The
Pipe
Like
Huck Finn, at that age,
I
made a pipe, drilled
the
yellow bamboo bowl
for
the stem socket, the stem
a
stalk of dried oleander bored
with
a hot wire and still nubbed
with
the sockets of leaves.
When
I light up, my tongue burns
with
the tang of sidr -apple leaves
from
my yard in Dhahran, and herbs
swiped
from my mother's cupboard,
and
my finger brailles down the stem
over
the symmetrical sockets, notched
like
years on a calendar, measured
steps
into the past which I tell
over
like the strung "worry-beads"
with
which Muslims recall
the
ninety-nine names of God
the
Incomprehensible,
and
the smoke roils up
mimicking
the immense torches
of
gas flares, orange and black
with
half-burned organics,
which
obscured the cold, hard ache
of
stars over the empty desert.
If
I must burn, as I must,
as
everything that shares carbon
must
in the oxidations
we
call life, let me not
be
told over incompletely,
let
me burn like a star
whose
core collapses
into
pure light.