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Your fingers were as hacksaws, I said,
one zigzagged grin - again a refugee. To a standstill now.
The floorboards, now covered in sawdust-
pounced on by your daughter, eyelids tight,
a day's effort again failed
to turn them back into mahogany.
"My grandfather, the great carpenter," I offer,
"would the trees have been as soldiers,
a barren earth would greet us at dawn.
Were the sky to be as merciful,
a thousand rains of streetcleaners
again on this ensieged city. It retracts
endlessly back into the earth."
Sometimes at night, your daughter
sobs in her sleep, waking to
a pillow of ferns. Sometimes
you watch her circling the room,
from the corner your hand braids her hair into Parthenons.
"Mierda en sus ojos, mierda en sus dientes"
Marina, I saw you yesterday at the bus stop,
whispering lost languages into your phone. March
was our last effort to cut the ice from the leaves.
March will be our last sacrifice to a god who tells us
we're a month too early for goodwill.
you sat five rows ahead. Off
into the hills, again we are carried.
Orchids tear past the windshield in streams, a
cinema subtitled for those
among us bewildered. These theatres
were constructed mid-landslide, a
bee with its forewing caught
between seats swings itself
over and over, to curl itself
beyond the Minoan, centuries ago, now
into a bloodied pulp.
You sigh and run your fingers
through your daughter's hair,
to a standstill now.
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