It’s only six
thirty, but
night is already
heavy, thick,
black, dense.
We hurtle along
ink-dark twisted
roads, lined with
tall, promising,
never-lit
streetlights and feathery
bending pines. A young
man emerges suddenly,
out of spreading
darkness,
walking -
it’s always men
walking at night - he
wears somber
clothes, and walks
near the edge
of the broken, rising
pavement,
unaware. He is
illuminated
in a brief flash
by the angry head
lights of an
oncoming car,
then he disappears,
consumed by the
night. The only trace
he leaves is
the faint
incandescence from
his palm-cradled
phone.

I am walking
Again
Gently sloping two-lane highway
Graying asphalt with faded yellow lines
Curving
Curving into the
Distance
I feel it, this moving space
Endless promise
Stretching out extending
Air
Snaps cool
Against my face
Against chromium green bristling pines
A stand selling apples
McIntosh apples glowing knifesharp
Reddish-green skins
Apples piled high in heaps
Jumbled against rough wooden boards I buy
Brown paper bag of them
Get one out, rub
It clean on my shirt
Bite thin
Taut skin splits
Peels I taste
Acid pineapple flesh breaks
Tender white
Sky, a light slate grey sky covered
With high stratus clouds
And
I am sixteen
Again
Walking along
Empty road, eating apples
Heart lifted
With independence
By being out
Out
Sheltered
Under these endless
Dark pines and
The spreading
The deepening sky.

The villages of Algiers
Well, suburbs
Really, but villages
Is what is said
In French
And heaven
Knows, despite one
Hundred thirty years of
Colonization
Brutalization
Deprivation
The many Algerians
Still
Love French. Those
Villages team with men
At night.
At night, the women
Wait
Indoors
Behind doors, away.
Waiting.
But at night the
Men take the streets.
At night the men crowd
Streets, cut in
Front of traffic, clog
Cafes, stream
Toward the mosque away
From the mosque fill stores
But mostly
Mostly they
Squat
Sit, or just
Hold up walls.
They lean.
Stare. Talk. They watch cars
As they jostle and jolt
Watch other men
Walking, watch
The silence
The noise. Watch
Stars, the
Dark
Still buildings
The passing cat, the rhythm
Of the wind,
Watch the gibbous moon and
It’s cycle
The fullness, the waxing and waning
They watch
They witness
The villages
The suburbs
The streets
They watch
The dead.

In Africa the lissome eucalyptus leaves
Sharply ovoid, a washed celadon,
Turn their silvery backs, yield, bend with
The promise of on-coming rain.
You taught me this
Sign, this tree-voiced prediction, long ago, among
The tenderly sloping, densely viridian hills
And heavy, somnolent, rolling fogs of Iowa.
And so, I turn my back. I yield, oh, how I yield.
But, you didn’t foresee, didn’t know
How, much later, my heart would
Flake and flay
How great sheets of myself
Would peel, would fold
Would slough off just like
The bark, the back of those massive whitened eucalyptus trunks, you
Didn’t, couldn’t foretell how this long union
Scars, clings, sinks so deep, tattoos itself so that eucalyptus-like, despite
Repeated rain lashings, leaf bowings, droopings and sun decimated leavings
My heart, my soul sheds, molts, reforms, renews itself and just as those
Sharpened leaves arch and curve and arc and sway
So I bend, I turn, I give in, I give in
To the chafing wind, to the scouring hurt, to
The on-coming African
Rain.

The North African morning light is thin and ****** and
Walking men are rinsed in the dim blush, they
Walk with heads down and
Cradle, eyes bent, contemplating, gently sipping
Steaming densely syruped espresso from miniature paper cups,
Bought from the nearest cafe. Their
Spreading hands are wrapped
Delicately around those doll-size paper
Cups (sometimes glass ones)
And still they walk, tasting tannic liquid
Courage, holding, with tender precision,
Candied black strength. I
Drink too, though because homemade, not
As strong a cup -
And now we both, the walking men and I
Tip heads back and face the newly purged
Light, emboldened by borrowed audacity.

My black inked voice
Sticks, hesitates, stutters
But these blank pages
Still listen uncomplainingly.
They forgive my
Broken, whispered, catching
Words and remember despite
Fraying leaves, shattered spine, rusty cover.
This book, this stalwart pen, this frail retreat.

Death gapes
For all: the running
The embracing, the fearing ones.
We are all chewed,
Devoured. Surely some
Slip down
Its gullet smoothly, a coated pill,
With ease. But
Others gag
Before rotten,
Jagged teeth. Wedges
Slice esophagus, won’t
Digest. Heart-
Burn or come
Back up as bitter
Bile to be swallowed
Again.