I wake to an imagined
sound: wooden blind
cords, with their little plastic
bells, lifting and slapping gently
against the sills
in a sturdy breeze. As if I were
waking in my childhood bed, stories above
the New York streets, windows opened
to the regions of
the upper air, air of laundered
freshness, air with the sea
in it.

Here, halfway around
the world in dusty Damascus,
where green glints of minarets
stipple the night sky, I am awakening
to thin white drapes which inhale—fill
with light—and exhale the still
cool air, billow over
open roof-patio doors,
subside, my ears tranced
by the after-vibration
of the muezzin’s call, the clear
tinkling of a few morning
dishes. I am blanketed again
in sums of rich
privacies—theirs whose tea steeps
in a large jar on an adjacent roof,
theirs who grow mint and cumin in small pots
on a ledge—while I lodge
deliciously in the privacy
of my own quiet body, the white
billowing drapes inhaling, filling
with light, sailing me through
all my morning cities.

like a delayed signal—
you can almost feel
the switches ganging on,
or something momentarily
caught, a clog,
in a drain,
before, at last, the train of memory
comes chugging through,
flags flying,
bringing magnanimous
to the station, like a candidate
on a whistle-stop tour,

or
it’s as if you’d submitted
a request for a rare cartographer’s tome
in an elegant library reading room,
and waited patiently, under
the chandeliers, by the brass
lamps, until a tiptoeing
librarian wearing
white gloves puts it into
your hands—Castellammare del Golfo!—
and its syllables canter, tossing
their manes, down a cobblestone street
to a brilliantly flashing sea.

See and hear Jane Beverly's video of "That Pause"