September 6, 2009
THE MICHELIN INSPECTOR
Eats alone in the ten abandoned rooms
of the provincial hotel, the paper stars
in his guide cut out and pasted to the tenuous wallpaper
like games his children might play if he could still remember them.
The notes in his anonymous book are exact,
coded, hieroglyphs for broken sauces, overdone halibut,
ways to escape his life filed [...]
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September 6, 2009
BURNING THE LIBRARY
Obedient to the Caliph’s orders
Amrou walked the length of Alexandria
in a wash of salt
and set about his sad task of destruction.
Book by book he unstacked the library
while the birds went mad overnight
and Amrou’s feet burned tracks of ash
on the holy ground. A thousand meteors fell
down around him as the ancient world
was fed in [...]
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