Touched the rose.
Can I walk back through mansions of time,
To the moment she first saw me,
Quaking and heaved in my newness,
Dark-skinned and flung on her shore?
Or before, when I squirmed in the wealth of my father,
While she—continents distant, oblivious—
Slept in honey?
Or was it before, in our parents—was there a sign?
In the details of two countries?
In seasides and rooms
Where decisions were made?
Was there no note of our future,
Our flamed cataclysm?
What sounds could be heard in past centuries,
Primitive air?
And before. In the time before time
And the space before space. In the wavering
Haze of infinities. Does the universe know
Of its future unraveling? Was there no hint
Of her lips on the rose? And our meeting,
Our union, the births, and the lives?
This planet, this second, the dress that she wore,
Red of her lips touching red-petaled rose—
Was there no speck?
Yet her lips touched the rose. There, I can see it,
The silk and her hair.
Perhaps I might hear some faint echo—
I listen to scrapings and breath.
Is it Abbas asleep in his room,
Or the wallowing mouth of the sea?
67
When was the moment?
The placement of chairs,
The duration of glances,
The scents in the air?
The tinkling of glass I remember, the wine
And the chattering, people in motion,
A flute solo, tattooed guitarist, autumnal
Breeze from the window, the winding
Of tendrils of plants in the sill.
Foods of a taste strange to my tongue,
Pâtés and brie,
That, I remember. But when was the moment?
The people in motion—there, at the window,
I saw her. Was that when it happened?
Or later that night, on the shore,
When all one could see were the dark silhouettes
And the boats tied with rope to the pier?
Or weeks later, when I only imagined
I saw her, imagined the shape of her lips?
Or perhaps it did not happen at once,
But instead slowly—parts of me stolen
Piece after piece, until I did not know my right hand.
I was ravaged invisibly,
Seized without speaking a word, wanting it.
And the demon who lived in the water,
My other self, grinned the most horrible grin.
68
Demon? My long-missing wife?
Have I dozed at my desk?
Afternoon swoons in the heat, waking and sleeping,
My neck moist and sticky with sweat—
What is the hour?
These deserts and shambling old orchards,
These orange groves and goats,
Villa, this room and this desk, splintered chair,
Smell of my own fingers that lift up this pen—
Here. By some miracle, I have awakened.
Today. Why, I don’t know.
69
Cosmos of formlessness, tell me a tale.
Tell me a story that might have been true—
What if I’d stayed in that country
Across the sea? Waited each morning
For shouts in the streets, knocking on doors,
Clinking of bottles and cracked glass,
Always the need to wear strangling shoes,
Wedged in a house without gardens,
Cold river, my blessed two children and wife?
Could it have been?
Let me hear stories
Repeated by voice through the ages
And changed with each telling, like wrinkles
Of water in wind, like light cast away
From a bowl of brown dates.
Some are my story.
Tell me the words that have never been stilled
By internment in books, the rebirthings,
The stories with endings unknown by the teller,
The whisperings of Bedouins who camp
In the night, and the howlings of sailors
In ships on the sea, and the voices of lovers
Who meet in the darkness
To name without names.
I give up the quiet.
I give up the constancy.
Here are my ribbons of skin and my pieces
Of heart. Here are my chunks of a brain.
Retell my life.
70
Years before, when it started,
I was on fire—
Breathing pitched
Belly contorted in anxious folds
Wanting and gimpy thighs
Pleasure and pain, and I screamed
For the burning to finish, but I did not wish it
To end. I would drink that sweet fire
And watch my destruction and flame.
Was that the desire that doomed me?
Or was it my fear?
I still burn
While the sound of her voice echoes
In vast burning canyons, her fingers draw circles
On burning skin, nipples set fire
To my chest. That was the moment,
I could not extinguish the fire, I could not remember
My journey across the sea,
But only that instant
When I was ablaze
With a sun in my body,
A perishing star
In this perishing universe.
71
All who have travelled this perishing life,
Let us gather and wait for our healing.
But time is no healer,
And time too will die in the vanishing stars.
