the author to the dead

             Beloveds, beneath the surface
of your last place, the tiny, oblivious fishes

form wreaths above the sea grasses
& their long reach—

Some mornings, in my own city far away,
I run to greet “you” come to me as sea, & carry

myself out into your long, dark time like a child meeting
its older cousins. I touch your teeth & give you the single word of my body.

I am a woman again, at the side of Aboy Haile’s bed. Aboy who is 96.
He is brushing my acacia hair. He is holding my arm.

He says, moving his hand to mean “all around us,”
that this is my home. He means Adi Sogdo,

but he also means the world.
Though I think, in “America,”

that I am There &
he is Here, that we are different, or far,

really, we are each other. My bones are
your bones, he says. His teeth are my teeth

& my smiling is his smiling.
He holds my arm tight, until it is a stone, a bone.

He smoothes my hair
with force. I am a horse.

The long, dark skin of the water,
the talk, talking Aboy of the water,

the brushing back, brushing back my acacia hair,
washing my face. When we are done

I cross the sea back into air
& return to the traffic of the streets I know.

I am marked by the dead, your sea-letters
of salt & weeping.

Now I am ready to lay my self down
on the earth, to listen to the instructions

for how to talk of love & land, to sing
of home in the horrible years, & to fill

my language, like the stars do,
with the light, anyway, of a future tense.

Winner of the 2015 Strousse Award. First published in the Schooner‘s Fall 2015 issue; republished in Spring 2024.