The first major career-spanning collection of the

poems ofAdonis, widely acknowledged as the

most important poet working in Arabic today

Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis is one of the

most celebrated poets of the Arabic-speaking
world. His poems have earned international
acclaim, and his influence on Arabic litera­
ture has been likened to that ofT. S. Eliot's
on English-language verse. This volume
serves as the first comprehensive survey of
Adonis's work, allowing English-readers to
admire the arc of a remarkable literary career
through the labors of the poet's own hand­
picked translator, Khaled Mattawa.
Experimental in form and prophetic in
tone, Adonis's poetry sings exultantly of both
the sweet promise of eros and the lingering
problems of the self. Steeped in the anguish
of exile and the uncertainty of existence,
Adonis demonstrates the poet's profound af­
fection for Arabic and European lyrical tra­
ditions even as his poems work to destabilize
those very aesthetic and moral sensibilities.
This collection positions the work of Adonis
within the pantheon of the great poets of
exile, including Cesar Vallejo, Joseph Brod­
sky, and Paul Celan, providing for English­
readers the most complete vision yet of the
work of the man whom the cultural critic
Edward Said called "today's most daring and
provocative Arab poet:'
On the cover: Poem and collage by Adonis, trans­
lated by Bassam Frangieh

Tomorrow when my country sings

With love flowing from me,
I erase the blackness with my face
And become a nation for every nation
So no darkness remains in our land
And no evil remains
Thus, say, I am free
And say, you are free.

ADONIS (born Ali Ahmad Said Esber) is a

Syrian poet and essayist who led the mod­
ernist movement in Arabic poetry in the
second half of the twentieth century. He has
written more than fifty books of poetry, criti­
cism, and translation in his native Arabic,
including the pioneering work An Introduc­
tion to Arab Poetics. Adonis received the
Bj0rnson Prize in 2007. Other awards and
honors include the first International Nazim
Hikmet Poetry Award, the Syria-Lebanon
Best Poet Award, and the highest award of
the International Poem Biennial in Brussels.
He was elected a member of the Stephane
Mallarme Academy in 1983.

KHALED MATTAWA is associate professor

of English language and literature at the Uni­
versity of Michigan. He is the author of four
books of poetry, most recently Tocqueville
(2010), and is the recipient of the 2010 Acad­
emy of American Poets Fellows Prize and the
PEN award for literary translation.

A MARGELLOS WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS BOOK

For more information, visit yalebooks.com/margellos

Printed in the U.S.A.

Adonis
 Adonis
Selected Poems
TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC BY

KHALED MATTAWA

F NEW HAVEN & LONDON

A M A RG E L LO S
WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS BOOK
Frontispiece: Poem and calligraphy by Adonis. Set in Electra type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Translated by Bassam Frangieh. Printed in the United States of America.

Live and be radiant Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Create a poem Adunis, 1930–
and go away. [Poems. English. Selections]
Increase Adonis : selected poems / translated from the Arabic by
The expanse of the earth. Khaled Mattawa.
p. cm. — (A Margellos world republic of letters book)
The Margellos World Republic of Letters ‘‘Frontispiece: Poem and calligraphy by Adonis.
is dedicated to making literary works from Translated by Bassam Frangieh’’—T.p. verso.
around the globe available in English Includes bibliographical references.
through translation. It brings to the English- isbn 978-0-300-15306-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
speaking world the work of leading poets, I. Mattawa, Khaled. II. Title.
novelists, essayists, philosophers, and play- pj7862.a519a26 2010
wrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, 892.7%16—dc22
Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate inter-
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
national discourse and creative exchange.
British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Copyright ∫ 2010 by Yale University. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in
part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of
the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for
the public press), without written permission from
the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in

quantity for educational, business, or promotional
use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@
yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K.
office).
CONTENTS

Introduction ix The End of the Sky 29

A Note on the Translation xxiii He Carries in His Eyes 30
Acknowledgments xxvii Voice 31
The Wound 32
First Poems (1957) Spell 35
Love 3 The Fall 36
Secrets 4 Dialogue 37
Elegies (for my Father) 5 Seven Days 38
They Say I’m Done For 6 A Vision 39
Home 8 What to Leave Behind 40
The Banished 9 A Bridge of Tears 41
Rains 11 I Told You 42
A Coat 12 It Should Suffice 43
To a Soothsayer 13 Lightning 44
Labor Pains 15 My Shadow and the Earth’s 45
Obscure Distances 16 Thunderbolt 46
Longing 17 A Blood Offering 47
A Priestess 18 Scene 48
Song 19 Dialogue 49
Psalm 50
Songs of Mihyar of Damascus (1961) Spell 53
Psalm 23 Farewell 54
Not a Star 24 The Flood 55
King Mihyar 25 Adam 56
His Voice 26
An Invitation to Death 27
New Covenant 28
vi Contents

