SONNET

Next life I want to be an Andalusian woman,

dancing flamenco, shredding my own patch of sea.

Or a cherry tree in the Kurdish highlands, seeing a black horse

come and go, seeing petals waft past an old poet’s window.

Or just a cloud over Kumbum Monastery,

mild thunder in cool air, an incantation vanished in a breath.

Or I’ll be a cavalryman, armored, in Manchuria, my pillow a halberd,

waiting for dawn. Snow heaps its fury south of the Yellow River.

Or a White Russian, last century, banished to a camp,

hearing a West Asian remember his wife, his

oud

.

Eight thousand spread industrial salt on drifted snow. Eight electricians

all night on frozen high tension lines, never more to set foot on this earth.

I’m alone with my armor, its big fishlike scales;

on one I scald water, on another I hammer night’s tune.