Author's Note: Best? Who knows? It depends on how my aesthetic is leaning in any particular hour. Sometimes it leans towards the short concise poem, sometimes the more discursive; sometimes towards the personal (but, hopefully, not private) poem that is “overheard,” sometimes toward the poem that clearly reaches out to others, or the world. I suppose this poem reaches out (one reader told me it made him feel connected to the whole world), but it also comes from a deep inner strain—my feelings about cities, and particularly the humble or lowly parts of them, as well as about the gift of life itself, even though it includes suffering.

“Koshary” is a very popular Egyptian dish of rice, lentils, pasta, chick peas, and tomato sauce.


Time Zone


7:59 P.M.: a woman in a Cairo room 
with fifteen-foot decaying ceilings of colonial
splendor gazes out her window at the neighboring rooftop
squatters, and in the distant Cities of the Dead,
Cities of the Living, a lump of flesh
in black robes grayed by dust scuttles
from cenotaph to cenotaph. In Bucharest’s
blue dusk lingering, a queue
quietly forms for bread before a milky-white-lit
bakery, shadowed by the black behemoth
of a cement-slab hotel; in rain-smudged
Istanbul, someone weeps into linens
smelling like damp dust; in smoggy Athens
near the Agora, a gypsy child
hangs on a tourist’s hand.

And here, and there, beyond the glistening districts
a little more ancient soot soft as fur gathers on windowsills,
on crumbling steps, tattered laundry stiffens a little more
against chipped facades, and the solitary comers
and goers turn down narrow streets,
on an eternal circuit from the newsstand
to the market—a half-liter milk to chill in the rusty refrigerator
as long as there’s power, an apple and pear
for the bowl in the dark tiny kitchen, yellow shades
drawn against summer. 

8:01 and the woman lifts her gaze
from the window, the black-robed form 
unwraps a bowl of koshary, the queue
grows longer by three; the weeper
gets up from her bed; the tourist 
shrugs the gypsy off.  Now ghosts
of all who’ve ever come to evening— 
under roofs or in the open air— 
in the cities of this time zone, gather.
In my own room, some press
against my shoulder, trying to scan
the news of dearth and deluge; some watch
juice drip from the knife
that peels the pear. 
         
First Published in Pedestal, June 2007.