Great Rembrandt, the master of light and of shadow,
Of tortuous path, ambiguity,
Come paint our faces,
The dazed lakes of eyes wishing for some
Other life, jowls full with unfinished living,
And brows soft with unceasing hope—
Come paint our faces, the cradles
Of sun through white shutters,
The graveyards of dark afternoons,
Stirrings of tea in a lifetime of mornings,
The touch of the lips kissing skin—
Yes we remember—
The plantings of seed pods that may never bloom,
Visits of uncles, the births of our children:
We’ve witnessed it all, without knowing why.
Come paint our faces,
The lights and the shadows,
The ends and beginnings,
All lost in the sea of uncertainties.
72
Here is the globe on my shoulders,
The folded gray clog of a brain
Whispering incessantly, needless of lips,
Multiple voices and dissonant,
Parsing the world into thousands of choices:
To say these few words or some others,
To steal what is waiting or not,
Give or withhold,
Action inaction,
Betrayal or loyalty,
Kneel or stay standing,
Live or decide not to live—
Bodiless voices, each states its case
In the bodiless court in the room of my mind.
In the wood-paneled chamber,
The waist-high bar with the smell of tung oil,
The invisible barristers each claim to be me.
“Do this,” says a voice, and “Do that,” says another.
But I did not ask
For this splintering of selves.
I want only to sit at my desk
Looking out at the white spew of sea,
Musing on what could have been.
My head will explode, flinging
Those people to prattle the parts of me,
Clashing with full ladled screams.
Here is the globe on my shoulders,
The folded gray clog of a brain—
I will pretend I am one, only one.
I am the one who once gathered the glass,
I am the one who took girls to the sea,
I am the one who could not sleep in the night,
I am the one who lost life to life.
Outside the room of my mind
Someone speaks to me—I will speak back,
While unseen in the chamber,
The barristers quarrel and snicker
At this grand façade.
What—have I uttered a word?
I’d expected to babble in disjointed sentences,
Stepping first left and then right.
There is no end to it, this multiplicity,
Life in this throng of myself,
Self an illusion, this oneness illusion.
I thirst and a thousand of me open our mouths.
73
Dryness, this heat,
I am soaked with my sweat,
Napping and dazed—
I hear voices outside of my window,
A gang of men dragging large sacks,
White tunics limp in the sun—
Traders of coffee, their teeth brown
From sucking on beans.
One man I know,
Thick-fleshed, perspiring.
I call to him, mentioning meals that we shared—
But he stares at me cow-like,
He does not remember,
Says I am confused.
Says that he’s traveled to Laos, to India,
China, New Zealand, Azores, has labored
As merchant and carpenter, sailor, spice grinder—
His hands tawny from cinnamon.
“One place, another,” he says. “None of it matters,
It all ends the same.”
74
Day drips to night
Becomes day again night,
Hours slowly pass without sound—
As I sleep in my bed scented with cardamom,
The night dancer spins in my room—
Or was she there always, that dark in the darkness?
Have I now found her,
The whispering voice of the doors?
And she moves to the rhythms of drums,
Slippered toes touching the floor,
Sounding like sails ruffling in wind.
Night dancer,
Let me show you the book of my life.
Please.
Here are the beards of my
Grandfathers, letters exchanged
By my parents, the moment of sun
In the groves—yes, I remember—
The songs and the schooling, the small
Dimpled pot, sorrel rug stitched in the corners,
The lists of my vanities,
Youth drunk with restlessness,
Poetry, typescripts, inventions,
Reports and bank statements, notes
From the dealers, the names of my lovers,
My French wife with blue eyes, children,
The land that despised me, my otherness,
Cruel looks in the street,
Longing for orange groves and sand—
Then my escape, flagrant abandonment,
Shame. It’s all here, I can certify.
Can you make dance from it?
Let me help. Tear out the bank statements,
Diary of lovers, reports from the schools,
Graphs and equations—surely none lyrical.
Compress the rest small as a grace note,
Lighter than breath. See how it floats.
There, it has slipped
Through the window, so weightless,
Like me, mingling with millions of particles,
Lost in the ocean of air.
Did it make one arabesque?
75
Night of my dancing, night dancer,
Did you read of my sins?
Tell me, why is there sin?
