Agha Shadid Ali
No,
not in the clear stream,
I went fishing in the desert sky.
With rain-hooks at the sun’s end,
I caught a rainbow, its colors
slippery in my hands.
I gently separated,
like the bones of a trout,
the blue from the red,
the green from the yellow,
my knife sharp, silver-exact,
each color lean,
impeccably carved.
But the rainbow’s end,
though I cleaned and washed
the earth from it,
tasted bitter,
like gold.
From the book A Nostalgist’s Map of America (Norton: 1991, out of print). About Agha Shadid Ali.
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