Migrations and Transformations in The Martyr 98

the Regions of Night and Day (1965) A Mirror for Beirut 99
Flower of Alchemy 59 A Mirror for the Lover’s Body 101
Tree of the East 60 A Mirror for the Hussein Mosque 102
Tree of Winding Curves 61 West and East 103
Tree of Fire 62
Morning Tree 63 A Time Between Ashes and Roses
Tree of Melancholy 65 (1971)
Season of Tears 66 This Is My Name 107
Tree 72
Tree 73 Singular in a Plural Form (1975)
Tree 74 Body 125
Tree 75
Tree 76 The Book of Similarities and
Tree 77 Beginnings (1980)
Tree 78 Search 175
The Poets 176
Stage and Mirrors (1968) The Experiment 177
A Woman and a Man 81 Children 178
Man’s Song 82 Prodigal 179
Woman’s Song 83 The Beginning of Doubt 180
The Hungry One 84 The Beginning of Poetry 181
Rage 85 The Beginning of the Book 182
Four Songs for Tamorlane 86 The Beginning of Love 183
A Mirror for a Tyrant 88 The Beginning of the Road 184
Bullet 89 The Beginning of Sex 185
Two Poets 90 The Beginning of the Name 186
A Mirror for a Dream 91 The Beginning of Encounter 187
A Mirror for a Question 92 The Beginning of Sex II 188
A Mirror for the Twentieth Century 93 The Beginning of Wind 189
A Mirror for Clouds 94 The Beginning of Death 190
A Mirror for Khalida 95 The Beginning of Pronunciation 191
 Contents vii

The Beginning of Narration 192 Beginnings of the Body, Ends of

The Beginning of Speech 193 the Sea (2003)
—The rose leaves its flowerbed 329
The Book of Siege (1985) —Your mouth’s light, no redness 330
Desert 197 —In her name 331
Persons 203 —I wake and ask dawn about you: Have you
Candlelight 209 woken? 332
The Child Running Inside Memory 222 —I imagine my love 333
—Our night is quiet 334
Desire Moving Through Maps of —Every day we reach toward our bodies—
Matter (1987) 335
Desire Moving Through Maps of —When we meet wherever out steps take
Matter 229 us in cities 336
The Cradle (excerpt) 250 —Love, give him, another body 337
The Joy Implement (excerpt) 255 —Every day 338
—Moon—how kind the moon is 339
Celebrating Vague-Clear Things —How can I call what is between us a
(1988) past? 340
Celebrating Childhood 259 —‘‘Each love is a misery’’— 341
Celebrating Death 264 —Maybe 342
Celebrating Abu Tammam 267 —I imagine I am the sound of singing 343
Celebrating Al-Ma‘ari 274 —From nothing 344
—I will not sing my song— 345
Another Alphabet (1994) —Ah, no 346
In the Embrace of Another Alphabet 283 —Let’s return 347
—I don’t love you except for that I hated
Prophesy, O Blind One (2003) you once 348
Concerto for the Road to Dante’s —I measured myself to the woman I
Church 297 imagined 349
Concerto for 11th/September/2001 —I will visit the place that was summer for
B.C. 303 us 350
Concerto for the Veiled Christ 315 —Bitter insomnia comes to light its
I Imagine a Poet 322 candles 351
viii Contents

—I check my house at night Printer of the Planets’ Books (2008)

I turn on lights 352 You Are in the Village Then 373
—I began to love that bed covered with our Wakefulness 376
day 353 Rag 377
—Me sleeping? No sleep, only wakefulness Music 378
that pains me 354 Motion 379
—Orpheus—I can swear that I see him— War 380
355 Face 382
—I learn—I insert my eyes among your eyes’ Red 383
alphabet 356 Café Shatila in Rodha 384
—Time is not a bed, the earth is not Ruins 385
sleep 357 The Stars at Hand 386
—Dusk takes time by the throat 358 The Childhood Behind the Door 388
—What did we lose, what was lost in To the Poem 392
us? 359
—I vow that you are the root—I tried to Notes 395
read 360 About the Author 401
—After all this roving that has filled the
world 361
—Life took us to it, tossed us 362
—Every time you say, ‘‘These are my paths
etched on you,’’ languages 363
—A barrier between us— 364
—A room betrayed by sleep No
dream And night is a grave 365
—Will it console you that the clouds come
and go in seconds 366
—Sunset— 367
—Here’s her house— 368
—Have I told you the wound? But (in
between there was a lot 369
—What is he saying? 370
INTRODUCTION

A culturally literate person in the Arab world today would find it difficult to recall
when he or she first heard of Adonis. By the time one is old enough to drop the names of
poets in casual conversation, Adonis is already there among the classical poets ‘Antara,
Imruulqais, Abu Nawwas, and al-Mutannabi, and certainly among the modern pioneers
Ahmad Shawqi, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nizar Qabbai, and Mahmoud Darwish. Later,
while browsing the shelves of contemporary literature, one would find copies of Adonis’s
single volumes of poetry and multi-volume collections occupying sizable space in the
poetry section. Eventually, when studying twentieth-century Arab literature, one would
discover that Adonis is one of the most original voices in Arabic verse and an indispens-
able contributor to Arabic criticism. The young lover of literature will pause at the name.
What sort of name is Adonis? It is the Greek name of Tammuz, a deity worshipped in the
Levant and Mesopotamia prior to the Jews’ arrival in Canaan and whose memory was
celebrated well into the golden age of Islam. Here the enigma behind the poet’s name
and his poetry begins to develop—Adonis turns out to be more deeply rooted in the
history of the region than its current inhabitants realize.
Born to a modest Alawite farming family in January 1930, Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said
Esber) hails from the village of Qassabin near the city of Latakia in western Syria. He was
unable to afford formal schooling for most of his childhood, and his early education
consisted of learning the Quran in the local kuttab (mosque-affiliated school) and mem-
orizing classical Arabic poetry, to which his father had introduced him. In 1944, despite
the animosity of the village chief and his father’s reluctance, the young poet managed to
recite one of his poems before Shukri al-Quwatli, the president of the newly established
Republic of Syria, who was on a visit to Qassabin. After admiring the boy’s verses, al-
Quwatli asked him if there were anything he needed help with. ‘‘I want to go to school,’’
responded the young poet, and his wish was soon fulfilled in the form of a scholarship to
the French lycée at Tartus, from which he graduated in 1950. He was a good student, and
he managed to secure a government scholarship to Damascus University, from which he
x Introduction

graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1954. (He would earn a doctoral degree in
Arabic literature in 1973 from St. Joseph University in Beirut.)
While serving in the military in 1955–56, Adonis was imprisoned for his membership
in the Syrian National Socialist Party. Led by the learned and sophisticated Antun
Saadah, the snsp had opposed European colonization of Greater Syria and its partition
into smaller nations. The party advocated a secular, national (not strictly Arab) approach
toward transforming Greater Syria into a progressive society governed by consensus and
providing equal rights to all, regardless of ethnicity or sect. These ideals, along with the
willingness of snsp’s members to confront authority, had impressed the poet while he
was still in high school. After being released from prison in 1956, Adonis and his bride,
the critic Khalida Said, settled in Beirut and quickly became Lebanese nationals.
There Adonis joined ranks with Yusuf al-Khal in editing Shi‘r (Poetry) magazine, an
innovative Arabic literary journal that was published for ten years and was arguably the
most influential Arab literary journal ever. Al-Khal had invited the poet to join him at
Shi‘r after reading one of Adonis’s poems while living in New York. In 1960, as Adonis
prepared to move to Paris to study on a one-year scholarship, he resigned from the snsp,
convinced that he was not party material. He has not joined a political party since. In
Paris he began to translate French poetry and drama, especially the works of Saint-John
Perse and Georges Schehade. When he returned to Beirut he resumed his pioneering
work with Shi‘r. From 1970 to 1985 he taught Arabic literature at the Lebanese Univer-
sity; he also has taught at the University of Damascus, the Sorbonne (Paris III), and, in
the United States, at Georgetown and Princeton universities. In 1985 he moved with his
wife and two daughters to Paris, which has remained their primary residence.
Adonis’s publications include twenty volumes of poetry and thirteen of criticism. His
dozen books of translation to Arabic include the poetry of Perse and Yves Bonnefoy, and
the first complete Arabic translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2002). His multi-volume
anthology of Arabic poetry (Diwan al-shi‘r al-‘arabi), covering almost two millennia of
verse, has been in print since its publication in 1964. He has edited several volumes of the
works of the most influential writers of Arab modernity, from Yusuf al-Khal to Muham-
mad Abdulwahab. Adonis’s awards include the International Poetry Forum Award (Pitts-
burgh, 1971), National Poetry Prize (Lebanon, 1974), Grand Prix des Biennales Interna-
tionales de la Poésie (Belgium, 1986), Prix de Poésie Jean Malrieu Étranger (France,
 Introduction xi

1991), Prix de la Méditerranée (France, 1994), Nazim Hikmet Prize (Turkey, 1994),
Lerici-Pea Prize (Italy, 2000), Oweiss Cultural Prize (uae, 2004), and the Bjørnson Prize
(Norway, 2007). In 1997 the French government named him Commandeur de l’Ordre
des Arts et des Lettres.

Adonis’s literary education, guided by his father, was steeped in ancient Arab litera-
ture, especially the poetry of the Sufis, whose verses inflamed his imagination with its
mystery and explorations of the inner life. Adonis’s most noted early efforts had come
while he was also under the influence of poets such as Gibran Kahlil Gibran, Ilyas Abu
Shabaka, Sa‘id ‘Aql, and Salah Labaki, all poets who broke from traditional Arabic poetry
in tone, subject matter, and prosody. Responding to post-independence disillusionment,
the loss of Palestine, or the Nakba of 1948, and the slow rate of social and political
progress, Adonis’s early poetry attempted to voice his political and social beliefs and to
contribute to efforts aimed at pushing Arab culture into modernity. Even at that early age
Adonis was merging the classical tradition with the new poetic modes.
By the time he was released from prison and exiled to Lebanon in 1956, the name
Adonis—which the poet had adopted during his late teens in response to newspaper
editors who rejected his work—had become familiar to readers in Damascus. Later in
Beirut, while at Shi‘r, Adonis wrote many of the magazine’s well-articulated and ener-
getic editorials, and he played an important role in the evolution of free verse in Arabic.
Adonis and al-Khal asserted that modern verse needed to go beyond the experimenta-
tion of al-shi‘r al-hadith (modern, or free, verse), which had appeared nearly two decades
earlier. The Shi‘r school advocated a poetry that did away with traditional expressions of
sentiment and abandoned metrical or formal restrictions. It advocated a renewal of
language through a greater acceptance of contemporary spoken Arabic, seeing it as a way
to free Arabic poetry from its attachment to classical diction and the archaic subject
matter that such language seemed to dictate.
Also responding to a growing mandate that poetry and literature be committed to the
immediate political needs of the Arab nation and the masses, Adonis and Shi‘r energet-
ically opposed the recruitment of poets and writers into propagandistic efforts. In reject-
ing Adab al-iltizam (politically committed literature), Adonis was opposing the suppres-
sion of the individual’s imagination and voice for the needs of the group. Poetry, he
xii Introduction

