Entranced by the ersatz girl, an old man’s heart
wells upward into ecstasy. He stands—
a mast in unseen currents—a world apart,
blanched below the chalky night’s commands.
He floats below wisterias and willows,
their moonlit drapery pulling him along
toward her curious gaze. Her posture follows:
she bares her chest as if the wind were strong—
a child, a sacrifice of blind abandon,
she calls to him: the rocks are not your end.
The hillside, mute and stony, makes its summons
over the ones who falter, break, and bend.
He nears the edge; the dark would take him in.
She calls again—the rocks are a benediction.

They skim the sand at Berjaya in black,
not walking—moving as the tide permits,
their hems kept clean where surf withdraws and lacks
the reach to mark what passes over it.
“Come here.” The phrase is quiet, edged with use.
She drifts toward Bella, low-tide sure and slow—
her hand, inscribed with henna: scripture without truce;
her eyes—two blue instructions I can’t know.
The heat goes still. I hold my breath.
Her fingers near my daughter’s lifted hair.
Then something skims my calf—wood, a weed, a net
the sea has finished with—and settles there.
A hand held back, the air we didn’t break;
the body keeps the breath we didn’t take.

After the first collapse, the room grew wet.
Forms softened. Walls began to breathe you back.
Love taught you how to close around a threat,
how to invoke terror, keep it smooth, intact.
We could not cut the sickness to the bone—
it nested where the mouth learns how to seal.
Each breath became a vow you made to him;
each vow, a shape the body had to feel.
You made the mask obscene enough to hold:
all lips and chambers, dotted into trance,
a face that learned how beauty molds its own.
Your husband held you there, his maddening dance.
What burned was not the mind, but what we spare—
the mask’s wet hinge—where breath corrupts to prayer.

The river bears its witness under stone.
What gathers there refuses any face.
No psalm will lift it. Weather claims its own,
a pressure time can neither spend nor place.
In Iwate Prefecture, the phone weighs down the air.
You lift it. Something tightens in the wire.
No god steps in. No answer meets you there.
The mouth goes on, exacting its desire.
I call. I do not beg for my release.
I hold the strain where breath and metal bind—
the living hitched to what will never cease,
lover and poet breaking in the mind.
I speak into the form. It does not take.
No voice accepts the offering I make.

I went where pleasure said it would be kind.
The door stood open; no one barred the way.
Rooms learned my name. The mirrors changed their mind.
A figure in the corner worked itself away.
The faces drifted—father, friend, and host—
one mouth rehearsed in several borrowed skins.
A shade crossed steadily from post to post,
each tree a hinge the night kept closing in.
I did not run. The floor took hold of me.
Heat pooled in roots that branched around my mind.
My mouth filled last; my body learned to be
a wick in earth that never quite goes dry.
I found a clearing, harboring this rule:
what enters once will never leave you whole.

I. The Boy Who Keeps

The key was given once to a boy who stood
inside the library, between the stacks.
It opened what could not be understood
except by one who never answered back.
It was not small. It spanned the years and ground
alike, and waited for the proper strain.
It opened you. That knowledge would be found
in time, through him, where loss becomes domain.
She placed him there because he did not sleep,
because he would not turn when called away.
He kept what you would lose and could not keep
and stood where dust and naming briefly stay.
The key was what you were and would become.
She gave it to the boy. He waits. It comes.

II. The One Who Takes

The key lay pressed against his face, a mark
the body bore as plainly as a scar.
A wound held fast within the listless dark,
where pain instructs and nothing drifts too far.
She placed it there because that place would make
it cost to give, and cost again to keep.
Its forging was not his; he stayed awake
to guard what others lose or leave to sleep.
You placed it where the breath and word align,
where flesh gives way and speech becomes a test.
You took his watch. The hours fell in line.
He turned, or slept. The duty passed.
You are what he became when it was done.
You take the wound. The watch. The work. The sum.

While a butterfly in Guatemala
stirs up the beginnings of El Niño,
a young man takes a comb from his wallet,
smoothes his black hair in a cockpit window,
and anticipates virgins in heaven.
Like Prometheus discovering fire
or Moses coming down from the mountain,
he radiates a prophetic desire
which inures him to fear of injury.
He could walk barefoot for days in the sand,
or survive weeks without ever eating,
or could simply resolve to understand
the controls in the flight simulator,
which stand between him and his creator.

I. Lesson

Berlin hums beneath my skin. The windows sweat.
A train moves east through frost and signal-light.
I write a line and lock it in a desk
where names are folded out of sight.
They tended me with razors and a bowl
then called me Joan and washed me clean of hair:
the blade cooled down; the water kept me whole.
I learned how names are borne, but not repaired.
I rode the war on borrowed light,
a Red ghost jumping boxcars with the news,
the folded paper in my coat at night,
a faded truth I carried—and abused.
Return to them. Return where orders start,
where mothers sing and break the soldiers’ hearts.

II. Proof

I watched their hunger gather like a choir,
the stairwells loud with breath and lifted hands.
They wanted truth the way a city wants a fire—
not light, but proof that order holds command.
They came in packs, their chanting loud as law,
the hallways ringing ribs and booted breath.
The room took heat; the men were made to draw
a line between obedience and death.
I went with them. I felt the iron sing.
My hands were clean. They did not shake.
The fire raged and cost us everything;
we fed it names until the night would break.
No mercy followed. Only this remained:
we burned the night, then asked it to be named.

The art of the second was born of need:
to sever the head—let it descend
to the retainer’s lap with proper speed
still hitched to the flesh it must transcend,
a newborn’s tether, pale and stubborn, caught
between what leaves and what refuses still.
Mercy and taste: the blade that answers thought,
the practiced hand that sanctifies the skill.
One final stroke to staunch a benediction
or to close the mouth before it speaks in vain—
and spare the watchers any fleck of sin;
the blood directed to a higher plane.
The breath revoked, the body’s work undone—
the tether breaks. There is no resurrection.