Be like love – a storm among trees
Don’t stand on the threshold like a beggar or tax collector
Don’t be an undercover policeman directing traffic
Be strong like shining steel and take off the fox’s mask
Be chivalrous glamorous fatal
Say what you want to say:
I come from one meaning and go to another
Life is liquid
and I thicken it and define it
with my pair of scales and sceptre
Death wait
take a seat
drink a glass of wine
and don’t bargain with me
Someone like you doesn’t bargain with anyone
and someone like me doesn’t argue with the herald of the invisible
Take it easy – perhaps you’re worn out by star wars
Who am I that you should visit me?
Have you time to check out my poem?
No that’s not your concern
your concern is with the clay of man’s being
not with what he does or says
You’re defeated Death by the arts by each one of them
You’re defeated by the songs of the land of two rivers
By the Egyptian obelisk by the tomb of the Pharaohs
In the temples there are bas-reliefs who defeated you
And eternity escaped through your cracks
So carry on with yourself
and with us
as you see fit
And I want
I want to live
I have work to do on the geography of volcanoes
From desolation to ruin
from the time of Lott to Hiroshima
As if I’d never yet lived
with a lust I’ve still to know
Perhaps Now has gone further away
and yesterday come closer
So I take Now’s hand to walk along the hem of history
and avoid cyclic time
with its chaos of mountain goats
How can my tomorrow be saved?
By the velocity of electronic time
or by my desert caravan slowness?
I have work til my end
as if I won’t see tomorrow
and I have work for today who isn’t here
So I listen
softly softly
to the ant beat of my heart. Bear with me my patience
I hear the cry of the imprisoned stone: let me go
In a violin I see yearning’s migration between peat and sky
And in my feminine hand
I hold tight my familiar eternity:
I was created then loved then died then awoke on the grass of my tombstone
whose letters from time to time refer to me
What’s the use of Spring if it doesn’t please the dead
and show them the joy of life and the shock of forgetfulness?
That’s the clue to my poems
at least the sentimental ones
And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?
Take your time Death
Take a seat on the crystal of my days
as if you’ve always been a constant friend
as if you were the foreigner among living creatures
You are the exile
You haven’t a life
Your life is only my death
You neither live nor die
You kidnap children between their thirst for milk and milk
You’ll never be a child in a cradle rocked by finches
never will angels and stags tease you with their horns
as they teased us
we guests of the butterfly
You are the miserable exile
with no woman pressing you to her breasts
no woman to make during the long night
nostalgia Two
in the language of desire
and to make into One
the land and heaven which is in us
No boy of yours to say: Father I love you
You are the exile
You king of kings
There’s no praise for your sceptre
no falcon waiting on your horse
no pearls embedded in your crown
You are stripped of flags and music
How can you go around like a cowardly thief without guards or singers?
Who do you think you are?
You’re the Great Highness of Death
Mighty leader of the invincible Assyrians
and yourself
as you see fit
And I want I want to live to forget you
and dismiss our long affair as nothing
So I can read the letters written by the faraway sky
Each time I readied myself you failed to show up
Each time I said Wait! so I may finish the last lap of two bodies becoming one
You said mockingly: Don’t forget we have an appointment
When is it?
Is it at oblivion’s summit
Where the world gives up and bows down to the temple’s wood and the animals painted in caves?
Saying: I’m nothing but what I leave behind
and my only son
Where is our appointment?
Permit me to select a café by the door of the sea?
No
Don’t come to God’s shore, you son of sinners, son of Adam
you were born to labour not question
Be amicable yes you Death amicable
become abstract so I can grasp the essence of your unfindable wisdom!
Perhaps you taught Cain to throw too soon?
Perhaps you should have taught Job more patience?
Perhaps you saddled your horse Death to take me on my horse?
As if when I confront forgetfulness my language saves me
As if I’m eternally present eternally flying
As if since knowing you my drugged tongue has become addicted to your white chariot
higher than the clouds of sleep
higher than when the senses are freed from the burden of matter
Yet you and I on the road to God are like two Sufis following a vision
both of us blind
Retreat under protection and by yourself Death
For I am free in this here of neither here nor there
retreat to your lonely exile
Fetch your hunting gear
and wait for me by the door of the sea
Prepare some red wine for my return to the clinic in the land of the sick
Don’t be crude O sledgehammer of hearts!