argued, must remain a realm in which language and ideas are examined, reshaped, and
refined, in which the poet refuses to descend to the level of daily expediencies. Emerging
as one of the most eloquent practitioners and defenders of this approach, Adonis wrote
that the poet is a ‘‘metaphysical being who penetrates to the depths’’ and, in so doing,
‘‘keeps solidarity with others.’’ Poetry’s function is to convey eternal human anxieties. It is
the exploration of an individual’s metaphysical sensitivity, not a collective political or
socially oriented vision.
After leaving Shi‘r in 1967, and as he prepared to launch Mawaqif, a new literary
journal, Adonis continued to develop his critique of Arabic poetry and culture. In his
1973 two-volume analysis of Arabic literature, Al-Thabit wa al-mutahawil (The fixed and
the changing), Adonis theorizes that two main streams have operated within Arabic
poetry, a conservative one and an innovative one. The history of Arabic poetry, he ar-
gues, has been that of the conservative vision of literature and society (al-thabit), quell-
ing poetic experimentation and philosophical and religious ideas (al-mutahawil). Al-
thabit, or static current, manifests itself in the triumph of naql (conveyance) over ‘aql
(original, independent thought); in the attempt to make literature a servant of religion;
and in the reverence accorded to the past whereby language and poetics were essentially
Quranic in their source and therefore not subject to change.
The dynamic, mutahawil, current has historically supported rational interpretation
of religious texts, emphasizing the connotative over the literal (here Adonis cites the
Mu‘tazala, Batini, and Sufi religious movements as the persecuted champions of this
approach). The literature of the mutahawil current had repeatedly emphasized poetry’s
esthetic and conceptual impact rather than its moralizing functions, where reliance on
fidelity to life and experience as perceived by the individual, rather than on conformity to
social standards, is the source of poetic creation.
The shift from naql to ‘aql meant that poetry now would be aimed at ‘‘embarking
upon the unknown, not upon the known.’’ Furthermore, Adonis wrote, ‘‘the poet does
not transmit in his poetry clear or ready-made thoughts as was the case with much of
classical poetry. Instead, he sets his words as traps or nets to catch an unknown world.’’
This kind of open-endedness affects both the poet and the reader. In constructing a
world of new words and images the poet has to structure an artistic unit that satisfies his
 Introduction xiii

sensibility. In essence, the poet begins using the new language and its imagery until he
creates a world he can inhabit.
As for the reader, the ambiguities and indeterminacies in this kind of art (inevitable
because of its newness) lead him or her to actively engage in creating mental perceptions
of similar innovativeness. The lack of clarity forces the reader to rely not on the writer or
the text but solely on his or her mind. For Adonis, who here is as much drawing on the
complex esthetics of Abu Tammam as he is referencing Mallarmé, it is this kind of
interaction with art, supplemented with unlimited creativity in composition and percep-
tion, that Arab culture needs to truly evolve. He argues that a revolution in the arts and in
how they are received can generate imaginative strategies at all levels of society. Arabic
poetry, he believes, has the responsibility of igniting this mental overhaul in Arab cul-
ture. It should not be used to advocate political policies that do not touch the root of Arab
cultural stagnation.
Adonis’s critique of Arab culture did not merely call for the adoption of Western
values, paradigms, and lifestyles per se. Science, which has evolved greatly in Western
societies, with its ‘‘intuitions and practical results,’’ should be acknowledged as the ‘‘most
revolutionary development in the history of mankind,’’ argues Adonis. The truths that
science offers ‘‘are not like those of philosophy or of the arts. They are truths which
everyone must of necessity accept, because they are proven in theory and practice.’’ But
science is guided by dynamics that make it insufficient as an instrument for human
fulfillment and meaning: science’s reliance on transcending the past to achieve greater
progress is not applicable to all facets of human activity. ‘‘What does progress mean in
poetry?’’ asks Adonis. ‘‘Nothing.’’ Progress in the scientific sense pursues the apprehen-
sion of phenomenon, seeking uniformity, predictability, and repeatability. As such, the
idea of progress in science is ‘‘quite separate from artistic achievement.’’ Poetry and the
other arts seek a kind of progress that affirms difference, elation, movement, and variety
in life.
Adonis states that in studying legends and myths, seeking the mystical and the ob-
scure, he found sources that ‘‘reveal truths which are more sublime and which concern
humanity in a more profound way than scientific truths’’ precisely because they engage
areas that escape the grip of science and rationalism. And thus convinced that rigor and
xiv Introduction

