gave way to city, city

to skyscraper, forest to plain. All this time

we’ve been building beside you,

in the eaves, in the trees your axes missed.

Look at the nest in the rafters,

look closely. Those red

streaks are fragments of your barn, paint

chewed to pulp. Everything

passes through us, transformed.

We chew the words off newspapers,

bodies off billboards,

even your clothespins, look at them closely—

each day thinner.

Xenophon’s Soldiers

In enemy country sometimes

you come upon a vessel

waiting in the road, a clay pot

brimming honey, your men weary.

Don’t you wonder

why the village stands empty,

why those who fled

went empty-handed? Why would they leave

these jars behind? In the villages

near Trapezus, after sighting

the longed-for sea, ten thousand soldiers

lay as if dead, foolhardy scavengers

of poisonous honey, essence of rhododendron

& azalea. Three days they staggered thus,

those that could move, purging &

bent, unable to straighten,

& in those three days the battle

& all Persia, lost.

If you were fleeing your enemies,

wouldn’t you load your body with food, strap

the jars to your back, no matter the weight? How else

to begin in a strange land? Remember

the ocean, how it carries a fisherman

year after year,

& one day simply pulls him under.

A man went to Mohammed and told him his brother had violent pains in his body, and the Prophet told him to give the sick man honey. He did as he was told, but soon came back to say his brother was no better. Mohammed answered, “Go back and give him more honey, for God speaks the truth, thy brother’s body lies.”

—Islamic folktale

Without

Without God you rip our bodies

apart, suck the honey

from our tails. With God you cannot trust

what even your own body tells you. In your book

we swarm a house, surround

a boy as he sleeps & lift him, only to set him down

unharmed. You saw us

lift your own son, hang his body

above your head—still

you need a prophet

to tell you what it means.

Pheromone

Sky electric after this midsummer

drought, but a day of rain

won’t be enough. The clover won’t return,

or the nights we slept the fields,

clinging to their petals. The keeper clips

the grass outside the hive,

& the old guard, full of venom,

prods us to attack. We stud his suit with stingers

until we hang dead from the netting,

until he becomes the word enemy, his arms

flailing. Jagged light

surrounds us, his son

waits in their cart, screams. The air

brightens. From this distance

he looks no bigger than a possum

as he mouths the word father.

Blind Huber (viii)

Each letter traced, an alphabet

dimly recalled—which

desk, what hand, to become

these words upon this sheet.

In primary school we got as far as “Hh,”

then the fever came,

sound it out: FEE, FEE, FEE—

the idea of an alphabet