A hammer sliding down a clay rooftop,
an old pair of leather shoes scraping over
road dust: the soft torque of breath,
a throat dry as sand, permeate the far wall
of your room with a voice that needs no echo.
Your tile floors are stung with coolness,
and the cry, whose every word is a passage
blazing a Herculean leap, rises from a dozen
hidden rooms around the city. Your sheets
are a blue shroud and the song travels
from district to district from wall to window;
your sun dawns the shadows of water tanks;
the bed is a sundial turning at the centre
of an old stenograph, words crying out as alien
as whale music scratching on your skull.
A horizon of television aerials and satellite dishes
and the relentless mammal lingers there,
its skin above you, the air its bones, the hammer
strokes the slow fury of one who utters God.
As appeared in the full-length collection, Ten Thousand Miles Between Us, the chapbook collection Leaning into the Mountain (Fooliar Press, 2006) and the literary magazine Prairie Journal (2006, No. 47).