depth—in terms of our knowledge of our psyches and our understanding of our human
existence—do not follow the future-oriented outlook of science, Adonis has stressed that
progress and modernity in the arts do not follow the chronological order of scientific
progress, where greater acquisition of material knowledge often results in human actions
or arrangements that contradict humane and progressive thinking. Providing examples
of periods of progressive thinking and esthetics in Arab culture, Adonis argues that the
‘‘essence of progress is human, that is[,] qualitative not quantitative. . . . Progress is not
represented merely by economic and social renewal, but more fundamentally by the
liberation of man himself, and the liberation of the suppressed elements beneath and
beyond the socioeconomic.’’ Adonis understands progress and modernity as neither
linear nor cyclical but episodic, occurring during times when the human mind and
imagination are in a dynamic and harmonious relationship with physical needs and
concerns.
In this regard, modernity has occurred and can occur anywhere, in the past as well as
in the future. Human achievements should not be seen as exclusive to their cultures of
origin, for many are among the global attributes of civilization, developments that we
have naturally adapted from each other throughout our existence on earth. And while
progress emerges from addressing the contradictions and hindrances in a given setting,
all human societies can benefit from others’ experiences and developments. This is
evidenced by our shared instinctive desire to live in physical security and to seek mean-
ingful lives. At one point, Arab civilization was best suited to offer this contribution to the
rest of humanity, and the West gravitated toward it for all sorts of knowledge and science,
just as many Easterners are now gravitating toward the West. Although the products of
progressive thinking and renewal can be shared, the onset of renewal in any given society
can arise only from a response to the contradictions at hand.
Adonis insists that newness in Arab society and subsequently in Arabic poetry, ‘‘how-
ever unequivocal its formal break with the past may appear,’’ must be ‘‘identifiably Arabic
in character. . . . It cannot be understood or evaluated within the context of French or
English modernism, or according to their criteria, but must be seen in the context of
Arab creativity and judged by the standards of artistic innovation particular to Arabic.’’
The poet therefore needs to be grounded in the organic artistic process that is his native
poetry. His expansion of the horizon of human thought and feeling rely in part on the
 Introduction xv

innovations he makes on his medium and his language, where work on their particular
facets is the way to expand knowledge in the broadest sense.
Even while viewing Western conceptual innovations with a sense of entitlement, and
considering them human cultural advancements, Adonis nonetheless has been a consis-
tent critic of Western societies’ and governments’ treatment of the rest of humanity. The
fiercely anti-totalitarian Adonis has repeatedly asserted that Western weaponry, industry,
and capital have dehumanized both Westerners and those subject to their violence and
greed. His critique of the damaging effects of mechanization and the ‘‘mongrelizing’’
force of globalization have become increasingly acerbic in the last two decades, coincid-
ing with his relocation to Paris in 1985.
Adonis’s visits to Arab capitals, where he is often asked to lecture on the state of Arab
culture, have often caused controversies. To young Arab poets who have adopted free
verse, which he has long advocated, he says that their work is only superficially modern,
as its outlook is often trapped in convention. And, causing controversy among wider
cultural spheres, he has regularly declared the end of the Arab culture, and the Arabs
themselves. Noting that little cultural innovation, let alone science or technology, is
being created in the Arab world, Adonis has harangued Arab audiences in public and in
media interviews, accusing them of being mere importers of cultural goods and esthetic
styles. Much of Arab music, classical or popular, either reiterates traditional forms or
parrots Western styles, he says, and the same goes for most drama, cinema, literature, and
visual arts produced in Arab countries. Tinged with a desire to provoke Arab artists and
intellectuals to challenge the increasing entrenchment of their societies, Adonis’s tone of
late never fails to convey a sense of disappointment. He has remained, however, deeply
engaged in the affairs of the region and has lent his support to developments that gave
him a sense of hope. Feisty, contentious, articulate, and alert throughout his sixty years in
public life, Adonis is a well-decorated cultural figure who has refused to rest on his
considerable laurels.

Although he is a seasoned and controversial public intellectual declaiming on the

state of his society and the world at large, Adonis is first and foremost a poet. And as much
as his literary criticism has solidified his role within modern Arabic letters, it is his
startling poetry that continues to endow his ambitious esthetic vision. The first two books
xvi Introduction

