Phantom Heart, and: Lament

Phantom Heart

This is the sound love makes—tolling of a tongueless bell, its waggingand wagging despite; its whole headteeming with wind. The sound

of waiting, but the waiting buoyedin silence, and the silence soblue. Sound I have known well,and known well enough to fear.

I know fear has its own well—bottomless depth. These days, I godiving, diving, and this, the fall of it,the winter that will, and must

follow, hemming its gown, borderof my country. My country! My thirstfor you, this acred blue lapping my shoes,and still, my country of thirst for you.

This, the sound of rain thrustingagainst your rim, and my headcocked back, my mouth crackedopen, my soft cave made well

for you. This many days betweenour bodies—enough to call itmemory, build a brief masjid,unhinge my knees. I am standing

in the foothills, traveling back—to aska sentence of your shoulders, brightHimalayas. Night loosened and fallingagainst them, skin a riversleeve

of moonlight. This many ways to prayto you. Legible, with no name. Soundof that name, caught in my throatlike its own country—my country!

Lament

after Agha Shahid Ali

At a certain point, I lost you. I came to know it firstas a weather, the earliest hour of day breakingon the bedsilk, its low rung of light, a pregnant silence.Isn't the after always tidier, divisible? I remember it fromthe floorboards, the bathroom tile, the hours' slow limptoward sundown. There goes the train of pity's satin gown,you'd say, my body bent blue against linoleum—I believed youbetter than my own pain; two-legged God, false prophet—I am a Muslim. Each of your breasts a mosque veiled by dayshine;I bent knee after knee in sajdah, pressing my forehead againsta thought of you. Desire is hilted. I held on relentlessly—your hair,your shoulders, your body's simple rhyme. And then, foolish,giddy with moondew, I pulled my heart from its necklace,I began the recital of your ninety-nine names, beads between my fingers;my fingers that had entered, that had roamed, that had brought youto weeping; fingers that had buoyed you in your own plotof blue. I put my mouth on your mouth, breathed in and in and inuntil I ballooned, backing away into a sky's windowless dark.As if by a string, as if promised, you kept me, tethered to our grave.