A Crown of Dust

(a cento)


10

Beneath me, a male world thrums with every strung kind.

One man asks me to the dance floor, one asks me

Amid the stubble and the stones,
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises

Darkness spills across the sky like an oil plume.


You       who I don't know     I don't know how to talk to you

something encloses the impossible in a fable
and illuminates what's outside it

You don't see until you're cut.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.


A human is a meager thing
in such immensity, the way a little shoe is small on the stones

How a river disappears into the night

             And is never still

          

Line sources:
Nicholas Wong, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Stanley
Kunitz, Louise Gluck, Craig Santos Perez,
Jean Valentine, Juliana Spahr, Mahmoud Darwish, 
Cornelius Eady, Mary Oliver, Chi Lechuan, 
Guillaume Apollinaire