Boubouka dancing
in the middle of the small floor
her costume revealing bare legs
belly, shoulders and arms
… its studied perspective and funneled point of view
having sucked me in
to roam a plaza almost entirely empty
It’s under my skin, spread out like a thin layer
of drying pus between the transverse ligaments of my forearms
the ropey muscles that pit in the backs of my knees
She squats by the sluggish cerise tinged river
Under a heavily laden tree with debauched fruit
Mother, out of the nursing home for Thanksgiving,
skeletally osteo-arthritic at ninety-two, smacks
her thin lips at the first taste of white wine like
Priscilla, Queen of the Wine Harvest;
Bare-breasted nymphs with six arms or more:
A model, a pageant, a dancer and a whore,
Paraded before a kipa, a hijaab and a turban;
The sand is wet
from the forgotten rain
that poured over the streets
and shop corners last night.
Somewhere in a town where time has died
and where the river does not speak,
I see you staring at the fishermen
a leaf has come to the door
so bend the ear to whence we
reinvented ourselves through
curlicues of air,
Did you exist in God’s mind from the beginning?
Persisting as light that shined from the beginning?