sleep is a secret you once overheard

A history of rivers

snaking down steep slopes

walled in glass.

clay is a wisdom that leaves no fingerprints

A history of ballads

that dolphins sang about horizons

broken by microphones.

shale is a darkness you struggle to weigh

A history of drought,

gulls circling above gaunt hills,

waiting for rain to wash the words away.

words are rapids that drown us all

Passage

Ask him at four

the con man with the fancy herb

whether the shirt will still fit

the grain still stream millward

the girl still hold her balance

on the fraying rope

How to hold and frame

no, see see see

as if for the first time

the raw unpolished yellow skin

of the door the warm brick skin

of the terrace the downy cream floor

You must be alert

to coffee stain and mosquito bite

red cloud of panic on the inner arm

the river’s pulse beating in the brain

its gilded fish bursting the weir of sleep

source forgotten mouth unknown

upstream and downstream braided

one current from which the wounded dolphin leaps

slipping from this skin of water to the next

finding balance on a wave

it’s you and me both

asking who’s really native in passage

The Refugee Pauses in Flight

for Nuruddin Farah

What should I call it, this number that has no name?

Countries are working hypotheses that sometimes fail.

I escape from mine, my wings of flame

doused, my route sketched in rumours,

an alphabet of stone and diesel

tapping at my ribs.

Invented reasons, found in a drawer of mislaid knives.

Never look back, not even at the veined marble columns,

the coiling creepers, the rusty sea gate, the orange tree:

all that you thought was you.

Even the briefest glance over the shoulder

could turn you to salt on a photograph.

Pick up the key ring, slowed by its bunch of yellowed date tags.

Where to draw the borders of the occupied city?

Across brain lobes that sleep while fingers twitch

in spasms? Across tents that shiver and capsize

on a frozen beach? Across graves

on which the wild basil has grown?

Living among strangers, he almost forgot the names of his gods.

Wound

The olive trees cast shadows sharp enough to wound. I scrubbed them off my sleeves with a wet cloth. Sat down on a bench and waited for my friends to arrive, the hours so many flat stones that I aimed at the skin of a stream, watching them skip and bounce and skip and bounce and not sink. All the way across the water.