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Poetry

Funeral

I saw the procession, followed the coffin like the others, with head respectfully bowed. I found no reasons to ask them, Who’s this stranger? Where’d he live? How’d he die? There are many causes of death, among them the ache of life. I asked m [...]

His Own Elegy

I read “The Dice Player” in its entirety in an Arabic newspaper right after Darwish read the poem for the first time in Ramallah in June 2008—what would be his last public appearance in that city. 

The Dice Player

Who am I to say to you what I say to you? when I’m not a stone burnished by water to become a face or a reed punctured by wind to become a flute . . . I’m a dice player I win some and lose some just like you or a little less . . . born b [...]

In Memory of Xiong Huang

who disappeared from Shanghai and whose body, his brother believes, is now on display in New York City in an exhibition of plastinated cadavers In some province a hemisphere from here you tapped at your grandmother’s kneecap, her elbow crooked in [...]

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Time Out

It took that pause to make him realize
The mountain he was climbing had the slant
As of a book held up before his eyes

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