From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine IV

And if you should answer?

I listened, years before I knew you, to the whine

of wind through the high stony pastures above my childhood village;

I breathed lavender and thyme and burned my bare legs

on nettles, scraped them on thistles, and rubbed

the sore skin till it reddened all the more. When we

walked the uplands together, you burned your hand

and I kissed the crimsoning nettle-rash. “We are the Lords of need,”

you said Hafiz said,

and I believed you, and we were.

In the rugs of your country, carmine is crushed

from insects, cochineal; saffron gold

is boiled from crocus stamens; and indigo

of heaven and fountain pools is soaked, hours upon hours,

from indigo leaves. “Like the angel Harut,”

you said, “We are in the calamity of love-desire.”

The angel is chained by neck and knees, head down, in the pit of Babel

for falling in love. Your carpets

told a different story: scarlet and saffron

blush as in Paradise, and God reveals himself

in wine, flame, tulips, and the light in a mortal eye.

All night you held me, sleepless, on my childhood cot in the stone house;

all night the wind seethed through crags and twisted olive trees,

high on the scents of thyme and goat droppings. “All night,”

Hafiz sang, “I hope the breeze of dawn will cherish the lovers.”

But the breeze of dawn is the angel of death.

You are in your far landscape now, I am in mine:

the wind complains and I can’t understand the words.

And if you should answer?

You, ten years away, in a different wind.

“We are in the calamity,” Hafiz sang. “But tell the tale

of the minstrel and of wine, and leave time alone. Time

is a mystery no skill will solve.” We should

thread words like pearls, you said, and the grateful sky

would scatter the Pleiades upon us

though we couldn’t see, and that was long ago.