IN THE MOUNTAINS

   Somewhere

without me

my life begins

He who lives it

counts on a cold rosary

God's ninety-nine Names in Arabic

The unknown hundredth he finds in glaciers

then descends into wet saffron fields

where I wait to hold him

but wrapped in ice

he by-passes me

in his phantom cart

He lets go of the hundredth Name

which rises in calligraphy from his palm

Fog washes the sudden skeletons of maples

Farther into the year by a broken fireplace

I clutch the shiver of a last flame

and forget every Name of God

And there in the Mountains

the Koran frozen into the year

he waits for news of my death

A WRONG TURN

In my dream I'm always

in a massacred town, its name

erased from maps,

no road signs to it.

Only a wrong turn brings me here

where only the noon sun lives.

I'm alone, walking among the atrocities,

guillotines blood-scorched,

gods stabbed at their altars,

dry wells piled up with bones,

a curfew on ghosts.

Who were these people?

And who finished them to the last?

If dust had an alphabet, I would learn.

I thrust my hand

into the cobwebbed booth

of the town's ghost station,

the platform a snake-scaled rock,

rusted tracks waiting for a lost train,

my ticket a dead spider

hard as stone.