My God, they were all so beautiful,
each parchment trumpeting its cursive praise
of Allah, whose residence m Istanbul

He who finds his business in the slow, 
persistent study of one green stone, 
even a plain one chosen, let us say, 

Cast them my way,
Groundless and true.

Eternal both.

 

God appeared to Dante as a cloud.
Dante had been lying on the ground

like a clod, compressed

On a street in a city a thousand miles inland
a woman I'd never met grabbed me by the shoulders
and shook me and shook me and shouted

Writing becomes distant and portraits of hosts crowd the space. The next page becomes as cornered and concerned as a studied artifact. Thoughts not towards anything but embodying a lot of writing. Too many military wives are being arrested. The tiny bit of wandering summarized by a spartan attitude of space.

Among the things that we don't know
about their civilization is the name by which

they called a clay plate such as this, that is

 

The logic of sleep draws me closer and closer to you,
taking the names of everything from me. My desire
to speak is suspended, my old reverence

The beds are always made, and bright hallways
veer off like lanes, looking for canals to leap
across in a white arch, and the stairs rise