there is no speaking this    at first Lebanon was nothing left to remember    the balconies empty    pool growing weeds and broken tile    ghosts of soldiers moaning in eave shade     but your body is the land I remembered and I walk so the land returns     your voice in my mouth the tide of sea under sand    your skin soft as tangerine tears    back then that childish time gossamer dragonfly tails shivered fingertips     sunwarmed poolstones dampened croquet balls cracked gently and rolled     afternoons across stone floors towards dusk     and nighttime we looked upwards awed by nightsky and bonfire     the cicadas flew away from the heat    space between us in photographs so ordinary but now I know history was secretly forging itself from what had gone before     it waited with the persistence of generations until this     your smell of pine nuts and thyme and bark and fossils from that time when our country lay beneath oceans    your body and mine dark weight of moist earth

and the great white dog sighs again in the shade     we ride his back like young gods down wide stairs to the childhood pool     where before us our parents danced to gramophone records and the night burned clear and fierce with living     when air smelled of jasmine and champagne    where before them in that magical time after the colonists had packed up their guns and uniforms and folded their flags into squares and fled over the horizon     our grandmothers drank sherry and cheated at cards and the cards snapped into the air

and what land this is     those nights when you     I    knew nothing    pine trees leaned into the moon and village dogs howled while we slept on     branches between our houses hummed with cicadas that stayed between my ribs and now you catch them     figs ripened and opened between my fingers and there inside lives the color of your eyes     the heat fell through trees to terraces where I lay dreaming     lifts me now into your mouth like sunlight through water

A week's search ends now
with keys in ignition, doors jutting
against a stormed October sky
and ochre fields of deer-graze.
He thinks, Like a painting, then
Zippo snap and breath of smoke.

The dampness of leaves
in drifts against the seat backs.
Crumpled fast food bag
and he hadn't considered her
eating such things
now sealed into plastic
along with the sweatshirt
folded, a paperback.
His fingers fumble the book
to dogeared pages, underlined this and that
while bulb flashes illumine segments
of this: the car, looking down into the woods,
doors oddly open, like outspread arms.

He drops the book in a ziploc
blows circles with his breath
and trudges the road a short distance.
Yesterday over more photos
her mother admitted, in apology,
She likes to walk at the oddest moments
as if this would help,
as if he has only to come upon her,
this walker, this mushroom-gatherer,
berry lolling between her teeth.

Men scrape boot mud on stones
to hiss and spit of radios.
They slam the doors, first one
then the other. His flesh
loosens at the sound. Car jerks up
the ditch, brushed by yellow
tow truck lights that wash
the field opposite where farmers
have laid out hundreds of pumpkins,
hundreds, dull stupid orange,
like heads without eyes,
and he is cold-still, looking,
looking through the trees for anything,
the cars rolling away in the glow

but I am here, here among the rows
blind as earth, fingers clogged apart by dirt
cheek boned to the ground
grown still--
That one's sure a good one
I rolled it into my arms, laughing
as he seized its weight and winked
my skin slid astonishingly apart
his hands dove into me and ribs yanked up
and out sounded like cracked rocks
When he opened my lungs the sky
spread through with darkness
the lights kept blinking
on and off for hours

You're still there, with every
telling: back curled into a cushion,
smoke from a cigarette,
hum-humming bees in lavender,
tooth feeling your lip's sun blister
and everything's about to happen,
your whole life's coming to this:
just now his car, maybe even
rounding the hill, but
you can't hear it yet --

and all this thirty years ago.
Thirty years!
You missed a whole war:
the earth was ripped up, Rima,
the mountains shuddered with artillery
and the roads cracked under the weight
of tanks, and the house behind you,
Rima, where they huddled and cried,
was grief-stricken, limbless
as you, you bony poet,
you silent thing on the rocking-bench.

Thirty years and still
you smile dreamily into the sun, palms
on the pages of some book, ankles crossed,
oblivious to what's been in the making,
what's been planned for you by the gods, by
that old bitch in the sky, there you are you
sleepy sunburned reader, ready for a nap,
about to become the stuff of generations
of stony hearts and no-talk, of no more trips
to Switzerland, no more beach, no more
long legged days of pages and ink
and lazy lemonade eyes --

and all this thirty years,
thirty years before your little sister will
find your grave undone by war, will
sort through the rest of your bones and wrap
them in plastic, the burden of your memory
dragging through her arms and fists and
what bones these are -- light as pastry,
light as week-old dried bread
and still smelling of surprise --

Where was I? You're afternoon-sleepy,
and from the kitchen
pot clangs, dog-whines,
hard beans spinning clic-clic-clic
in a siv and by your feet the whoosh
of a hose swollen with water drawn to the azalea.
The earth fills with dark
and you yawn, hands
fisted and stretched skywards,
your poet's body, body's
youngness stretched, oblivious.
The car halts and beeps and shines
the black iron gate.

You said you would only be a moment
that he wanted to give you a gift.
Your mother watched. The earth overflowed
and dribbled down the stone stairs and the dog
lapped at it, paws splayed, bony-ribbed
and ravenous and then the faucet
groaning shut, the shudder of the
stilled hose and the bushes stood stiff
and full and clean while the African gazelle
stared through the wire fence
with eyes like targets.

My mother, your best friend,
her eyes still absent when she speaks
of the moment she heard.
With you, Rima, we wait on the verge
of living. You are still there,
thinking about anything,
anything other than the stone edge
living in my heart you did not think to imagine,
thinking of anything but
the surprise of becoming nothing after all.