Four Poems
Toward the Amaranth Gates of War or Love
Tonight the city is glimmered.
What’s left of an August monsoon
is heat and wet. Beyond the open window,
the streetlamp is a honey-skirted hive I could split
with my hand, my palm a pool of light.
On the television screen, bombs like silvery bells
toll above blurred horizon—
All I know of war is win.
What is a wall if not a thing to be pressed against?
What is a bedroom if not an epicenter
of pillage? And what can I do with a hundred houses
but abandon them as spent shells of desire?
