On her mother’s tongue, the word is “andho”
blind unseeing, blind’s undoing. Blind blind.

In her mother tongue, the word’s embedded
in the dim, inside the well deep with night.

“Andho-kar” is darkness, synonymous
with a sky scorned by stars, emptied of moon.

Memory is praised and plundered, rued, like
a yew tree fallen to blight. You see our

weather as foregone conclusion but berth
is not a birth except when it is one.

No, it’s not pornography.
The suture hardly holds.
It sags like old glass.

Cut in half,
A smile becomes sellable.

No, not ghosts.
The laundry of the dead,
Listing in the wind.

Stains quiet in early light.
Among the eyeless dolls
And unpriced socks.

Hit with limbo,
The body grows damp.

No, call it a garden,
Where sallow flowers bloom
Like low wattage bulbs.

No dignity for you, Inachus’ daughter;
come early-modern times you’ll be a byword
with hooves flailing in air, always embarrassed.
Down the long centuries your spectators
will watch you plunge and wave that unkempt arse
at Heaven. They sit gravely, reins in hand,
these equites. How equable. You veer,
and see a polished steed prick up its ears.

      till we’re no more than campfires
our families encircle. Our families then—

beneath the lantern of a saline bag—
rehearse their own deaths through us.

Meanwhile our pores open inward
under a deluge of morphine

and memory is all we have left to eat.
Slowly it grows to enclose us, before sailing

like a whale’s belly lightlessly on.

Our organs then, if we gift them to the living,
will rise, piece by piece, on cloaks

of dry ice. The small planes that await them
chirr over this city like crickets.

See their shadows leap freely, like those
of skimmed stones on the drowned.

And the men here—paused at a crosswalk
and listening—can feel their heels

lift as the crowd pushes them on.

The names we write here cannot be recorded,
though ownership drives all who yearn.
These pages—widespread as a motel Bible’s—
burn in those who wish they were burned.

I know those who’ve read them blindfolded,
the silhouettes more lavish when veiled.
We parents do them one better: this print
lifts us—half sandpaper, half Braille.

I can’t tell you about Delanoi’s sheep.
They aren’t in the pasture
across from the west woods anymore.
Medicare didn’t cover her Alzheimer’s.
I can tell you they ran to him every morning
up the meadow with the horse and two dark cows.