I am the green and your comfort,
Say yes, then say yes, then say yes.
33
Out of the mist, two birds emerge,
And they glide without sound to the sea
In a wraith sweep of dream wings.
Two hawks from the mist.
I can see them, just past
The stone steps and wall,
Sweeping in slow ornament.
Uncover my head, let the wet
Damp my face. I receive all
That comes down from the sky.
34
Bits of my life sideways in drawers,
In the cramped space of my closet,
The dog ears of books, odors
That never dissolve, photos
I cannot behold, cracked spool and string
That once was my son’s yo-yo—
He touched it, then me.
With this string and this weight
I will compute the Earth,
I will fashion a pendulum.
Release the weight,
Set the bob swinging.
It follows the arc of the world,
Back and forth, back and forth,
Beating like beats of the blood.
I can measure the time of each swing,
Record the number of seconds
To tenths and to hundredths.
The number, I write in my book.
Now, with the laws of mechanics and force,
By dividing the length of the string
By the square of the time
I have found the Earth’s gravity, 9.8 meters
Per second per second.
A number that holds other numbers:
The mass and the size of the Earth,
Figured with only a clock and some string.
These are the things that I know:
Heart that repeats like a pendulum,
Muscles that slacken with time,
String that he touched and then me.
These are the things I want to be true:
Seconds to measure a movement,
And movements to follow a movement,
Each action preceding reaction,
Like heat and the wheeze of Abbas’s kettle,
And hope that might grow from reduction,
And knowing that comes from experiment,
Nothing that hinges on chance,
Even the fall of a pin,
Cause and effect—
Push and the Earth pushes back
Just as it must, hundredths of seconds, exactly.
35
This is the cosmos of measuring.
Numbered the barrels of olives,
The crates of pocked oranges,
The kilos magnesium sulfate, the times
Of the shippings, the paychecks, the days
Without rain—all of it kept
In these columns and rows.
Great Lavoisier, bony-nosed,
Eyes far apart, silent,
Preferring your studies to play—
You were the master of measuring.
You were the ruthless accountant
Of chemical quantities,
Reckoning that mass never vanished
Despite changing form.
With your scale and your balance,
Your cylinders, candles, and bellows,
You tallied the weights of the world.
Phosphorus, sulfur, and minium,
Charcoal all breathed your air.
You found sharp truths in the numbers and grams,
Conceived substance as change,
Transformation, with quantity always the same.
You found the secret between the old elements—
Fire and water and air—joined by oxygen.
You believed only in what you could measure:
“Trust nothing but facts.”
You were Magellan of molecules,
Substance, and flame.
You showed the cleaving of food
In the body to be a cold fire.
Great Lavoisier, you counted grains
Of the vast hourglass
In a slow summing up of eternity.
36
Lavoisier—
Can you compute
The Patio de los Leones,
Mosque of Alhambra?
We’ll number the columns
That plunge from the arches
That lead to the stone heart at the center,
The fountain of lions—
And these too we count,
Shadow, geometry, maze,
Gold-covered filigree, each
Hollow a part of the cosmos
Of number.
Dust of the lions has smeared on my hand,
Darkened my tunic, my bed sheets,
My fingerprints smudged on my ledgers,
More waste in my wasted house.
Can this too be measured and weighed?
Down to each molecule, atom,
And even within, to the energies,
And then to the spaces of nothingness?
What is the number of nothingness?
Wait—I will measure.
37
I hear voices.
Abbas’s grandchildren have arrived—
Zarina, with two missing teeth,
Tabat with one skinned knee, dark-eyed Sabrine,
And the naughty Ra’oof.
They play jigsaws while eating sweet cakes
Soaked in honey and filled with moist dates.
One by one, they come to me,
Calling me Uncle and kissing my cheek,
Each kiss a sting of remembrance.
They follow Abbas to the groves—
“Help this old goat”—
Plucking up low-lying oranges for balls,
Pitching and zigzag to sea, splashing
Romp, trail of wet sand and shells,
Abbas on the terrace bellowing.
What would I say to my own children and grandchildren?
How would I listen?
38
Night, and the children have gone.
Abbas snores on his cot.
The Voiceless has come and he waits
At my door. He has traveled from deserts
With sand in his shoes. Mouth
With the motionless lips and the question
That cannot be asked. Standing, he waits
In the night, in the dark, and he smiles
With a terrible grin. From my window,
I look at him, dim in the lamplight,
And dimly he grins at me.
Caught in our mutual stare,
He throws stones at my house,
Rolls his eyes back and forth,
Gestures to open my door.
I refuse.
He continues to grin,
Hours pass.
With the dawning, the Voiceless departs,
And returns to the desert, his unspeaking
Mouth, but he leaves a dark mist
In the bloom of my house, he leaves
Sand at the base of my door.
39
I ask: What is the form
Of the principal forces, the atoms of atoms,
The dark energy pushing the galaxies?
How does the smell of baklava
Fix in my brain?
Numbers and names I will give to these things:
Gravity, chromosomes,
Seconds, and quarks. Photosynthesis,
Synapses, covalent bonds. Mitochondria, quanta,
And thermodynamics. Electricity, ions.
The codons, osmosis, cortex, and catalysis.
Is a thing known if it cannot be named?
There, on my terrace,
Between those two stones—
Flower whose petals are shapeless
And odorless, empty of color—
Nameless though each atom is trapped.
40
Abbas and I shovel sheep dung,
My olive trees hunched
Like a throng of old men—
Sun overhead, I look up
And I gaze at the clouds—
This is the way that I see:
Ten trillion photons of light make their way
Through my pupils each second of time,
Through the oval-shaped lens, through
The jelly-like fill to the retina, hundreds
Of millions of cells, where each photon
Of light meets a molecule, retinene, coaxing
It straight from its twisty vine,
Curled bougainvillea-like. Neurons
Respond to the dance. Protein molecules shift
In their shape, so that sodium cannot find
Passage, electrical charge unrelieved,
Shudder of current moves through
The neurons and flies to the folds of my brain.
Here the fourth layer is sentry, receives
The first tingle, computes a sensation,
And passes its tremblings to five other sheets.
In shards of a second, some hundreds
Of millions of neurons start quivering,
Each being shocked by one thousand others
And doing the same to one thousand more.
Click-click-click sound the firings,
Some punctured and scattered, some synchronized.
Click-click the pulsings in waves—
And my brain tells me “cloud.”
I believe in the knowledge of sight.
41
Newton and Darwin, Pasteur and al-Haytham, Mendel,
Mendeleyev, Curie, and Bose. Galileo, Bernard,
Lavoisier, Al-Biruni. Einstein and Watson and Franklin
And Crick. Here are your robes and your sacraments.
Here light the lamp of eternal oil.
Kepler and Brahe, Berzelius, Dalton,
Copernicus, Boltzmann, and Bohr.
Pauling, Boveri, Planck, and Cajal,
Heisenberg, Meitner, Brown, Krebs, and Schwann.
You burn the incense of asking and knowing,
Toss petals of restlessness.
Is nothing still?
42
This is a cosmos of living things.
Darwin—sailor, surveyor,
Collector of bottles and crates,
Casks crammed with pickled fish,
Bird skins and dried plants—
What beasts you’d find here:
Camels, gazelles, jackals, hyenas,
Sleeved mouflons, horned vipers, and cobras,
The bitterns and egrets,
The rails, crakes, and coots.
Cutting blue eyes, bushy brows,
Clumsy of movement and awkward
Of hands, with a passion
For birds and rare bugs.
You grasped the rule of survival and change,
Found the origins: petal and pistil,
Proboscis and lung, myriad shapes
Of the beak. Three kinds of mockingbirds,
Each from a new island. Extinctions of capybara,
Sloth, armadillo. The flightless small rhea
In south Patagonia. Lizards.
And tortoises, different by size of their shells,
Island to island.
The species weren’t fixed.
You showed that
Order can grow from disorder,
And purpose from aimlessness.
You said: “The large hand of chance is the hand
That has fashioned the cosmos of life.”
43
World of unending forms,
Spun from one primeval pattern?
And clouds,
And the infinite turnings of shells?
You found the links
In the hard chain of life.
You found that many can unfold from one,
Found the complex in unity.
Walk with me, Darwin, to prune
In my groves, speak of the crush to survive.
Goats in the stone keep
And gulls on the shore, falling
From ancient beginnings, with blood
Of our blood, kin in our family,
The endless unwinding of common
Beginnings, the branching and branching
Through eons of time,
From the first tiny movements
Of life on this world. I am goat, I am gull,
I am part of their bodies. Each breath
Is the breath of millennia.
44
Afternoon on my terrace, I sit
In the heat, bare-chested,
Sipping hot tea. Far off,
The sound of an oud. And then nothing.
The air closes, silence. Again,
Faint strings of an oud,
Muffled bells, drums,
Horn sound of mizmar—
All swallowed in air.
In the distance, I see figures.
Dim movements emerge from the haze,
Women with parcels on top of their heads,
Men carrying carpets and tents, drum players,
Trio of mizmar, boys trailing bottles on string—
It’s a wedding procession, defiant with music,
Making its slow way up the coast.
The bride, covered in gold, walks with her eyes
On the ground and Koran over her head,
While the mother shuffles from one guest to the next
Pressing a coin to each brow.
Scarlet veils billow like sails
Of a boat sailing on sand.
Servants bear baskets of lamb, peppers,
Chickpeas and couscous, zucchini,
Cinnamon, tabil and fish,
Ladoos and coconut cakes.
They are so young.
And then they have passed, winding north,
Fainter and fainter, a flicker of color,
The white dot of a caftan, dim note
Of one horn, and then gone.
45
Unlike Zafir’s third wedding,
A drunken affair in his old desert house,
He just turned eighty, his bride twenty-one—
Oud players dressed up like ouds,
Mizmars as cups for the wine
Bashed brawled and slammed—
I in a chair nursing my dried life,
When Zafir, bloat-bellied, places my hand
On his young bride’s gold bracelet,
Says: “This will endure beyond all mortal life.
Gold. Density 19.3, mass 197. Kiss it,
You’ve kissed what is true.”
46
To know of this world,
Should one not love details?
Here, the DNA codes for the essences of life:
GCT→Alanine
CGT→Arginine
AAT→Asparagine
GAC→Aspartic acid
TGT→Cysteine
CAG→Glutamine
GAA→Glutamic acid
GGT→Glycine
CAT→Histidine
ATT→Isoleucine
CTT→Leucine
AAG→Lysine
ATG→Methionine
TTC→Phenylalanine
CCG→Proline
AGT→Serine
ACT→Threonine
TGG→Tryptophan
TAC→Tyrosine
GTA→Valine
47
Journey of questions, I paddle
My oar in the stars.
I look out my crumbling arched window
Across the orange groves—
There, in the dusk, the great tower
Beckons again.
I return to the infinite hallway—
Tell me: What is the center?
The great door swings on its hinges,
The hall gyrates and twists, I grow dizzy,
My seconds churn hours and seconds again.
“You are asking of time and of space,”
Speaks the universe. “That is the center.”
Great Einstein, you were the master
Of time and of space.
You cracked the clocks of the universe,
Fracturing glass and coiled springs,
Showing that seconds and meters
Are not what they seem—
Time does not flow at a uniform rate,
Strumming and sliding through pages of space—
That a second, like rubber, can stretch
And contract. Moving clocks won’t keep
Their synchrony, caught in a monkeydance.
How did this gangly time pop
From your symmetries?
48
This is the world of the ticking of clocks,
Menses of women and tides
Of the moon. Orbits of planets,
The swing of a pendulum, spin of the earth,
Cycles of seasons.
Here, at my table, I question time’s meaning,
I gaze at the legions of people who pass by my gate
And ask: Where are they going, and why?
Two hawks alight on the rail with a flap
Of dark wings. Are they time and not-time?
They watch as the throngings of travelers
Pass silent below, the successions
Of parents and children, the deaths after births
After deaths through the span of the ages,
The sweating and splashing of time,
Pendulum’s swing and the next and the next,
With the endless repeat of forgotten lives.
What is this passage of seconds and centuries?
Cyclings of atoms through mindless
Vibrations, this flight of the galaxies
Racing to nowhere? What meaning this instant
Of time with my inhale and exhale, this moment
Of breath in infinity?
49
Einstein, mustached and sad-eyed,
Can you hear the blind ticking
Of clocks? Can you feel each soft second that slips
Through the glass? You were young at one time.
Can you make the world young? Can you
Rebuild the world at each dot of time?
Exiler of absolutes. Nothing is still
In your universe. All speed is relative—
Speed of my walking astride the chipped stone,