White Flesh, Yellow Dust

 
 
A desert winter, next to water, hearing nothing
but the river and the muttered morse-code
 
of birds through leaves, a language
that swirls in my ear, like water.      
 
Listen.
Come summer, under a relentless sun
 
this wadi will crack open its thistled
silence as if silence
 
was all it could ever have known. Now,
in winter, the green dimples in wild
 
chamomile, white daisies
flooded with the fragrance of apples, only
 
not apples—something earthier,
baser, and bitter-smooth on my tongue. Monks
 
who for centuries knelt here, planted bed
after bed of chamomile, resting rough,
 
home-spun knees against grass
stained with the breath of vespers,
 
relaxing back on the scent said to expand
their prayers up and open
 
until they fill this blue arc
of sky.     Now there is just stillness,
 
a silence not quiet, but alive
inside the muted grace of winter light. I
 
stoop in a chamomile cluster, taste one
flower, then another. They rest, white flesh
 
and yellow dust in my palm, dust
on my tongue,   dust.
 
I haven’t heard a human voice for days,
 
have only gazed into the unlocked jaws
of caves that sweat the moisture of centuries,
 
and still cling to last night's rain. And what holds
me? Once it was my mother’s body, me deep
 
inside, covered and smooth within secret waters
of my own. Once I arrived as fresh
 
as this spawned odor of decomposing leaves, algae,
tadpoles and mud. And now? Now
 
there is this just this desert with its branches
of aquifers that flower and feed
 
this river, this winter, this green, a green
so clear, so quiet I can hear it grow
 
and with each exhale feel the essence of what
might still be possible—a blessing,
 
an earth soft with new growth, so yellow, so blue,
so complicated into molecules, the air tastes of it.
 

This poem first appeared in The Missing Slate