I didn’t come to mock you nor to walk on water in the soul’s north
But still
you led me astray
and I neglected the end of my poem:
I didn’t carry my mother on my mare to marry my father
I left the door ajar for an Andalusia of songs
and sat myself on a fence of almonds and pomegranates
brushing out cobwebs from my grandfathers’ grandfathers’ clothes
whilst foreign armies pass by along the ancient road
punctuating time with the same ancient war machine
Death is this history your twin or your ravine opposite?
The dove builds her nest in an iron helmet
And wormwood may sprout from the wheels of a destroyed chariot
What does History your twin or opposite do to nature when earth meets heaven and the holy rain rains?
Death
wait for me
at the door to the sea in the café of romantics
Don’t come back until your arrow misses one last time
Like this I can say farewell to my inside from my outside
Like this I can proffer my wheat-filled soul to blackbirds perched on my hand and shoulder
Like this I can say goodbye to the land that drinks my salt and sows me
as pasture for the horses and gazelles
Wait whilst I finish my short visit to time and place
Don’t argue about whether or not I’m coming back
I’m going to thank life
while neither living nor dead
Death the supreme one you’re the orphan!
My nurse tells me: you were shivering violently and screaming: O heart!
O heart take me to the toilet …
What’s the use of my soul if my body’s sick and can’t evacuate?
O Heart Heart bring back my footsteps so I can go to the toilet alone!
I’ve forgotten my arms legs two knees
and how gravity works with an apple
and how the heart functions
I’ve forgotten Eve’s garden at the entry to eternity
I’ve forgotten the use of my small organs
I’ve forgotten how to breathe with my lungs
I’ve forgotten speech
I’m scared for my language
Leave the rest and just bring back my language!
My nurse says: you were shivering violently and screaming:
I don’t want to return to anyone
I don’t want to return to any land
After this long absence
I want only to return to my language deep in the cooing of a dove
My nurse says you kept shivering and asking me:
Is death what you’re doing with me right now?
Or is this how language dies?
Green the land of my poem is green and high
Slowly I tell it slowly with the grace of a seagull riding the waves on the book of water
I bequeath it written down to the one who asks: to whom shall we sing when salt poisons the dew?
Green I write it on prose of wheat in the book of fields
stalks bending with our weight
Whenever I befriended or became a brother to an ear of wheat
annihilation and its opposite taught me survival
I am the grain that died and became green again
there is something of life in death
I suppose I am I suppose I’m not
No one died instead of me
Thanks apart what words do the dead remember:
God have mercy on our souls
I enjoy recalling verses I’ve forgotten
I didn’t engender a son to bear the burden of his father’s death
I prefer the open marriage of words
the feminine stumbling on the masculine
in the ebb of poetry towards prose
A sycamore will take my limbs as branches
and my heart will pour its muddy water into a planet
Who will I be in death after myself?
Who was I in death before myself?
A spectre proclaimed
Osiris was like us
and the son of Mary was like you
and like me
an agony convulses a dying nothingness
promising that death is temporary
a trick …
Frome where does poetry come?
From the heart’s intelligence
from a hunch about the unknown
or from a rose in the desert?
The personal is not personal
and the universal not universal
I suppose I am I suppose I’m not
The more I listen to my heart the more I’m filled with the words of the unseen
and lifted high to the treetops
I fly aimless from dream to dream
Belonging to a thousand years of poetry
born in the darkness of white linen
I don’t know who amongst us was I
and who the dream
Am I my dream?
I suppose I am I suppose I’m not
My language doesn’t lose its ruminant lilt til it migrates north
Our dogs quietened
our goats in the hills lost in mist
a stray arrow lodges in the face of certitude
my language on horseback wearies me quibbling about what the past makes of the days of Imru al Qays
who was caught between poetry and Caesar
Each time I turn my face to the gods
there in the land of lavender
I’m lit by Anat’s round moon
Anat the mistress so the story goes of metaphor
She mourns no one
but weeps for her own attractions:
Is this magic my own
or is it offered me by the poet
who shared the emptiness of my bed of glory?
and plucked abundant flowers
from the thicket of my playfulness
Or by that poet who coaxed night’s milk in my breast?
