"Dhaka Nocturne."
I admit that when the falling hour begins
to husk the sky free of its softening light,
I reach for anyone willing to wrap his good arm tight
around me for as long as the ribboned darkness allows.
Who wants, after all, to be seen too clearly?
Still, the heart trusts, or tries to,
climbs back down the old mango tree outside the bar
to marvel at the gymnast tornadoing forward,
electrifying the air with her soaring body on the TV.
Even as the friend beside me asks, "But how
could you sleep in the same room as your dead sister's things?"
Once a man I loved told me I was stunning.
It terrified me the way grief still can,
risen above us in the bar seeking its own body.
I tell her the body, exhausted, does what it must,
as it did then, sutured itself to his, said,
I'll be yours forever with all its secretive creases turning
steam in this heat flustered city,
wet fever of the nape of my neck chiffoned beneath his lips
galaxying across it.
I don't tell her about the shelves of porcelain cheeked
dolls tarnished lavender by falling lights,
the ebony abundance of my mother's--
the ebony abundance of my mother's hair
varnished blue as she slid my sister's child's clothes
off the old wooden hangers then back on.
But what else is mine if not all this strange beauty?
"Look," I said to him, running my own hands down myself,
night rinsed anaglyph of muscle and bone
held fast against everything yet to plunder
this or any twilight's nameless and numinous unfurling.