August. The birds racket towards morning
a grey place the moon left in a one-man bucket plane—
was it the wind in the pines
or a propeller I heard
twinned with you in my bed?

To August’s husks and hot gusts
I speak an old language of prophets, shepherds,
a language in which cisterns were built, kingdoms splintered.
Hebrew envelops my tongue, throat up, like water
through pipes, and it sleeps
when I close my lips.
Like a bird, I keep song on my migrant tongue,
I am building a home of dense darkness
and I pick up a strand each night in my teeth.
So many songs of return jostle for my attentions,
a crowd on a day train with its curtains drawn
heading towards distant cities—
August, thirty-one days without a sleeping car
hungering over rails, between low-slung trees.