ALGIERS IN AUTUMN

“Sojourn with me
to Algiers”,
she entreated at
the museum of light.

Its astonishing layers
and ivory walls reveal
histories of mystics,
colonial plunder and fight,

they meander like snakes in
the dust over miles for days

are white as cow’s milk
or children’s first teeth

and the heat, how it blazes
pours down like hot caramel
on narrow alleyways

in a sweet golden scorch
from cerulean skies,

we’ll pray word/
lessly at noon
on our eager
four knees

in magnificent
mosques bathed
in silken
Mediterrranean
breeze

make love
all night
soaked in
oil of myrhh
on thick
tapestries

dally in the cool
moonlight
of a perfumed
room.

How could I not awaken at once,
begin to pack cotton socks,
that cherished book of Rumi poems
to unbury those bright emeralds of song,

commence this longed for pilgrimage
of lushness, the very second
“sojourn with me to Algiers”,
she seductively crooned?