And she flutters in dark soubresauts.
“Each thing exists with its opposite,”
She sings, singing Lao-Tzu.
“Pain lives with pleasure,
And illness with health,
Evil with good,
Force with the absence of force,
Motion with stillness,
And being with nonbeing.”
I dream in my cardamom bed,
Dream while the night dancer
Turns in the room, moving and still,
Time and nontime,
Awake and asleep.
76
I wake in the night—Abbas snoring,
The tick of the clock in the hallway,
A tinkle of distant bells—
There, out the window, the bubble
And oil of the moon, dripping on steps
To the terrace, on split bark and leaf,
Moon on my boat beached on the shore,
Whitened against the black sea.
What do I want in this still hour?
Should I put on my sandals and walk in the dunes?
Should I read, should I eat,
Spangled and slammed and confused?
So much is hidden,
And all doomed to waste away.
Hour by hour the taut wire slackens,
The sharp pull of memory, air and regret.
Something takes hold,
Grinning that terrible grin.
What will become of my flesh
When I’ve passed on to nothingness?
Atoms, my atoms, still bound
By the forces of physics
But free from their duties to life—
Where will they travel? Forgotten,
The sight of an island in haze, the explosion
Of starlings from trees, squeak of a door,
Darkness and light,
The procession of seasons—
Forgotten and lost from the bits of me,
Scattered in soil and in wind,
To sleep in its white sleeping petals.
Some washed to sea, swallowed by fluke
And blue marlin, some tossed in the air,
Inhaled and exhaled for centuries. Strangers
Unborn will then breathe in my atoms,
All of them there—
Lavoisier can count.
Where is the moment I wept for my mother?
Last sight of my children? The memory
Of poems and geometry?
Atom by atom still there, but not there.
77
Minnah—
I still have this ribbon
You wore in your hair.
Do you have children?
And passion, and sorrow?
I’d cut off my hand
For a glimpse of you.
Can you forgive?
Did your mother not tell you
I asked that you all come with me?
I wish you had known of my agony,
Caught in the vise of two deaths.
Hassan—
You were so small,
Brown-eyed and quick as a fox,
Laugh like your mother.
Can you remember me, anything,
Walks by the river, my voice?
78
One hundred mouths chew at me,
Saw through my bristle and skin,
Swallow and dribble blood,
Gnaw down to white bone—
Still, I will not be clean.
How can I kneel to God,
Blackened and fouled? Faithless,
For God has forsaken me,
Sanctioned it all,
&
nbsp; Knowing the words spoken,
The movement of feet, fire and death.
I could throw my whole length
Across his fierce mouth,
And he would not utter a word,
Not ever save me from this flaming world.
Where is his power? It fades
Like my daughter’s dull ribbon,
Outshone by my sin.
79
Perhaps there is more than the one,
Multiple Gods.
Do they vie for each choice
By my unwitting brain, each sliver
Of light of auroras?
Or do they remain in their separate domains,
Each taking his own feeble steps?
Or is there no God in the multiple worlds?
No mind that says: “This is the way it will be.
Here are the continents, here is what moves.”
Without God, I would watch as the moon bends
Through night, slaving to gravity. I would say only:
“Now I am here at this moment.
My life is my own.”
God of all Gods or none?
Something or nothing?
Mind or a mindlessness?
Speak, I will hear you, I’m waiting,
I give you the knife,
Give you my flesh.
Open me,
Show me one vein
In this vanishing world.
80
Can I remember?
The glances, the wind, angles of walls?
There, in the mirror, I see
Marks that were not there before,
Minuscule shiftings, indentions,
The skin of new crevices,
Baldness and moles,
Eyes with their alien stare.
Down to my mind—
How can I know who it is?
Moment by moment, I feel something shift,
Mind that re-minds after each spoken word,
Each action taken,
Recrossing filaments, neurons,
New pathways joined, old bridges broken—
Brain of perpetual nowness.
I want back my mind.
But I ask: Who is it wanting?
Who was it slept in this body last night,
Stood on the terrace as windy sand
Pelted the white stucco walls?
There, I can see my new face in the mirror.
I raise up my hand,
And a hand rises up at my side.
81