Transmigration

The stranger crosses into the city, wanders thru streets whose names he can hear reverberating off his bones, sinking down, rubbing against the words that have nourished him like a cruel father with a bent spoon & a book spread over his lap, luminous with markings that spill across the page like sand. A thousand steps & the river’s murmur fades, the streets narrow, each face in the passing windows darkens beneath huddled shoulders as the smell of beef & dumplings
seeps from gratings. When he crosses into a city that will never lower its unwelcoming guise, he approaches the unthinkable—that instant when the life he can hardly recall blurs & becomes overtaken by the life of one who was born there. The prisoner of a language that will never be shaken from the tongue far from a river whose light will never cease to sear the eye.