This breeze, the hussy, has traveled around the world,
gathering smoke from cook-fires in Afghanistan,
stealing the sweat of lovers in London,
the stink of traffic in Marrakech,

blowing her hot breath through your threadbare heart,
huffing up your skirt,
roughening your genius hair,
hot with the stench of battlefields,
cool and sweet with the cries of gulls.

Breeze! Tell me it’s me
and me alone you love.

How can I tell you that
when I have just caressed the seashell ears of a baby
and caught, with equal care,
the parched last breath of the woman
whose strangled, abandoned body
won’t be found for months to come?

When this morning I whipped veils against the foreheads
of that long line of refugees
carrying their lives on their backs
through an endless gray-and-white newspaper desert?

And this afternoon recorded the wheeze
of the bull elephant as he chased through underbrush,
trumpeting after his mate,
and listened just as intently
to the cricket, fiddling her delicate desire?

Well, then, what do you want with me?

I want one stray hair from your scalp,
one drop of sweat from under your armpit.
Give me that short breath you just took without thinking,
the blood-blister on your toe, inside your gritty sandal,
the fleeting impulse too swift to write down.