I am a poet from a desert country
and every night I dream about floods
they’ll erase the earth they’ll destroy these cities
like copper etchings washed by acid
like a dime left under a faucet for a hundred years

“night is the province of death, sleep, and love”
wrote this woman who writes poems as dense and strange as mine
all night I stay up listening to the jasmine clapping its white hands
and murmuring its terrible quiet songs
I flick my cigarette stubs into the garden
I dream a cabaret of drowned men
every night is young, and every night is hungry
and every night returns again