For Jasmine, with love.

Girlfriends

I sit in my townhouse and read of your travels on a screen.
Morning sound of jack hammers, distant pigeons,
children shooting water guns in unlikely backyards.
I remember your legs splayed over my embroidered bedspread
tittering over some temporary man or insufferable woman.
Not long ago. The secret snark of girlfriends.

I imagine you now, heels traded for flat rubber,
alone on a dirt path, digesting a first rare silence.
Kutaisi. Not a trivial place. No time, no hinges.
Stripped of all but its name, truths lost amidst detritus,
history books half-written. Nobody won.

The cool orbs of a languid cow meet yours as it
pastures alone.  Slow. Labored. Tiny gray women,
faces thatched with unspeakables, skin like beaten leather.
They gesture at you, hesitant.
For the American they shape stories
through the hot air with crow-footed hands.

Your irrepressible ache, patron saint of lost souls simulcast
on news reports, features in the Times that jar
over morning coffee. Friend, steel your heart,
I whisper. Yours is not the stuff of flavored lattes.

Soon I will sit, fingers drumming, in some sticky downtown bar
recalling dirt paths of my own. Distant. A confused pain
through jagged memory. I expect you will breeze in,
back in stilettos, flustered, ten minutes late,
apology half-launched, back
from saving the world.

I will take your ivory hands in mine,
those of the girl with the beam of ideals,
heedless zeal and laughter,
and squeeze them between my rough palms,
hoping to glimpse some small fleck of dirt
still sunken beneath your fingernails.

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