Annotations for a Memorial

Something so light

almost nothing

Not a list of violences

nor reports from beauty

One person looks up

& then another after

another looking

up in the same direction

Who took this picture of Fight ghost town

graffitied in Hebron (al-Khalil)?

Who wrote, “they bring that desert stuff            to our world”?

My father writes on my wall:

I remember these birds, they used to fly by

It begins to waste

like a bar of soap

turned in your hand,

the repeated word

(the boy spins into a curtain)

(whirl-like smoke)

(bewitchingly out of the mouth)

Grief builds a settlement inside you

When Eric played the album of abnormal heart sounds

recorded for medical students,           I felt sorry

And how the brain can’t hold an archive

of every sound you’d like to hear again

You could listen by holding your hand to your ear

Grief will probably

redraft your whole

anatomy:

harbor opens from the chest — 

a cargo ship drifting out,

seen & tracked by a satellite