And it was night

         The night is vague, and in it, I can hear each sound. And sometimes I fold my legs and become. I heard my great grandfather used to speak to the river-jinn. It was night, it was night, it was night. He reached out to shake them and tell them and make them. But they just laughed their smokey jinn-laughs and went on whispering among themselves.

         The meandering night with her strenuous banks, and sometimes I sit and think and stretch out my legs like baobabs—the village under them stripping off their opulent bark: look a house and a cart and a boy and a horse. They run and play and forget themselves in their soccer ball—ripe with sweat and sand-plumes.

         The night, her humming faces, her spilling tongues—I sit like a delta after all that dancing, in the midst of dancing, in the strangely choreographed before. I listen to the vague unfolding, the moonspeak of the 4th avenue drunk: he’s trying to align his body with the stars; he’s trying to fold himself like a cat; he’s trying to fill his eyes with midnight. I hear her pouring.