he published, First Poems (Qassa’id ula), 1957, and Leaves in the Wind (Awraq fi al-reeh),
1960, presented a well-honed poetic sensibility of great promise, poems in which he
resuscitated the tradition of the qit‘a (poetic fragment). For a long time Arabic poetry has
been identified with the classical qassida, the odelike lyric-epic in which the poet’s
biography frames the poem’s character and reception. Adonis’s early works, represented
here with selections from First Poems, focus on the poem’s voice, directed by related
sentiments or events, and in so doing emphasize the poetry at the expense of the poet. It
should be noted that Adonis, true to his artistic instincts, never quite adhered to the
seemingly programmatic aspects of his vision for Arabic poetry—such as his advocacy of
the use of dialect. His language is of a high literary caliber, his diction richer than that of
any of his avant-garde peers.
With his third book, The Songs of Mihyar of Damascus (Ughniyat Mihyar al-Dimashqi),
1961, Adonis established himself as a unique voice in modern Arabic poetry. Through the
persona of the Mihyar, Adonis articulates a vision of the world empowered by revolution-
ary fervor and mysticism fused with symbolist elements associated with twentieth-century
French poetry. The volume also mingles Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage with Greco-
Roman mythology; Mihyar is identified at times explicitly with various figures, including
Noah and Adam, and Ulysses and Orpheus. Through this persona, states Adonis, ‘‘I
wanted to get out of the direct subjective discourse and speak an impersonal language,
objective-historical and personal, symbolic, and mythic at the same time. So it is more
than a mask; it is a vortex where Arab culture would meet with all its dimensions in the
central and pivotal cause: crossing from the old Arab world into the new.’’ In Adonis’s
words we hear allusions to two cornerstones of Anglo-American modernism: ‘‘Vortex’’ is
what Ezra Pound called any dynamic cultural initiative in which an artist moves in a given
direction but attempts to survey and affect his or her surroundings. We also hear in Adonis’s
description of Mihyar an echo of Eliot’s ‘‘objective correlative,’’ a phrase that encapsulates
Eliot’s understanding of the French symbolist approach to poetic representation.
Adonis’s next volume, Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and
Day (Kitab al-Tahwulat wa al-Hijra fi Aqalim al-Nahar wa al-lail), 1965, reconstructs the
turmoil surrounding the life and legend of Abdulrahman al-Dakhil (731–788 a.d.), the
last heir of the Umayyad dynasty, who fled Damascus as the ‘Abbasids took control of the
 Introduction xvii

caliphate. Al-Dakhil, a figure whose story symbolized youth, betrayal, and people’s
natural sympathy for the persecuted, traveled westward until he reached Andalusia,
where he established an alternate dynastic caliphate and launched one of Islam’s most
celebrated ages. In both Mihyar and Migrations and Transformations, Adonis demon-
strates mastery of epic scope and lyrical precision. Each of the poems in these two
volumes stands on its own while adding a layer to the complex dilemmas facing their
speakers. And while Mihyar is a synthetic figure drawn from the region’s history and al-
Dakhil is based on a specific person, neither of these books renders a narrative as such,
both ably demonstrating Adonis’s stated preference for circling his subject matter. Mih-
yar threads through the existential crises of Arab life in the twentieth century and al-
Dakhil processes the Arab world’s political and cultural crises through the prism of one
of its most tumultuous eras. In both books Adonis finds a balance between poetry’s
sociopolitical role and the demands of the symbolic ‘‘language of absence’’ that poetry
required—as he saw it, a language that allowed poetry to focus on perennial points of
tension and to endure beyond its occasions.
In Mihyar and Migrations we find solitude and imagination emerging as powerful
forces, uniting within the speaker’s mind and lifting him to ecstasy, then separating and
forcing him to pit them against each other in order to reunite them. Imagination,
coupled with solitude, allows the speaker to witness the transformative capacities of
nature, where language is the currency/blood of renewed paradigms. Nature begins to
mimic our habits and wear our features, rooting us where we perpetually feel estranged.
Without imagination—as in the poem ‘‘Adam,’’ as Mihyar recounts the mythical figure’s
dilemma—solitude is liable to erase all knowledge of oneself. Alternately, the capacity to
imagine saves al-Dakhil in his flight from his persecutors, and each encounter with the
natural world erases an old longing, creating space for renewal. Similarly, Mihyar, who
‘‘is not a prophet/not a star,’’ is nonetheless engaged in dismantling idolized paradigms
one by one, replacing them with new discoveries. He embraces the earth by ‘‘crawling
under rubble,’’ trying to loosen her bond to gods and tyrants. Mihyar is a knight trying to
rein in unfamiliar words in ‘‘the rough and magical . . . climate of new alphabets.’’ Using
irregular rhyme and employing the improvisations on traditional metrics that came to
the fore two decades or so before the publication of these books, Adonis here provides
xviii Introduction

musical pleasure without predictability. The subtle musical elements call attention to
the language, keeping the reader engaged, but not so enchanted as to be lulled by the
music.
In the 1970s, Adonis turned his attention to the long-form poem, producing two of the
most original Arabic poetic works of the twentieth century. The first of these volumes,
This Is My Name (Hadha Huwa Ismi), was first published in 1970 with only two long
poems, then reissued two years later with an additional poem, ‘‘A Grave for New York.’’
In the poem ‘‘This Is My Name,’’ Adonis, spurred by the Arabs’ shock and bewilderment
after the Six-Day War, renders a claustrophobic yet seemingly infinite apocalypse. Here
Adonis is hard at work undermining the social discourse that has turned catastrophe into
a firmer bond with dogma and cynical defeatism throughout the Arab world. To mark
this ubiquitous malaise, the poet attempts to find a language that matches it, and he
fashions a vocal arrangement that swerves and beguiles. Thoughts in ‘‘This Is My Name’’
are so fractured, and loyalty and belief in the collective so fragile, that objects attempt to
lure verbs from their subjects to save them from falling into escapist forms of narcissism
or black holes of grief. Truthful in its fluidity, the language Adonis employs remains close
to nerve endings and refuses to entrust itself to established facts. ‘‘I can transform:
Landmine of civilization—This is my name,’’ states one of the poem’s voices—it’s impos-
sible to say that we have a single speaker—declaring that he is a fuse of hope capable of
doing away with all that has come before him.
The second long poem, Singular in a Plural Form (Mufrad bi Sighat al Jama‘), 1975,
is a four-hundred-page work. The same breadth of experimentation, linguistic play, and
deconstructionist esthetics found in ‘‘This Is My Name’’ permeates the dynamics of
erotic union and rupture found in ‘‘Body,’’ one of the work’s four movements. Wavering
between languid serenity and animated joy and disappointment, and between deadpan
sobriety and articulate yearning, the lovers in ‘‘Body’’ explore their union’s every facet.
Doing away with rhyme altogether and opting for syncopated rhythmic patterns and
abrupt syntactical transitions, Adonis offers a revolutionary and anarchic flow reminis-
cent of Sufi poetry and literature. As in the great mystical works that are steeped in
eroticism, such as the poetry of Rumi, al-Hallaj, and St. John of the Cross, Adonis’s
‘‘Body’’ narrates not a story but the ahwal (conditions or states of the heart and soul and
 Introduction xix

