REMEMBERING for Megan
We live between the layers of our life
that old warped storm-damaged book
leaves twisted as memory.
I get lost in the old stories,
slip effortlessly from the dark womb to
spinning on the lawn till all–fall-down
to that Chuck Berry album in the cabin
first glance I saw it challenge everything
Later there was speedtalking at the Tete
in a street that no longer exists there were
missing persons and that one night both of us
pasted ourselves to warm leather backs
hair flying doing a ton through the tunnel
These lines, put together and continued,
could be a script for a long meaningless
movie or maybe there is a meaning it lies
unpolished under upmarket paving tiles
caught in the slanting rain of desperate night
alone at the railway station with Rimbaud
JANAN: heart
.Janan the girl from Colorado has hair
like a black waterfall and a surname
which carries history “Grandfather” she says
“was called the one who stayed and still
he and the house remain in Israel”
Father took the name and carried
that small piece of Palestine to the USA.
About the past he is not forthcoming.
Mother is a soccer mom. Janan’s boyfriend
didn’t want to part with his own State
so he stayed and she travelled alone
leaving more of him in Denver everyday
What we choose to name defines us
In another language, heart and mind are one word
brain is another thing altogether; in another tongue
bitter is sweet or at least good to eat. In another
language we are not us or them but me and you
or one and two or tatou tatou. In another tongue
sense pricks at unimagined specificity, so snow
has many guises each with its own word. Perhaps
the raindrops which fall right now on my verandah
and bounce up again as small round evanescent balls
in another language would have a hundred names
