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Xaghra, above a beach
of imported sand, we see the visitations
one island makes upon a smaller,
we pay for water, we watch the pitch
where one old monarchy
throttles another, and back
in the country they co-formed,
where I was born and you
cannot live forever, someone shoots
at the once and future king
from a nearby roof.
It’s the would-be birthday
of Isabella and Ferdinand, not
the murdering heads of state,
but the two egg-layers my brother
named with his wife
among the anonymous brood
of hens elsewise fated
for the killing cone.
Then there were Bismarck
and Lilianna, always pets
in their pairs, because
as overlords we understand
companionship takes the sting
out of captivity.
We climb a goat-path polished
by cloven hooves and more recently
by the cars that ferry tourists
from remnant to remnant
of an ancient and surviving people,
past houses which appear
vacant for how tightly
their shudders draw against us.
None of us knows what will happen,
as we watch a man descend
into a quarry from which
the city walls were cut,
but I credit you
and the well-seasoned sea
for teaching me to float on my back
after so many years
spent sinking.
It’s true that the circuits
are closing in new ways:
No longer can we conceive
of boundless travel, no longer
can any film about drought
be considered a fiction,
no longer can we claim
the jellyfish swarming the shallows
are a coincidence and not
the spawn of a heating bed.
One wraps its magic
arm around you and presses
till you calmly say
Motherfucker to the sea
and for four days the itch
says No longer can we pretend.
No longer films about refugees,
holy wars fought beneath
interchangeable banners,
in the town square
we watch Spain triumph
and it’s halfway between
entertainment and empire,
we stab at a cake
which bleeds outward
from its core, hoarding moisture
like the rest of us in this desert,
and the internet cuts
in and out amid the crowd’s cries
of That’s it and Beat them
and Ah.
I am thinking of a man
who died to draw our
eyes to others, because he died
twice, once inside
of death, the way one day
we visited a cloister
which beats below Mdina,
in and not of it,
and you lean in
to mention the dignity
that is possible among a people
conquered once every few centuries,
whose city walls eventually
became useless against the invasions
that buzzed dragonlike above them,
surrounded on all sides
by water needing reverse osmosis,
and we fought to remember there
that the maintenance
of every quiet place
is not a punishment,
that another life
is possible, that it is possible
to want another life
