Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl   
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the   
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-...

Your head is still
restless, rolling
east and west....

Those intervals
between the day’s
five calls to prayer...

Crowned with a feathered helmet,
Not for disguise or courtship
Dance, he looks like something...

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font....

Seeing photos
of ancestors
a century past...

The skin ripples over my body like moon-wooed water,
rearing to escape me. Where could it find another
animal as naked as the one it hates to cover?...

Though the road turn at last   
to death’s ordinary door,   
and we knock there, ready   ...

Not, in the saying of you, are you
said. Baffled and like a root
stopped by a stone you turn back questioning...

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed ...