KATRINA VANDENBERG

D Ghazal

Let D kick things off as it would in the Book of Kells, gold-leafed D.
Vine-wrapped D. Lions and ravens strut around its Royal D-Ness. D.

Down the street children color in its middle when it shows up
in the chapter book, with O’s and R’s. Already doors left unopened.

D sounds like a door, slammed.
Case closed.

The sound of de,
                            beginning a word, is that word’s undoing.
At its end, De-’s evil mirror twin -Ed says the word is dead.

In the Phoenician alphabet it is , daleth, a crude door.
They packed it with purple dye and glass in a cargo hold,

sailed it to the Greeks, who wrote it for delta,
the river’s maw. In chemistry accuses, “You’ve changed.”

And so it is written, , , for years. Slips of white paper
folded into warm cookies. Your fortune tongue-tied inside.

As in Deliberate, Dust, Dinosaur. As in Donkey, Doo-hickey, Don’t.
D, the metal shoe with which the other letters’ horses are shod.

Do you still hear their hurry as they stampede into the future,
Dopplegänger, shadow boy? Each year it is your death I hold

against the light of November, to ask myself how I have done.
I give myself a , the door that faces backward.

Would you even know me? — Katrina, pure amber that trapped
your boyhood self. These days, I’m a hurricane. These days, a flood.