We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. ~Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tam Pico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear. I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. "How do you know if you are going to die?" I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, "When you can no longer make a fist." Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand.

Naked, you are simple as one of your hands, smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round: you have moon-lines, apple-pathways: naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked, you are blue as a night in Cuba; you have vines and stars in your hair; naked you are spacious and yellow as summer in a golden church.

Naked, you are tiny as one of your nails - curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born and you withdraw to the underground world,

as if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores: your clear light dims, gets dressed - drops its leaves - and becomes a naked hand again.

After a night of rage that lasted days quarrels in a forest, waterfalls, exchanges, marriage, exploration of bays and places we had never known We would never know my wife's always changing syriac face, chosen of all faces a pouting difficult child's changing in the chameleon emerald wilderness of Kerala small cousin to tall

mythic men, rubber plant and peppervine frocks with print patterns copied locally from the dotted butterfly, grandmother wearing white day and night in a village

full of the colour schemes of kraits and gartersnakes adolescent in Aden among stabbing Arabs, betrayed and whipped yet happy among ships in harbour and the evacuees the borrowed earth

under the borrowed trees, taught dry and wet hot and cold by the monsoon then, by the siroccos now on copper dustcones, the crater townships in the volcanoes of Aden

I dreamed one day that face my own yet hers with my own nowhere to be found lost, cut, loose like my dragnet past I woke up and groped turned on the realism of the ceiling light

found half a mirror in the mountain cabin fallen behind a dresser to look at my face now and the face of her sleep, still asleep and very syriac on the bed

behind: happy for once at such loss of face, whole in the ambivalence of being half-woman half-man contained in a common body, androgynous as a god balancing stillness in he middle of a duel to make it dance soon to be myself, a man unhappy in the morning to be himself again, the past still there a drying net on the mountain

in the morning, in the waking my wife's face still fast asleep blessed as by butterfly, snake, shiprope and grandmother's other children by my love's only insatiable envy