My proof of choice was moonshine
a fermented sugar that could parch every last hydrogen
pearl from the sky.
Lost to fire spirits, memory is porous,
earthenware,
the mind a kiln.
Beyond the dunes
are huts of adobe slumber,
muted rows of baked sienna
that will someday crumble, return to their origins.
The chamelier has retired,
tented by goatskin,
supine upon his nervous carpet
a village of fingers still alive within the tapestry.
I have never seen so many knots within a square inch.
Do not fear the spiders you have killed
he says today.
I revulse over the hairy thorax
crushed behind a feather-budded tamarisk tree.
Eight guilty mutilations, one for every leg
that crawls me into civilized panic.
Upon the ruminating dromedaries,
Garbo and Simoom,
we slow-step,
the Saharan floor pressed turmeric.
His few words are never arid but botanical,
vining lush through me.
The storm sand-mackles our eyes, saltating,
I wrench forward, reach for the rein.
Wishing for eyelashes camel-long,
he pulls me down from the humped saddle.
Desert talcum makes a rattle of the skull,
abrades the amygdala,
until every particular article finds its settling place.
He is a mirage-blue man, a free man,
wearing the ocean upon a scarf that seems to quench him.
He wraps it around my mouth and I drink.
The night becomes tungsten, a filament of want, of wattage
that can buckle you under and other.
With the jam of dates upon our fingers, and minted tongues
we steep a new devotion.
He calls me Tagine,
a vessel of nourishment,
for here love settles in the liver
and instead the land is jaundiced.
Within a moonshine we are knotted together, every square inch.
