Codex 9
00.21 (START TAPE)! We begin here in transit, it is September

and I am inventing a kind of time the way Coltrane did

in Alabama. I am looking for a hole in the ground or lightning

from a skinned tree with its fragile brightness, that spikes

below the waterline, not to be seen from the dirt road.

Where is my city perched on seven hills? Where is the sky

in its height to watch the evening crawl in? Where are

the horses that broke loose? I know I come from another

world that is both sheath and blade, both bruise and blood.

You have me in a room. Your boss is using my last name

outside this door to express the relationship between me

in part and it’s whole. The word sounds strange at the edge

of his mouth, like bait at the end of a hook. I glance at a clock.

The ceiling tiles are perforated, and you ask Why did I move

from the home I once had to this home? Your silence is also

a hole. The soil from which I came does not want my return.

Men who look like me in the eighth century came to the hem

of your shores. They used the wind like a stone in a sling.

I used an airbridge. I used a runway. I used a loud flight path.

I used an airport lounge of a country known for its invading

army. I used who I am in this night with its far-off star. I used

what nobody would admit, that geography is everything. (END TAPE)