Paros

1

There’s a place to go sailing behind the mountains.                                                                       
They rent the boats there.

I tell my father this, but he will not listen.                                                                                      
Instead he lines our street with buckets.

His buckets will outlive my mother                                                                                                    
whom he won in the end
by questioning.

Imagine being a Lazarus who
resurrects too quickly, without rationing momentum                                                                
gently over the prescribed three days.

Four, my mother said. It took four days.                                                                                                    
But then I remember she caught
his eye in the morning light,

with a silence that said—
You are right darling, four is too much.

2

Then they joked about a Lazarus Soap Co.
“Reborn with every bath” is not a bad slogan,
my mother said,
and this is still the recording I have of her laughter.

3

You must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star,                                                              
said Nietzsche, I say unto you:

you still have chaos within.

This explains perfectly why

unable to pluck the plum of Samarkand,                                                                                               
Babur turned south from his empire                                                                                                                 
and wrote his autobiography.

I only understood this years later
when I took a bath with someone for the first time.                                                                                  
The boy, to make me smile,
took a bite out of the bar of soap

hungrily, as if it were a pear.

Then he eased himself back
as if to affirm this was a world of illusion, and he saw

no choice but to accept everything as a hoax—
the same way that, eventually, glass lantern panes all crack                                                                
to let the calm night flood in.