There Was A Time When Mapmakers Named

A Man In A Desert Can Hold Absence In His Cupped Hands Knowing It Is Something More Than Water. There Is A Plant Whose Heart, If One Cuts It Out Is Replaced With Fluid Containing Herbal Goodness. Every Morning One Can Drink The Liquid Amount Of The Missing Heart.

She Lights A Match In The Dark Hall And Moves It Onto The Wick Of The Candle. Light Lifts Itself Onto Her Shoulders. She Is On Her Knees. She Puts Her Hands On Her Thighs And Breathes In The Smell Of The Sulphur. She Imagines She Slap Breathes In Light.

We Die Containing A Richness Of Lovers And Tribes, Tastes We Have Swallowed, Bodies We Have Plunged Into And Swum Up As If Rivers Of Wisdom, Characters We Have Climbed Into As If Trees, Fears We Have Hidden In As If Caves. I Wish For All This To Be Marked On By Body When I Am Dead. I Believe In Such Cartography - To Be Marked By Nature, Not Just To Label Ourselves On A Map Like The Names Of Rich Men And Women On Buildings. We Are Communal Histories, Communal Books. We Are Not Owned Or Monogamous In Our Taste Or Experience.

Men Had Always Been The Reciters Of Poetry In The Desert.

Her Life With Others No Longer Interests Him. He Wants Only Her Stalking Beauty, Her Theatre Of Expressions. He Wants The Minute Secret Reflection Between Them, The Depth Of Field Minimal, Their Foreignness Intimate Like Two Pages Of A Closed Book.