I’m the beginning
I’m the ending
And my limits outdo my limits
And my harts run after me in words
nothing before and nothing after
I won’t dream of repairing
the axle of the wind’s chariot
or of healing the wounds of the soul
Myths are traps along the course of the real
and in the poem there’s no room to alter the passing of the past that won’t pass
or to stop the earthquake
I will dream in the hope that countries expand to make room for me as I am
an orphan cut off from the people of this sea
Stop asking me hard questions
Who am I you ask
am I my mother’s son?
I don’t doubt much
I can do without shepherds and kings
My today like my tomorrow is with me
I have with me a small notebook
and each time a cloud grazes a bird I write: a dream has freed my wings
and I am flying too
Everything that is alive flies
And I am me
nothing more
I’m one of the people of this plain
When the feast-day for barley arrives
I’ll visit my magnificent remains
they’re a tattoo
the winds can’t preserve or scatter
And when the feast day for vineyards arrives
Drink for me a glass of wine from a peddler
My soul is light
My body heavy with memory and places
In spring I’ll become a tourist’s impressions scrawled on a postcard:
On the left of the deserted stage a lily and a walking shadow
on the right a modern city
And I am me
nothing more
I’m not a Roman legion guarding the salt roads
I pay a toll for the salt in my bread
and I say to history:
Decorate your lorries with lowly slaves and lowly kings
and you will pass …
No one henceforth will say No
And I am me
nothing more
I belong to the people of this night
and I dream on my horse going up and up
following the river to its source behind the mountain
Listen Horse be sure-footed
for in the wind we can’t be told apart
You are my youth and I’m your shadow
Stand firm like Aleph and strike lightening
Search with your hoof for the pulsating desire there in the echo
Stand tall like Aleph
Hold firm and be erect as Aleph
Don’t fall on the last foothill like an abandoned ensign in the alphabet
In the wind we can’t be told apart
You are my cover I’m your metaphor
To hell with tame processions
Faster Horse!
Pull my past into a place that is mine
for place is the path and there’s no path save you
shod as you are with the winds
Make sparks in the mirage!
Show me clouds in the
nothingness
be guide and brother to my light
Don’t die before me or after me on the last foothill
Don’t die with me
Warn me of the ambulance
and the dead
I may – who knows – still be alive
I will dream
Not to change the apparent result
but to rescue myself from the dry penury of my soul
I remember by heart all my heart
who is no longer a fretful child
one aspirin calms and mollifies him
my neighbouring heart has become a stranger
and I’m no longer at the beck of his wishes
or of his women
The heart rusts like iron
It no longer takes
no longer gives
no longer feels the first rain of desire
no more laments like the dry August grass
my heart is turned into a hermit
similes no longer speak
When the heart dries up
aesthetics become geometric
feelings wear cloaks
and virginity becomes cunning
Each time I turned to face the first songs
there were tracks of a sand grouse on the words
I wasn’t the child who happily said: yesterday was better
But memory’s two light hands can rock and make the earth tremble
and in an exile’s veins memory can carry the weeping scent of night flowers
which make him declare:
Be my grief’s ascent then I’ll find my time …
Then all I’ll need
to follow the ancient ships
will be one beat of a seagull’s wing
How long ago did we discover Time and Death
the synonymous twins of life?
Maybe we’re still alive because death forgot us?
We with our gift of memory are free
to walk the green walk of Gilgamesh
from age to age
Being is a perfect speck of dust …
Absence shatters me as if I were a small jug of water
Enkidu went to sleep and didn’t wake up
And my wings slept swaddled in a handful of their own clay feathers
The gods are wind turned to stone
My left arm a wooden stick
My heart is abandoned like a dry well
and the savage echo shouts: Enkidu!
My imagination will give out before I finish the journey
I don’t have the energy to make my dream real
Give me my weapons so I can polish them with the salt of tears
Give me tears Enkidu
So the dead in us may weep for the living
And me?
Who has gone to sleep now Enkidu?
Is it me or you?
Our Gods are a fistful of wind
So wake me with all the fickleness of your humanity
And let’s dream that in some slight way the gods and us are equal
We who restore the beautiful land between the Tigris and Euphrates and cherish its names