the desire to uplift and enhance) of the lovers’ struggle for a touch of bliss to dissipate
their hefty awareness of mortality.
Adonis’s poetry in the 1980s began with a return to the short lyric works exemplified in
The Book of Similarities and Beginnings (Al-Mutabaqat wa al-Awa’il), 1980. Adonis’s
work here still carries the scent of a larger project. He is not, as he was in Stage and
Mirrors (Al-Masrah wa al-Maraya), 1968, holding a convex mirror to current events.
Instead, he returns to the beginnings of things, focusing on stages of life and states of
mind, imagining a time when one might discern a divide between memory and con-
sciousness, biography and philosophy, and even between innocence and experience.
The thrill of these poems is in the crystalline focus that Adonis brings to each subject he
addresses, demonstrating that his lyric touch is as powerful as his epic sweep.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 prompted The Book of Siege (Kitab al-Hissar),
1985. This work brings Adonis closest to what we might call documentation, and perhaps
best demonstrates his oblique approach to narration, in which the lyric of disaster mixes
with the prose of somber meditation. The book includes a variety of stunning pieces.
‘‘Desert’’ and ‘‘Persons’’ move in fast-paced montage, slowed by dramatic scenes reminis-
cent of grainy slow-motion footage with masterful psalm-like passages. The genre-defying
‘‘Candlelight’’ is unique even by Adonis’s standards. And ‘‘The Child Running Inside
Memory’’ is as pure a lyric as he has ever written. The Book of Siege, little known even
among Arab readers, is perhaps one of the best war books ever written in Arabic.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Adonis became, at least in his lyric practice, more of a
poet of place, as Kamal Abu Deeb notes. Accompanied by his poetic guides, Abu
Tammam, al-Mutannabi, Niffari, and Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma‘ari, the poet travels, seeking
zones of openness that parallel the inheritance of progressive and tolerant humanism
that he has long championed. Also at this time Adonis began to coauthor books of
manifestos with younger poets from other parts of the Arab world (from Morocco to
Bahrain) and to collaborate with visual artists and musicians. Exile and the loss of Beirut
were thus being replaced by a greater connection to other arts and artists. Adonis’s
writings in the last two decades demonstrate a deliberate reexploration of the lyric (as
exemplified by numerous love poems) and an abandonment of poetry as a unified genre.
This era, Adonis once declared, is now simply the age of writing.
xx Introduction

In the meantime, Adonis was working on Al-Kitab (The Book), 1995–2003, a three-
volume epic that adds up to almost two thousand pages. In Al-Kitab, the poet travels on
land and through the history and politics of Arab societies, beginning immediately after
the death of the prophet Muhammad and progressing through the ninth century, which
he considers the most significant period of Arab history, an epoch to which he repeatedly
alludes. Al-Kitab provides a large lyric-mural rather than an epic that attempts to render
the political, cultural, and religious complexity of almost fifteen centuries of Arab civili-
zation. The form that Adonis opted to use for Al-Kitab was inspired by cinema, where the
reader/viewer can watch the screen, and where ‘‘you see past and present, and you watch
a scene and listen to music.’’
The poet’s guide on this land journey is al-Mutannabi (915–965 a.d.), the great poet
who was as engaged in the machination of power as he was in being the best poet of his
age. The pages of Al-Kitab are divided into several parts. One portion of the page relates
the personal memory of al-Mutannabi, or what he remembers while walking alongside
the poet through history. Another portion is devoted to the guide’s individual experience
as the poet imagines it. The third, at the bottom of the page, establishes a connection
between the two parts, or digresses from them. The book includes a series of homages to
the numerous great Arab poets who were killed or exiled and continue to be canonically
marginalized. ‘‘I was telling my readers that Arab history is more than a history of the
sword, that there were also great men,’’ states Adonis. To complete Al-Kitab the poet had
to read all of the classics of Arab history, making the project an ‘‘immense amount of
work . . . a crazy undertaking,’’ one that makes it impossible to excerpt in a way that
would demonstrate its encyclopedic range and lyrical and dramatic ambition.
After the dense engagement of Al-Kitab, Adonis seems to have felt a great sense of
relief and a freedom to experiment. Between 2003 and 2008 he published five books,
each a deliberate recalibration of the poet’s voice. In Prophesy, O Blind One (Tanaba’
Ayuha al-a‘ma), 2003, Adonis, who had been criticized for the lack of personal warmth in
his poetry, presents perhaps his most autobiographical chronicles. Hearing Adonis speak
in the present tense of our times, telling of his dizzying journeys from airport to airport,
American readers may hear supersonic echoes of Lunch Poems, which chronicles Frank
O’Hara’s exuberant midday jaunts through New York City. Prophesy also includes an
atypical poem for Adonis, ‘‘Concerto for 11th/September/2001 b.c.’’ In this idiosyncratic
 Introduction xxi

