Lacunae Read online

  If you stand there in the open rain

  Your head seems lower in this light

  The still

  Fresh banana leaves can carry whole fish

  The afternoon is a fugitive

  You curse the rain outside your window, believing

  And if a bird descended on your shoulder

  Your hair is suspended in motion

  Like wooden planks from a broken ship

  Down the river the creatures in the basin prepare

  The tree collapsed on itself

  The growing fingers of clouds meet

  Daughter, along the rim of what you were knitting

  Why is the forest canopy strung with rope?

  The bird is in the center of the sun

  After two days I was luminous and half-naked

  The animals were slowly digging in the mud, and were frightened

  We came across a hunter disguised as a bird

  The dancing girl has veiled her body

  This slim body of yours

  A tear was painted on your cheek

  At the bottom of the pond in your heart

  If I can deceive this girl then let me

  You tell me I have pine needles for bedding

  They do not want to be noticed

  A river has gotten away from you. Pools

  Only this much do I know

  On your body I left behind

  Why have my friends spoken of him

  Your thin body, encased in my warmth

  Brother

  What is this belt made of, that clasps your dress to your waist?

  Are you the same girl who sheltered the sun in her hair

  Who are you going to meet tonight

  The rain kisses my face

  A lamb blinking over a patch of earth

  My tigers have left me

  The man who grows flowers in a field

  Hair covered a face

  Clay pots, shaped from the inside

  The red earth changes color when a stream runs over it

  Your husband is stretched out on the ground

  The girl cries from the number of fingers and toes

  Brother, don’t look away when she glances at you

  Even as you look at her

  As the village goes up

  His limbs covered in sweat, and ash

  Sister, when you look at him

  A sand dune came toward us like a sailing ship

  When the strange rain singed the outline of a lake into the sand

  I have never seen improvements to the flesh. If a man should steal, let it be sugarcane

  Islands are pronounced by the ocean without bubbles

  Leave me a stone

  And so

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Nadler

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2016

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  eISBN: 9780374714819

  First eBook Edition: June 2016