Exodus Song, and Song in Tammuz

Exodus Song

When the drowning comes, know: there will still be    horses, loose and alone        in the old country—their eyes flipped upwards,

the horseshoes snapping one after the other and shooting    into the great black night like the prophet        Muhammad's spears. When the drowning comes, know

the farrier will re-build his shop, sell toys    or trinkets on a distant avenue decked on both sides,        he'd notice, with unfamiliar flags. But the horses—

yes, they'll be running and running until they are no longer    horses; the bare hooves will lift and lash like decades        over his country of ghosts, his country

of wet black ash. Remember it even here, underwater: the warm rush of blood,    the old heart, its pulling and plunging the way a blind man's gullet        pulses the psalms. Remember the boy watching

his teacher on fire, how her body relights the city's forsaken square.    He knows, the soldiers are sleeping at last        in their various plots, a girl already in her new country

reads Dostoevsky in English. Her hair smells of mothballs    and basements, walls discolored with rain. She moves        her pen in the margins and it's a tongue

not quite yet her own. Had I been grateful here? Was I driven by purpose?    And were these always my own thoughts regarding the afterlife?        Her pen is a stronghold, a lighthouse

flickering late in July. Did I make it a home?    Did my brother feel pain? All my life I am trying, Lord,        not to inscribe your full name.

Song in Tammuz

after Traci Brimhall

The last time I saw my brother, he'd been dead    eighteen months and came as a ghost in the passenger seat,        his arm hanging out the window and whistling

an old boot camp song. He said    we were born on the two ends of Tammuz        and that our mother, ever since Dachau, knew God

wanted us close. The road curved along the Hasbani River.    He turned his head toward the apple groves, let the wind breathe        on his beard as if it hadn't been

washed and treated in Tahara. Cursed the plains,    their magnificent light in the Arabic he'd learned in a village        beyond the plateau. We stopped for gas

and he took off his shirt. Shrapnel gleamed like mussel shells    caught in the skin above his ribs. He said he'd travel again        underground, spend nights counting beetles

in trenches, that he'd tasted the blood of palm trees    in yellow dates on the other side of the drought.        Years ago, we saw a woman with wild hair

pull bits of gold from her mouth and cast them like the Mayans    cast them, into a sinkhole by the Dead Sea. Flies bustled        in and out of her dress. The desert hummed

underneath like an engine refusing to cool off.    When the late sun vanished into Hebron, she chanted something        in Russian, bent over to watch the last bit of gold

overcome by a womb of earth. The rim collapsed    under her weight and hours later they mined her:        dogmatic, unwilling to show herself

through the muck and salt. No one claimed her. A tourist,    my brother said, and he held me so I could stand        what the land, in its unquenchable thirst, had done.