A box of oils. A hand-stretched canvas. Green,
in the hue of mint: the night's steeping impasse
before Khalil put his brush down- they split
his handle into 4 pillars. Imploded locks
splintered rubies. The prolonged tremble of oolong
and the ghosts of boot prints.  The city whose imprint fades
in the painting that dropped from the prayer room wall
in his house.  They can't take the 5th. They can take what he painted, but they can't take what he can still paint.

He could paint their eyes how he saw them-
parochial red, peerless, confused boys and their leaders-
narrow, parental and devolved from equity, but Khalil
never tried to compete with Paradise. He never painted
them- the men of entitlement.  Their black-eye delivery-
his relative wealth, next to soldiers pitching tents in the desert;
their green eyes scanning for glory.  They can't take his prayers;
any of them.

Shinkay's silhouette.  Arabesque hair.   Her kesh dress.
Complexity unto which she gave herself.  Why had she married him?  
Pickled tang of his green olive bread. Contour of olive branches
he stretched in graphite across the synagogue, church and masjid
of the Holy Land sky-scape.  No matter that she had never been there.  
Together they had made lush vegetable gardens; sheen
beyond spring and producing a spectrum
of love's accomplishments.

Her last night they lived like animals- watched each other
through the flare of grenades pirouetting
to a blared sound track from a tank.
Her brown topaz eyes in the wrong light used to look green. Brass and copper
turn green with age.  Subjects avoid light.  
Blind contour drawing.  Shinkay- fading from infrared detection.  
Khalil as he sees her encased in shadow, and so he paints her shadow.   
They can take his Qur'an, and paint it with their yellow, but they can't take The Qur'an away.

Khalil doesn't know how long
her body waited before he could bury her
but he could count the time in color.
After black shrapnel dispersed.
After the rose of seven Maghrib salah.  
After the color of it drained from her
skin to mineral lime.  Blood in her
veins looked green until they cut her.

Paint dies.  Khalil knows this.  
If the ocean were ink,
if the ocean were ink,
if the ocean were ink.  

Naive armies try to compete
with the green of Paradise.  
They try to paint the dying world
in victory colors, but the paint cracks and chips.

Serpentine jade of a ruler's palace. Emerald city flakes.  
Living in the United States is easy.  Boxed crates branded on a barge.  Broken
wood on the sandy grand opening.  It's like riding on a lion's back
as it hunts down a gazelle, and Khalil is a young gazelle watching the mother of his children die.

The only thing green in this city are the golf courses.
A woman cocks her wrist, dangles her painted fingernails
over the passenger sill of a matching forest-green Mercedes.
Colors have speed. Orange speed cones
line the streets for the reckless, with the red cones of the eye, he can see green.

Purple hearts with oak-leaf-cluster pound
in the chests of tin men.  Bronze stars can't light up the sky forever.   
They can't take The One, but one day, unlike they have taken Shinkay,  they will all be taken; xanh like the leaves.

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