Day 65

My friend whose husband died
engraves what she calls ghost images beneath drawings
of crows, snakes, trees. The ghost images
are fainter, less developed, as though
they were on their way to disappearing
and yet leaving some trace of themselves. If
there could be a sound, a fragrance: the way,
after Mariolina died, I ordered a perfume she wore
years ago, when we were young,
and opened the lid to take in
her presence but also those afternoons:
poems we read together, music
we listened to. Refaat wrote a story about an old man
in Gaza who treasured a stone
he was told had come 
from Jerusalem: held it tenderly
in his hand, carried it everywhere, told his son
that, as long as he had it, he still had Jerusalem.
The son, impatient with his father, told him
the secret his uncle – who had given the old man
the stone – had told him never to reveal. He
revealed it: the stone was nothing, not
from Jerusalem, just a stone from the yard
of the uncle’s house. And the old man, who all
those years had believed he possessed a piece
of Jerusalem, undone by what his son
let him know, felt his life draining out of him.
The stone had sustained him and now
there was nothing. My friend
shows me another engraving: ghost images
of other birds, an intricate spiral that looks like the shell
of some primitive crustacean. Image behind image,
as though you could follow them deeper, farther,
and the images would never end, and at last
you would find yourself in a place where ghost
and body would merge, where the dead 
still had voice and touch, where a stone
found in anyone’s front yard 
would hold the soul of Jerusalem:
where, exiled by death or force,
you could hold the stone to your ear
and hear the long anguished familiar
wailing of prayer; feel the warmth
of the cobbled streets. The open sky.