(Broken) Ghazal of Night

This small city draws its hot wings near its bodyto perch inside itself. Night here soaks bodies

in their own waters. Out on the porch goes everybodywith cool amber bottles for forgetting,

one by one out to meet the darklike a string of lamps turning on.

All my life I thought hurt should split my bodyso I would know the body.

When it did, bone gone from skin,gaze gone from body, street

under body, metal into a body, I did not knowit still. My friend was in jail at the crux of this city, his body

mute as an unlit bulb. Not the body who sins, but punished,the body. My friend is free now (but the body

is not free) and we go out on the porchat night. We wear thin clothes and our bodies

shine. Somewhere beneath the currentof talk in the heat is each person's grief.

As if beneath the babbling river a body.My old life is here like another body in a thin slip

and beneath it the hairs on her bodyare grasses from the bristled black plain of the past.

She follows me down the street.Nameless, the body follows the body.

The trees are withholding their greensomewhere beneath the night.