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Dead Reckoning   They say birds always find their way back home but home is a nowhere – a memory; a never was   Do wings remember spaces in the air the way we might a place? A field of rice?   How do you fly back to that? Away from a tomb of fears, this place yearning for you…   Some years ago, I lay bright flowers on my grandmother’s grave Years before, I saw   my grandfather’s ashes taken by the furrowing wind in the Bocas islands   I am not myself nor have I ever been something apprehending the sun   and other bright celestial objects thinking: this is a tapestry in orbit   around me I am completely convinced that we were the last creatures to discover   how to be in the world My beard grows wild My children brush past me in the darkness   Their chattering voices fill my ears and then my chest and I cannot hold it in   I am always coming home       Genealogies   Do not tell me a thing does not do what it does – that these chains (now plated in gold) are no longer chains, or that from above the clouds no longer look like drowned bodies washed ashore in the rolling surf I must go to my mother to learn the real names of the gorgeous objects in this greened world, of the beauties that can drive the body to exhale its life in one purpling sigh, the body that is a precarious house, assembled in this world but out of time   But I can no longer trust my mother’s histories They are not the taut suspensions my adolescent mind thought them to be   The blue-black body breaks at its closures, twisting in a dancing double helix dripping blood and amazement                                                           We will be Home soon Bowls filled with brown oxtail and broad beans At the food stand, an umber dog floats through the crowd like a leaf