Have you spoken?

Have you spoken to the ocean recently? Or to Yemen? Or to
a yellow dinghy at the bottom of the Mediterranean? How

about a polar bear? Or a blueprint in a factory somewhere,
for a nastier gun? I can hardly make a list better than your

morning paper. What would you say to a bird perched on a
length of barbed wire separating this from that? Keeping

person from person? Me from you? Don’t ask me. I don’t
speak. I spend the evenings in the balcony, mourning a lost

love. Bemoaning the universe’s broken parts that collude
against me. Thinking about a young Krishna who opened

his mouth to show his mother the entire cosmos within.
Unbroken. I talk to myself. About silence. Endings. About

love. A little bird on the concrete parapet opens its beak to
to scare the encroaching dusk. Darkness falls over us like a

coarse blanket, all at once. Starless. Moonless. Skyless. How
can you bargain for peace when you have nothing to give?

How can you bargain for love? The night takes my hands
away from me. Like plastic, like chemicals, like everything

we made and used and threw away, won’t love turn up
on a distant shore, in the belly of a murdered sperm

whale? Have you talked recently to the naked mountains-
cold, their lips parched in this strange December rain?