writings on the wall * I was the one who said the ditch in the backyard was maybe a river that had flowed from somewhere else and was flowing to somewhere else * I was the one who said where are you now? * I was the one who told about the one whose photograph in the book of Eakins’s photographs was of a guy the perfection of his body was his doom, and Shakespeare said so too * Right there before my eyes was the one who said where are you now? Where are you shadia? I was the one * Who saw how Aeneas lay there in the darkness watching the light, the little motions of light moving around the ceiling and telling him something * I was the one whose mother’s voice called out of the urn beseeching * I was the one who said how the day light knocks at the lid in vain * I said be keep to your self be close be wall all dark * I said good people are punished, like all the rest * I said the boats on the river are taking it easy * I said the brain in your head whispers * I said death lives in our words * I said how beautiful is the past, how few the implements, and how carefully made * I was the one who said her body witness is, so also is her voice * I said better not know too much too soon all about it * where rhymes with beware, I said * I said it is the body breathing, the crib of knowing * I wish I could recall now the lines written across my dream is what I said * I said the horse’s hooves know all about it, the sky’s statement of oncoming darkness * The fumes on the roof are visible and drifting away like martyred souls, I said * I said the knees of the committee touch each other under the table, furtive in pleasure * I said Eurydice, My Father * I said we huddle over the ice, the two of us * To squeeze from a stone its juice is her art’s happiness is what I said * I am the one who said, I hum to myself myself in a humming dream * And how we’re caught, I said, In language: in being, in feeling, in acting. I said, it’s exacting * I said the sea upheld us, would not let us go nor drown us, and we looked down say a million years, and there were the fish * See, the dead bloom in the dark, I said * The nightjar feeds while flying softly, smiling, smiling, I said * I said revenant whitefaced Death is walking not knowing whether * I said the formula on the blackboard said who are you * I said Utnapishtim said to Gilgamesh blink of an eye * I said where are you now Where are you shadia * Stanza my stone my father poet said * vwx stones and sticks * The day doesn’t know what day it is, I said * What’s in the way the sun shines down, I said * I cried in my mute heart, What is my name and nature