One:               comrade

Little as I knew you I know you:      little as you knew me

                                         you know me

—that’s the light we stand under when we meet.

I’ve looked into flecked jaws

walked injured beaches footslick in oil

watching licked birds stumble in flight

while you drawn through the pupil of your eye

across your own oceans in visionary pain and in relief

headlong and by choice took on the work of charting

your city’s wounds ancient and fertile

listening for voices within and against.

My testimony:      yours:      Trying to keep faith

not with each other exactly yet it’s the one known and

                                         unknown

who stands for, imagines the other      with whom

faith could be kept.

In city your mind burns wanes waxes with hope

(no stranger to bleakness you:      worms have toothed at

                                            your truths

but you were honest regarding that.)

You conspired to compile the illegal discography

of songs forbidden to sing or to be heard.

If there were ethical flowers one would surely be yours

and I’d hand it to you headlong across landmines

across city’s whyless sleeplight I’d hand it

purposefully, with love, a hand trying to keep beauty afloat

on the bacterial waters.

When a voice learns to sing it can be heard as dangerous

when a voice learns to listen it can be heard as desperate.

The self unlocked to many selves.

A mirror handed to one who just released

from the locked ward from solitary from preventive detention

sees in her thicket of hair her lost eyebrows

whole populations.

One who discharged from war stares in the looking-glass of home

at what he finds there, sees in the undischarged tumult

                                          of his own eye

how thickskinned peace is, and those who claim to promote it.