Traveler, and: The Kingdom of Gravity, and: How a City Vanishes

TRAVELER

Barefoot I push a bicycle to a new village, entering with a song to hide this face’s signature. Through a glass darkly the heart stops dead weight. I am leaning by a fence afraid, not of shadows, they are nobody’s fault, but of time—the unseen persistence. The mob form a circle around me and I wonder do fish pay any mind to rain. I wish I could be two elements! At the intersection I am older by two minutes. Watchmen carved from camphor arrest a man with my face without ID and pull up his trousers, inked calluses show where army boots had been. Gunshots from the wood disrupt the hour. I shouldn’t have lied about the rifle-strap marks. They search for my tax card and jest Your graveyard the river can be seen from space.

THE KINGDOM OF GRAVITY

We are not Alexander, who conquered worldsgiving them new tongues, but we share the storyof a ship resting on an African river, unbucklingat its shore, awakened by the night’s cold hard rain,staring at the face of the Nile as it reminds you

    You are a hawk    silent in the voice    of a midnight universe

What makes a man name a city after himself,asking bricks to be bones, asking the windto breathe like the lungs of the night,asking the night to come closer, to speakto you as a tribe, asking the tribe to sleep,asking sleep to loosen its language, askinglanguage to dream? Come close to me.

Can you not see that I am in search of fire,the unshapen song of light? In my mouthis a name hovering like smoke, spoken to meby the oracle. Like others, I was in searchof a forest, a place to call home.

But what can I tell you about Kingdom,about having the world at your feet?When you have seen all the earth’s boundaries,you will crave for mirrors, searching for them in streams,and when the river looks back at youhow will you be sure that nothing is lost?

HOW A CITY VANISHES

All it takes is two men on a bike,a convoy in their rear view mirror,some land, a shortage of visas,the closing of embassies, a nightlowering its curtain of curfewand some C-4 to turn a dirt highwayinto a makeshift airstrip.

Out come the men in uniformfollowing the flare of a flashlighttowards life lurking in the long grass.White soldiers with foreign wordsthat taste too much like caution,huddled around a wireless waitingfor orders, keeping their voices down.

A war reporter, tourist and volunteerwith the same faces just cleareda checkpoint. Said they were on safari,hence the cameras. Tonight they will makethe weekend edition of People. Tomorrowour city, or some version of it, will be asfamiliar as the dark side of the moon.