another me is in Mosta, inside the dome,

& the dome hoards all that light like debt.

across the world I wake,

lungs full

of something like incense.

or limestone dust

settling in the mouth of a man I should have been.

outside my window the city does what cities do—

its blues & whites, its bottomless mouth.

I let it swallow me every night.

#

he is in the Rotunda on Sunday.

the pew holds his shape

& those of every man before him—

his father, his father, the one before

whose name the family stopped saying

because he moved away.

the priest speaks & the other me

moves his mouth along.

he has learned this. the learning

is so deep now it is not learning.

it is limestone, it is ġebel—

the island’s own bone,

ground to dust & sold

halfway across the world.

he kneels when they kneel.

his knees, his hands,

they know the angle, the fold.

somewhere a boy is in a city

full of light he cannot imagine

& does not try.

#

the quarry opens at five.

he works the stone as always.

by noon his hands are white,

the dust finds the creases first,

then the palm,

the place where the thumb bends,

the small scar from a childhood

of prickly pear spines.

the foreman calls him by his father’s name.

he does not mind.

it is easier to be a man

who has always been here

than to explain the feeling

that arrives sometimes at the lip of the quarry

when the light hits the stone

a certain way

& he sees for a moment

the thing inside the thing.

#

at dark he finds the carob trees.

the low hills that hide nothing.

the island at this hour

is more itself than in day.

something loosened,

fennel, scrub,

the sigh of an island in heat.

he walks until the lights of Mosta

are small & could be anything.

blue & white stars.

a city he has never seen.

a life that split like a fig

& rolled into the horizon.

& here is where I cannot follow—

I only know he stops.

I only know he stands

in the specific dark of that specific island

& sees a figure standing in light

that is not from here.

the figure is doing something ordinary.

laughing, maybe. touching

someone who is glad to be touched.

the figure does not kneel.

has perhaps forgotten how.

he watches for a long time.

he does not know if what he feels

is grief or envy or the word

that lives between them

that neither of us has learned.

#

in Maltese the ghost is fantażma—

borrowed from Italian,

like the feast days,

like the façades,

like the way the women wear their grief

on the outside,

so everyone can see.

everything that leaves

takes a foreign word with it.

I have been gone long enough

to become one myself.

#

sometimes I think he is the real me.

the one who stayed & worked the stone

& learned the angle of the knee.

the one the island kept.

sometimes I think I am the ghost—

the one who drifted into other light

& lost the weight of ġebel,

the smells of Sunday,

the way the dome holds light.

he wonders if I kneel.

I wonder if he has ever not.

one of us walks the arcades and strips.

the other in the dark beneath the carobs.

& I do not know anymore

which is haunting which.