Meanwhile Under the Shade Palms

shedding quills in ribbons of heat,

     moustaches and slippers

curled fetal at the ends. Like everyone,

they have their eccentricities:

one’s reliance on his left knee

     which implies a limp he doesn’t have,

another’s thumb-ring flask,

from which he drains a ruby-colored liquor.

Nothing happens inside the egg:

     the Turks are yoked to their carpets.

One might be missing an arm or a leg,

     admiring a pair of camels

drinking at a trough, the other spying

     on the lopsided love-affair

of the Dowager Empress

     and the Rajah of Ramnagar.

They don’t know it yet,

     but he’s to be assassinated

by a hummingbird.

     Meanwhile under the shade palms,

I write, this is not happening.

Her egg is small, encrusted

     with diamonds. Death watches

through the emerald window.

It moves against the shell,

through her body’s dense waiting,

     up through the floor,

through the legs of the chair,

through the skin-covered calves,

up through the arm

     in its pose of righteousness,

through the hand,

tethered to the wrist,

up through the golden barrel

     of the pistol,

through the empty tunnel

     of the hummingbird bullet—

out into nothing,

     into the nothing

beyond which there is

     only the desert

white as the ocean,

     white as the port of Tangiers

flooded with nightingales.

Because I write this,

they are singing to the egg,

     and I am singing, too.

That it might carry itself

to the precipice.

That the Turks might hear it,

     and brace themselves—

as they do—for a moment

just like this.