Monsters & Fruit ¶ The word for smoke is the word of mercy, a memory of the fields burning behind him while he walks the choppy mud street, passing watershed of liquid brown curry and with coffee holdings of fragile images from the lines of amber-barked jacaranda trees above, all deep in their chant of years and purple flower carnivore teeth. ¶ At the corner is the man with the small curling horns at his temples, and a mottled red lump on his forehead bulging there like a scarab. He wears a well cut suit of clean, deep white silk and a long, silk indigo tie, and hums something near to a salutation when the man passes. ¶ It is later in the morning, almost 10:00 a.m., so what the sun is saying is ambiguous. “I acquiesce,” it says. “I did not make this world.” ¶ He does not particularly desire the ritual, but enters the teahouse nevertheless, and resides in sweet shade made by the cool far wall. Tea is brought by a wooden hand and there is a sprig of quavering mint in it. It is a small golden cupful with visible bits of steam rising at the edges. The first taste of it changes the brittle stance of his mouth, though he knows it will be all the same when the tea is gone. ¶ In the courtyard there are monsters and fruit and red bottles hanging from the neck of a rooster that passes and pecks caustically at the long dirt. He thinks, then, that the stars can be no more than red glass themselves, and the black sky which houses them in night, no more than the ash heaps where a goat is in caprice and eating a rotted cloth. ¶ Incense glazes the filth of the temple he had passed coming to the teahouse, he remembers feeling as if grass hands were waving for him just beyond the road in the enormous tattered stones, and beckoning him come. He remembers the sorrowful dogs that slid through the shadows made by the sandstone colonnades, their swollen udders dripping from their skeletons like black ice. Who would make such a thing to be the house of a green god with eyes like wasting hot lamps? ¶ He decides taking more tea, that if two lovers moved together, vulnerable to the sky, making silver light by their bodies turning on the river shore and beneath the cast of their own dead shadows, then they would be a temple, somehow. ¶ But this is not the world. His tea, he sees, is gone from the glass, and what of the time that has passed? He rises, and in walking, passes the sharp arch of the teahouse door, gives 25 piastre to the hand of the horned man, whom, nodding, watches him depart in the manner he came. ¶ “Jerusalem to Cairo” ¶ Yes, on these streets the unripened dates that fall with the fruit in tight alleys of the songs are like carnelian eyes taken by a bird from a lion. Yes, these colossal buildings are tooled from blankets of shanty soot, and it is true that every call to prayer slices quiet meat from the shrill bones of sound on the maddened bricks. Yes, that golden jackal at Damascus Gate will drop its clothes and become bread; a woman. I have seen squashed pear from the Arab market on its teeth. Yes, it will pay the moon a sheqel to dance. Yes, I was a begging dog at every table I went to; it is true. And I did ask in a language of steady thirst. My approach over urine-slicked cobbles condemned my tongue. And somehow it is true that, when walking these streets, I dreamed of a sleep near a bed of flowers burning in a circle like a fire-ring, and was healed in that way. I believe that tomorrow I will go by darker roads to curling Africa. I have faith in the strange light to the south: this morning, from the fifth story window in the room where I slept, I saw a gazelle running in the stone ramparts below. In black eyes of a woman below. Yes, tomorrow I will be gone from here, from this road through Cairo tonight. ¶ “Dying Road Near the River” ¶ A sound of reeds, the heron has left but her whiteness will linger. In morning, when the river is colored like hot tea, before the blue arrives. She will spread easily, forever, across water, and softer music of light will be reprinted on coppery dung and wild tule where the yellowjackets are plentiful. ¶ The road that leads here is the color of strained blood, as if hibiscus leaves had steeped in the old water that mixed the clay. She is very old, but she walked this road when she was a small girl going to where the other children played, and again, later, as a young woman with the sultry body of a cheetah sulking in a brilliantine dress that raged amidst the tiny yellow flowers in the field the road cut through. ¶ She went on the road to meet her man, feeling hot and sticky, and laughing rosily behind her dark hair. Somewhere that day, in the mossy sway of trees farther along by the river, a bird concerned itself with the blurred white heat of shadows. Pomegranates dropped from the mouth of the sun. ¶ When she found her man, he was sitting, always still on a white chair in the shade of a stand of acacia trees, and he was smiling. He had told her that she left a dry hot feeling in him, and when she was away it was as if a heron had possessed his body and gone fluttering through the impossible solitude of his rooms. ¶ Now they watched each other, smiling, and his was an eternal smile from lips colored like a heart. She was very young then, as young as the world. The years have since fallen away like children, but death does not die. All that remains to remind her of herself is the red road that broadens into the far green fields until it finds the heavy stormclouds that come out of time. ¶ “Once Slave Road” ¦ when the road opens from the tall rocks, it can be dangerous to become too elated – madness is an overture from stretching clouds - consider the moist silver glisten from piles of minnows on drab canvass – they appear wet, but each fish is dried in death – where poverty is a thing smeared on the naked legs of passing children - considerable time above baked manioc road, aubergine cobbles, and always, falling vegetable husks are pounded white, lying on a long pass of good trodden road – earth over manioc seeds, seeping mango stone on all the bitter leaves; the african tulip leaves make ruby slush on the roadside, falling as pleading hands would in the grass - all red – dead road, though its bones are vital – when i reached a small town by the lake, the shadows made on the road by the gaslights at night put haze in my head and made me think i could always stay - how licorice trees flash yellow leaves in cool, cool tropical sky, blue palm, moving over women colored almost yellow, sometimes dark coffee or black of jet, black-purple, onyx; night sky-blue skinned women in violent dyed scarves and in heaven flora – how fuchsia could mock their calm – when they carry the dry fish it is done with metal trays on their heads – between the river and the train tracks, a candle placed in each tray makes phantom and flickering the fish heads and open fish eyes – with movement is a turning fabric of sound from the trees, the women’s children come running at their dresses with brown honey in discarded gin bottles – use naked heat to dress the dust of the road – can you remember a road coming through a hot green forest? – brought spice and ebony and cloth and slaves before, and now, approaching the city, free people walk in thinning fields with their burdens – one million kiosks sag, pregnant with shade and packed bodies and enamel bowls filled completely with beans, sweet potatoes and steaming yellow cabbage – costs ¢40, and you are strange and white – leave beside long painted benches – delight stares, kindness on each mouth behind each bowl – now it is where the road ends, where the men of the road make wreaths of wire and beautiful flowers for the dead – a cloying smell is at their black long fingers and bright carnations surround their faces of coal – the flowers are left unlocked by the roadside in the dangers of night, and they are never touched.