so our spirits must be lightly checked - Seamus Heaney


The strangers' case 

The fence crept into the sea. Took root there. Walls inched into skies. Scraped turbid air. Country gave me to country-


Crossing the river by foot 

Each crest, crease of land, bend, ditch, pebble, branch jabbed soles. Thin mountain air sped breath-beats. Foreigner, foris, those 'outside doors'. Whose raw paths are plied in soil, rip-tides. Snitched residues
of hair, flesh, fluid, fabric in staves of razor wire. A story sown into earth. No word can trap-


Look, my name reeks

Carrying war-smoke, sun-sparks, ice-chill in our coats' fibres. Names drown in the crossing. Drift to stone-shores, dismember. Our tongues swallow-tailed. Faces stiff as Greek masks. We are black smears on froze-roads. Foraging in Athenian slums. Ghosts no one reclaims. Who live in air-pockets, soul-pockets-


To sculpt is to take fat off space

Watch Europe, soundlessly. Its heft, chasms, circuits, bared skeleton. Sense it blind. A force-field of shudders, jeopardies. On brinks of life, we sift for momentary solidity: specks, slits of aloof light-
The man from Moria Camp said "The world is not just darkness; there's a narrow bright light."


Caravans

Words flout borders: smuggled under tongues. From Persia came karawan.
'Operation Faithful Patriot', San Diego to Texas. Rolling edges of raw wounds. The poor come to claim crumbs of a pie. Figures in camouflage fatigues. Dry voices crackling in radio lines drain fear into thicket hideouts.
The steel slats snake a valley: slice Nogales city in two.
DeConcini Crossing: Mariposa Crossing.
Ankle monitors, camps. 
The torn, bloodied hem of freedom.
Asylum was a term rattling like a tin can, 
rattling in the eternal echo of Cherokee cries, in booms of rifles.
Tunnels through time 
haunt living minds like an endless reverberation tremor of a cello-


The Heart and the Feather

Waves hurtle, unnail timber, butt doors. Houses unanchor, drift to sea as lopsided boats. Snow-curtains coil for miles, capture cities in ice-nets, blot-out maps, make folds in winds legible. Land-wrinkles like sheets of weathered paper. 

The ancient Egyptians poised a person's heart against a feather. If a heart was lighter than a plume, gods allowed them to ferry into a land of souls. A feather-tuft's heaviness is of rose-ashes, not a rose.  
Our scales waver, the weight wanders-


Tabula rasa

Earth, after us, will sound itself in itself. As the clicks of a monk's beads sing to a timeless time -