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And the body is beautifully there, like hoarfrost.

Tears on its face now glimmering like dimes

falling from a slot machine, or a stream, thought lost,

that breaks through fresh snow at wintertime.

From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press

To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue 
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music 
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum, 
the German word for dream. 

There were times when the girls knew where the man was in the orchard, and times they did not. These times they trod slowly and carefully, not that they thought he would harm them—not really—but it had become a kind of game. You might turn the corner into an orchard row and find him there, walking toward you or away, or maybe you saw his legs, his trunk, obscured in leaves.

Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin

      flames, one black, one a gauzy red,

only to learn the title is Boats at Sea. It's like how

      sometimes I forget you're gone.

But it's not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world

      similes carry us nowhere.

And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries

a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased—

Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother.

      Listen to me

plead for your life though even in the dream I know you're

      already dead.

How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was

      Priam's ever?

I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.

“There is an ocean of dreams,” Maryse was explaining, “that our sleeping heads dip back into late at night. The tides go in and out, cleansing the shore. Who we are is whatever silhouettes against that great sea. It is deep and vast and strong, and even in the clearest moment of the brightest day something is leaking in, a permanent trickle in the plumbing. Sometimes, in some of us, things collapse, but now the moment is approaching when the wave will break to carry us all away. This will happen. Consider the signs. Learn how to float.”

“But what’s all this got to do with UFOs?” asked Beale.

“They’re the openings the dreams come through.”