I grow the stiff body of a sunbaked weed, poking its thistle-hot hair through a crack in the tar. Wind languages blow in from the northeast. A carpenter ant complains that his feet are burning, that he must keep dancing awkwardly on this black, mineraly plain. I hide my thorn-choked throat. I don't want to keep bringing up the lack of rain, or how my roots are shriveling down there like dead spiders. The birds call who, who will bring the clouds back? A hawk lifts from his perch and the world goes quiet. And yet, these days, even he takes up the mournful tune, his screech strange with sorrow: who, who shall rain the earth?

Your face is as cryptic as a hieroglyph. I clip a lock of hair, hoping to rouse you to anger, but you give no protest. Tonight, in their cabinets of fire, they will fashion a new man, ready for the scattering. All evening, I feel for the lock in the pocket of my coat: the softer, sacred version of the hairs still circling the tub drain—the last vestigial movements of a being that has stopped.

For years, I swore you spoke, sang, called in pain from every direction of the earth. I searched along the dreamy Nile and cracked the jaws of crocodiles.

The sound settles. They say there is no more you to find. But I am thorough. I am so, so patient. I can crush the spreading tamarisk tree back into the soft shell of its seed.