DREAM LOGIC

We are at the zoo.

I do not remember how we got here.

I do not question it. I do not

question the animals muttering

amongst each other in sounds

I can understand. You were a child

long before I was born,

but I know this little girl

tugging at my sleeve as we walk

to the tropics enclosure is

you come to visit. I know it

from your beaming, from your hand waving

at the capuchins playing cards in the tree on the

other side of the glass, from the way I crouch

beside you, pointing up, guiding your eye to

the blue-and-gold macaw shuffling on its perch

like a line dancer, its mouth full of whistles

and acquired phrases. It regards us

with its ink-blot eye, asks

How do you live in a place that resembles

your home, but isn’t your home?

I sweat like an understudy, wonder

who had the time to teach this bird riddles, and

though I do not ask this question aloud, it is

enough to collapse the sky into screeching bells,

enough to turn all the animals against me,

enough to swallow you

back into a fissure in the earth.

FOURTH ATTEMPT AT WRITING A POEM ABOUT

ALBRECHT DURER’S WING OF A BLUE ROLLER

Look—how it resembles a mountain crowned

in snowmelt or the harp of an angel,

the sky caught there in its fibers. Its right

side, where it was severed from the body,

looks as if its burning, streaks of orange

and red bright against the blues, too many

to fit in my head already swimming

with cerulean sorrows my truant

tongue has refused to translate. There I go

again, making it about me. Forgive

my wandering eye, my brain of gnawing

tower bells. I just want to spend my days

a pupil at the feet of beauty. I’ll

hollow my body to make room for it.

I DREAMT I SAW YOU IN A DREAM

             after Sunbeam Sound Machine

standing in a tired meadow of goldenrod and daylilies,

your shawl, flag of my first & most beloved nation,

whipping in the wind, its color unlanguageable.

Beside you, a large pan over a fire where you pour,

from a silver flagon, the batter that bubbles and settles

into sheets and sheets of injera. It tumbles out

like a scroll down a staircase decreeing all

the luck I have and can’t understand.

It goes forever, I mean,                forever

& your mouth is moving, saying something,

but even here my American ears make it impossible

to decipher, my American tongue a lead fish in my mouth

so you prepare us a plate instead

a meal that blooms the language within me:

temesgen temesgen temesgen temesgen temesgen.