For Nate Mackey

the morning after the Bedouin reading
  the streaked skies tending West
    & old sense of south-north
    drift und Drang verified
    in Nate's accurate pacing,
      canto, no cante, he said
        cante moro
        yes you hear
      that depth in the flamenco,
    that deathert inn
    the fla the fla
      the men co
    flamenco flames of
      flamen, flamina
    priestesses, les cousins
    of the Mediterranean,
  & we will sip Sidi Brahim
    a wine after a place name--
  d after a saint's name--
      nomad names that
      desert things &
    change objects,
        our pray,
    our prayer, fast
      gazelle,
        lithe ghazal.

Pierre Joris teaches in the Department of English at SUNY-Albany. He has published over twenty books & chapbooks of poetry, among them, h.j.r. (EarthWind Press), Winnetou Old (Meow Press), Turbulence (St. Lazaire Press), and Breccia, Selected Poems 1974-1986 (Editions Phi), as well as several anthologies and many volumes of translations, both into English and French. With Jerome Rothenberg he published a two volume anthology of 20th-century avant-garde writings, Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry (University of California Press), the first volume of which received the 1996 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Wesleyan University Press will publish Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 in early 2001.

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