- So, then as if by plan
- I turn and you are lost
- How have I lived knowing
- that day of your laugh so alive/so nothing
- even the clothes you wore then
- rotted away How can I live believing
- any year can be the deciding year
- when I know the book of plans
- how it disallows us
- time for change for growing older
- truthfully in our own way
- .
- I used to think you ought to be
- a woman in charge in a desperate time
- of whole populations
- such seemed the power of your restlessness
- I saw you a rescuer
- amid huge events diasporas
- scatterings and returnings
- I needed this for us
- I would have gone to help you
- flinging myself into the fray
- both of us treading free
- of the roads we started on
- In the book of plans it says no one
- will speak of the book of plans
- the appearance will continue
- that all this is natural
- It says my grief for you is natural
- but my anger for us is not
- that the image of a white curtain trembling
- across a stormy pane
- is acceptable but not
- the image I make of you
- arm raised hurling signalling
- the squatters the refugees
- storming the food supply
- the book of plans says only that you must die
- that we all, very soon, must die
- .
- Well, I am studying a different book
- taking notes wherever I go
- the movement of the wrist does not change
- but the pen plows deeper
- my handwriting flows into words
- I have not yet spoken
- I'm the sole author of nothing
- the book moves from field to field
- of testimony recording
- how the wounded teach each other the old
- refuse to be organized
- by fools how the women say
- in more than one language You have struck a rock --
- prepare to meet the unplanned
- the ignored the unforeseen that which breaks
- despair which has always travelled
- underground or in the spaces
- between the fixed stars
- gazing full-faced wild
- and calm on the Revolution
- Love: I am studying a different book
- and yes, a book is a finite thing
- In it your death will never be reversed
- the deaths I have witnessed since never undone
- The light drained from the living eyes
- can never flash again from those same eyes
- I make you no promises
- but something's breaking open here
- there were certain extremes we had to know
- before we could continue
- Call it a book, or not
- call it a map of constant travel
- Call it a book, or not
- call it a song a ray
- of images thrown on a screen
- in open lots in cellars
- and among those images
- one woman's meaning to another woman
- long after death
- in a different world.