The longest night

In the dim nowhere we stand,

erect like rows of pickets

or like sunbleached obelisks

in Luxor,

our parched skins

speak for themselves.

We look for a sign, alert,

our gaze floating over the dunes.

The searing sun is still hung high.

And we think we hear a voice

but it is just the wind hissing

over the sands:

“I will open my hand and

I will show you man in a handful of dust.”

We watch our palms,

watch the dying man's rake

the dying man's claw

the last stand

there is bitterness and damnation

in those raking fingers

the minutest scratch carving doom

in the halest flesh.

We know full well that

the dyer's hand, congested, swollen

and puffed like a bloated drowned,

only the lines on the dyer's hand

can show the way there –

where we have need go –

tumefied as a dier's hand.

To hold

a dier's hand is

terrible

nothing has a stronger grip

and a sadder release.

Somewhere, far away and yet visible to us,

the summer deck chairs are being brought in.

The wind swirls the napkins,

shakes the flowers in their makeshift vases.

The storm is massing in the East,

the horizon billowy and swollen and

streaked with claw-like arcs.

The first raindrops bloat the tablecloth,

contort and contract in unshapely waves.

The party shall continue inside the grange.

We lost the pace of the longest night of the year

face buried in 'kerchiefs,

unable to see through tears,

adversity pushing our gaze clean to the horizon.

the warmth of a stranger's hand

glimpsed at a cashier

exchanging notes

surprises us

like painted players stuck in a

dumbfounded, ridiculous

rigor mortis

the feel and the dream long gone

of water and that of the sand

rubbed in the palm of the hands

begin to fade

the desert and the country

make one, in the dier's hand,

united for one second

of agony, of glory.

Now we feel on our skin,

prickling,

beginning, for us,

what we shall forever know

as the longest night

of our lives.