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"Dhaka Nocturne."

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I admit that when the
falling hour begins

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to husk the sky free
of its softening light,

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I reach for anyone willing
to wrap his good arm tight

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around me for as long as the
ribboned darkness allows.

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Who wants, after all,
to be seen too clearly?

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Still, the heart
trusts, or tries to,

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climbs back down the old
mango tree outside the bar

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to marvel at the gymnast
tornadoing forward,

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electrifying the air with
her soaring body on the TV.

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Even as the friend
beside me asks, "But how

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could you sleep in the same room
as your dead sister's things?"

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Once a man I loved
told me I was stunning.

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It terrified me the
way grief still can,

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risen above us in the
bar seeking its own body.

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I tell her the body,
exhausted, does what it must,

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as it did then, sutured
itself to his, said,

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I'll be yours forever with all
its secretive creases turning

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steam in this heat
flustered city,

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wet fever of the nape of my
neck chiffoned beneath his lips

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galaxying across it.

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I don't tell her about the
shelves of porcelain cheeked

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dolls tarnished lavender
by falling lights,

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the ebony abundance
of my mother's--

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the ebony abundance
of my mother's hair

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varnished blue as she slid
my sister's child's clothes

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off the old wooden
hangers then back on.

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But what else is mine if
not all this strange beauty?

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"Look," I said to him, running
my own hands down myself,

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night rinsed anaglyph
of muscle and bone

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held fast against
everything yet to plunder

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this or any twilight's nameless
and numinous unfurling.

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