The Collector of Bodies. Diane Glancy

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      Every time I left a town I took the view of a boat

      leaving the sea vacant there on the shore

      as if the whole world were a broken slice of the moon

      across the Mediterranean.

      I tell you these valleys will run with blood

      if these wars of nations continue—

      these open, running sores

      in the general way the world is moving

      as if draining to a close

      the way I shut my purse with a click

      in the Damascus marketplace, the suk,

      the burro with his dosser, the stalls of meat,

      the home-spun silver pin I bought.

      3.

      Yet the road rippled as though a field

      where an ancient farmer plowed his furrows,

      and from my viewpoint,

      when I saw more soldiers with their guns,

      I knew no one in my country could tell me what

      to believe

      and I was happy about it.

      Those beliefs have to come from within

      or I would be at odds

      as I was the day I went to the Muslim school for girls

      and my heart sat a little at their desks, and the door

      for me was in the leaving which they could not,

      and among them were the people I met and spoke at.

      They were kind you see and allowed me to talk

      as the sun scrubbed the lovely sea at their port city

      on the coast at Lattakia.

      Wherever I went

      the loudspeaker from a minaret read from the Koran

      of the Islam religion into the streets.

      What if they piped the Bible into my own country

      on the corner of Market and Elm?

      As I passed through Aleppo and Homs

      on my way back to Damascus

      I thought of the bylaws of my own country—

      the triune system of Capitalism for greed,

      Democracy for altruism,

      the Judeo-Christian heritage for a moral component.

      And the Syrian road where the apostle Paul was

dumbstruck1 two thousand years ago

      was brought right up front at last.

      Something far away and remote

      weighted its place in my bones.

      Discontinuities or something like that

      because of the conflicts and contradictions

      in the human heart.

1. Acts 9:3-4

      The University at Lattakia

      It’s the writers, not the politicians,

      who should talk.

      A Syrian writer

      A student in chador

      had a question in the lecture hall.

      The instructor tried to form her words.

      I said, let her speak.

      The tables climbed their ascending rows.

      The windows scratched their throats.

      She lifted a silent sky

      from the bunker of our countries,

      the Quonset huts of our eyes.

      Can You Imagine Hearing No Stories?

      1.

      How do you begin a story?

      You face the silence so dense the words are magnetified metal filings, but you begin to pry.

      You put both feet on the floor you sit in a chair you open your mouth. You speak to the story as if it were already there. You remember a stray cat who came around and you left the door ajar and you saw him while you were at your desk from the corner of your eye he walked past the door one way then another and soon he jumped on your desk scaring you both but he was there and you reached out once and once again and soon he let you touch his head.

      2.

      No, you don’t offer the story a corral or even the pasture.

      You offer it the whole continent.

      You hear a buzz, a hum, which is the clump that forms before a word.

      You hear the word that comes from the hum.

      Then others follow.

      They stand together, shivering.

      You separate the words from one another.

      They won’t want to at first though some come forward

      to stand next to other words.

      They learn to adapt, move over, and change in relation to others.

      That’s how story is a process of learning how to trust before you hear.

      A phenomenon that nothing longs for something more than something longs for nothing.

      3.

      Your words travel the air-space between others, and there is a hereness, a connection, and soon your one voice is a cropduster that turns into a Concord when you see it’s a matter of magnitude

      say the prairie air-corridor at full amp.

      Blue

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