I was not born of woman
but issued from a cloud of darkness,
low on the horizon,
from pungent nothingness,
from dark and dense nowhere.
I emerged between meridians,
fluctuating boundaries of
malaria county, of the turbid
jungle depth with cannas causing
invisible slow flames, equatorial
and morose, in a night-ridden
enclosure.
I am the fever at the beginning
of the plague,
a scourge, calm, implacable,
like a hat worn by the storm-
the emanation in the bloodstream
before the secret trigger.
I am not the gun,
I am not the door.
I am the moment that
made the murder,
the march of time,
the engine of fate,
the river’s lost sleep,
a coin, a ghost.
I am the bottom of zero
that grabs your throat at the appointed hour,
clothed in honor
and promptness.
tra la la boom boom
I am an afternoon in Samarra.
This article appears in March 2008.
