“I really feel I can touch you even in this darkness when I pray.”
    —War correspondent James Foley (1973—2014)
           from his last message to his family

“Man Jack the man is, just” Gerard Manley Hopkins

Recovered now enough to scrub the deck,
which turned dun brown with insidious dirt
and cobwebs in the months I twisted, hurt-
ing in yet one more hospital bed, my spine a wreck,

In the beginning my beginning hummed
with the sound of a thousand other beginnings.
Now, when I say light, I stare away from sun
& into your body. If I am to be in possession
of anything, I want it to be my state of witness.
How difficult to see the consanguinity of rivers,
one leading toward one, the air the blown kiss
swims & the kiss itself, its fist & fever.
We are born of word & the word travels.
You hear it at night, the train’s rattling moan,
dust’s physicality, a country of mothers unraveling