The sea started to shake up and down as if in a rapid boil. Jaloe steered alongside the Mitra Buana, one of many bigger boats fishing in the water. The captain, Rhaban bin Amad, was Jaloe's friend. "I think there is a ghost in the sea," Jaloe shouted up." "No ghost," the captain replied. "It was an earthquake." Jaloe weighed this. "I think it was a ghost."

I see you picking through a field of ruins, strewn with the granite stone, splintered wood and brick of toppled citadels;
Dusty Assyrian cities
(Kalakh, Sippar, Dēr, Babylon)
with names that sound like war.
Others: Platea, Carthage, Uaxactún, Ashkelon Herculaneum, Constantinople, Harrapa, Changhsa, Nanking, Leningrad, Sarajevo, Dresden, Manila, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Phnom Penh, Grozny, Kabul etc.
Not only cities. There are untold villages and fields.
Pastures in Belgium.
Polish forests, beautiful and lush in the Spring,
where my people were destroyed.

A German looking back on the bombing of Dresden by American and British planes over some nights and days in 1945 writes: “Is the destruction not irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands and seem to break out suddenly are a kind of experiment, anticipating the point at which we shall drop out of what we have thought for so long to be our autonomous history and back into the history of nature?”

Have we ever left it, the history of nature? Have we ever really pried ourselves from its embrace?

You told me this once:
The floods will come, and a French journalist will travel to the destroyed plains full of tangled death, and he will snap pictures of the death (bloated flesh of goats and women, men with bones for eyes), and not turn away when a petrified baby is pulled from the mud.

A day or two later he will fly home, make love to his beautiful Chinese girlfriend after dinner and in the morning prepare his slides.
He will be invited to show us the things he has seen
(though we will not smell them, the things he has seen).
He will show us hope.
Populations reborn,
a child smiling,
filth washed away,
injections and construction.
He will tell us life returns.
We are born again.

On the field of ruins,
from time to time the mounds of rubble of cities of men grow so enormous they begin to resemble new towers and battlements,
over which new men (born again men) roam and laugh and desire,
filled with the confidence that is the right
of every citizen of the empire.
—Just rubble, you say, and I laugh
because I know it is true.
Dusty men and their desire,
rummaging in a dump.

In Rome, there are buildings that sit atop ruins six levels deep, one level for each age and its idea of destruction. Each time they are lost they are built again, on the same spot (a little higher up), by persuasion, boredom, faith, ambition, only to be lost again to angry flames, set by a mob with the slights of history in its pocket.

Let us recall Paz by a distant sea, longing for home like explorers of old, years (years) from wife and kin:
to be/ the flicker of the lidded instant,/the conflagration and the destruction of birth of the instant,/ the breathing night rushing enormous at the edge of time, a long word that never ends.

Then
One day late in my childhood, deep beneath Summer's ravaged gardens, in the tomb of level four
I felt the fire's tongues.