“Ornament” and “A Century of Surnames for Witness”

Ornament

You will exhale winter in a garland of moths,

sighs suspended by a sentence

 

in silk, there is a wish they carry

on their wings, two pages of snow;

 

one page for me and one page for you

too carry such a destiny—

 

Beneath an oval glass dome of curiosities

wild silk moths are at work;

 

three lifecycles have passed

into twilight and they have conceded the map

 

of tender mercies, the chapter of a previous life between two;

you trace a circular flight path to the interior

 

night blooming Lepidoptera in our canopy bed;

this time next year should you emerge

 

somewhere it is snowing and you are buried

on the opposite side of a cocooned solitude—

 

inside winter is another blank page beneath breath

and content to be so; a consolation for the living

 

words yet to be written; should you cast your eyes heavenward,

your body shrugs off the symmetry

 

of this shift in weather, and your name lifts to a hush

of mulberry trees; there was an orchard

 

you left an outline of a silk moth

between my shoulder blades; when spring descends

I feel its wings fold in prayer.

 

 

A Century of Surnames for Witness

With folded hands, swallow the night bird,

evening spills open the color of marrow.

 

Select a hundred ghazals from the pulse,

bound each prayer in muslin.

 

Conceal the nightingale’s couplet at your hip,

a curved blade, a wish at twilight.

 

Ebb is another word for elegy; inside a mangrove

of silence live a century of surnames for witness.

 

How to tether you little rhyme

to the outline of your previous incarnation?

 

One hand erases the horizon

line of fallen noble houses.

 

In a Mughal miniature, there lives a blind court poet

who counts elegies; the cries of night birds are soft

enough for a baby to swallow.