I swear that day at Abu Simbel
the khamsin winds ripped me to shreds,
or I must have offended
that megalomaniac, Ramses II,
for the would-be god to make me ill.

The waters of Lake Nasser were raging
like the scales of some monstrous thing.
Khamsin fever gripped me. I sweated, slept,
held down crackers, peanut butter, little else.

The relentless Book of the Dead dreams:
buried by sand, eaten by crocodiles,
whipped for my insolence and beheaded.

I woke with a thousand miles of desert
far back in my mind—wherever it was.

Where space flows like water,
So that nothing is hard or sharp,
Everywhere the pliant, buoyant, firm,
Infinitesimal balance of motion,
Equilibrium’s endless flowing
From every direction holding, releasing…

Or eternal and simultaneous interchange
Of subatomic and celestial particles,
Infinite number and regression,
The farthest point always near.
Gravity’s first rising.

Or regeneration’s genesis,
Beginning of all emerging,
The birth before birth,
Genealogy’s first molecule,
Progeny’s spring and curative.

Or clarity’s deepest water,
Simplicity’s essence distilled,
The weightlessness of all need
Where love is greater than chaos.

Last night storms drained life from the air.
I breathe in what’s been taken,
with the same breath I put it back.

With nothing to see I look at the news,
only to be disillusioned
by evil’s triumphs and the fall of goodness.

Yet every day I try to add
something of being back into the emptiness,
haunted by the suspicion—
as if a shadow moves across the page.

A suspicion that meaning is fulfilled
only after you’re gone and unaware.
But in others, it will make itself known.

Sunlight on the outer
fringes of the clouds:
somewhere,
a table set for summer.

A nun levitated above her bed,
While a fish peered through the window,
Sobbing in the way of fish.
The silence swarmed with ants.
A watch opened its mouth to show its teeth.
A trophy ram’s head looked on,
From the mountains in its glassy, dead eyes.
Then there were mass arrests.
The whole state turned into a prison.
After that got boring, we went to a ball game.
The nun was now levitating above the field.
The game was suspended until further notice.
Then it began to rain baby antelopes,
But all of them were dead,
Limp as the rain itself.

One time my father was getting hassled
by some wiseguy from Detroit,
but all dad had to do was make a phone call,
and the young, dumb wiseguy
was chastised for hassling an old friend.
And I still have that secret little phone book
of numbers—those numbers—even though all of them are dead.
Maybe if I have to, I can call them all in hell.

In the beginning, Black Bill dressed like my grandfather,
Like a simple man from the provinces,
Which made the story my family would tell
Over and over all the more engaging,
About how Black Bill bought his mansion
In Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
When the builder dismissed him as a peasant,
He pulled out a large down payment in cash,
Leaving the builder blinking at that fat wad of bills.
That was how they interpreted the American dream.
It didn’t matter how you got there, only that you did.

They went to the same schools,
Lived in the same neighbourhoods,
From the same small towns
In la provincia di Palermo.
Often they were distant relations
And cumpari from the old country.
My mother would say
“Jimmy Q was such a nice man,”
When the Feds said different,
And my grandfather
Would hug someone called Black Bill.
My father treated them respectfully
And they reciprocated.
They respect a respectful person
Because it shows indifference
To their business practices.
And now, with time, I’ve learned,
That guilty by association
You keep your mouth shut,
Wait until all of them are in the ground
And write poems about them
Like legends of their time.

When I was a kid,
We drove past
One of those endless Michigan cemeteries,
And my uncle caught me staring,
Maybe with more fear
In my face than necessary.

In his gravelly, wiseguy voice, he said,
“It’s not the dead you need to fear,
It’s the living.”

After that,
I never feared the dead,
And I never trusted the living again,
Especially him.

The older guys knew what to do:
dig a deep bed
and bury the coals under sand.
A survival tactic
they’d learned somewhere.

On that freezing night by the lake,
no one talked much,
just the crackle of cooling embers
and the weight of breath in the cold air.

I remember the heat on my back,
like the sun was buried under me
and our blankets were made of myriad stars.
We survived till morning
and followed the frost to the tracks.