and incisive meditation on the violence unleashed on September 11, 2001, Adonis draws
on a sizable segment of recorded human history to review what had become a singular
event in our era. Here the poet reiterates and revises his impressions in ‘‘A Grave for New
York,’’ but not without a sense of anguish that little had changed since the earlier poem,
and that little was likely to change in the future. A book published in the same year,
Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea (Awal al-Jassad, Akher al-Bahr), cross-pollinates
two of Adonis’s earlier styles, the erotic/mystical atmosphere of ‘‘Body’’ and the lyrical
quickness of The Book of Similarities and Beginnings. The poems in Beginnings of the
Body utilize sharp imagery, dialogue, and quiet musings within a formal consistency that
unites them into a powerful meditation on love.
Among the more recent books is Printer of the Planets’ Books (Warraq Yabi‘u Kutub
al-Nujum), 2008, which, with its leisurely prose meditations interspersed with lyrical
flashes, draws on the poet’s memories, especially his childhood in Qassabin. Tender and
poised, these poems never veer into nostalgia or sentimentality. Adonis adroitly recap-
tures a child’s sense of wonder, as well as his anguish and fears. Above all, perhaps, these
poems capture the villagers’ dignity, empowered by a naturally philosophical outlook
and a practical resourcefulness that complement each other. The volume ends with a
poem to poetry, or to the muse, who has visited him for years, always wearing the same
black dress. Poetry has served the poet well in its all-consuming fashion, allowing him for
decades ‘‘to fall asleep fatigued between the thighs of night’’ and to reinvent himself with
every visit. But now he longs for a change; he wishes for poetry that would surprise him.
The poem is a masterful end to the book and a brilliant subtle comment on the poet’s
vision of his future poetry and career.
Adonis’s desire for renewal is not surprising. Looking at his oeuvre as presented here,
we note the creativity and the great sense of liberty with which he went about inventing
himself, in formal and prosodic aspects, and in tone and subject matter. We also note a
great capacity for cunning, where creative impulses are embraced but are made to work
hard for the poet’s acceptance. Like al-Ma‘ari before him, the poet maintained his
skepticism of all forms of enthusiasm, and waited for his ideas to prove their mettle. Like
Abu Tammam, who, when asked, ‘‘Why do you not write what is understood?’’ replied,
‘‘Why do you not understand what is written?’’ Adonis has entrusted language with the
role of stretching our conceptual faculties while trusting the reader’s natural ability to
xxii Introduction

occupy new realms of thought out of sheer curiosity. Finally, like al-Mutannabi, Adonis
seems to have learned to speak with the full force of his art, having forged it with the heat
of his doubt and creativity, and even his most ambiguous utterances exude clarity.
Adonis is a poet who takes risks, but they are calculated ones taken when the stakes are
truly high and requiring every ounce of the poet’s creativity and intellect. Fortunately for
readers of Arabic poetry, the rewards have never failed to bring them face to face with the
sublime.

Works Cited
Adonis, Al-Thabit wa al-Mutahawil [The fixed and the changing] (Beirut, 1977).
Adonis, Introduction to Arab Poetics, translated by Catherine Cobham (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1990).
Adonis, ‘‘There are Many Easts in the East and Many Wests in the West,’’ interview with
Margaret Obank and Samuel Shimon, Banipal 2 (June 1998): 30–39.
Adonis, Al-Adab, vol. 4, no. 4, 1962, quoted in Shmuel Moreh, Modern Arabic Poetry 1800–
1970: The Development of Its Forms and Themes Under the Influence of Western Literature
(1976).
Mounah Abdallah Khouri, Studies in Contemporary Arabic Poetry and Criticism (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1987).
A N O T E O N T H E T R A N S L AT I O N

A few weeks ago I found a letter from Adonis in which he thanked me for translating
two short poems by him that appeared in Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt’s most widely dis-
tributed English-language newspaper. He also stated that he had no objection to my
request to assemble and translate a selection of his more recent work. The letter was sent
on April 13, 1992. At the time I contacted Adonis I had translated most of his Celebrating
Vague-Clear Things and felt empowered to go on with more work. However, I soon
realized that this work, with the particularity of its Arabic references, could not stand on
its own in English without much of the poet’s other work providing context. I also
realized that to assemble a volume of more recent works I needed to work through at
least twenty years of poetry. And, further, I had a ways to go before making any claims to
being a poet myself. I could not bring myself to write the poet about my disappointing
realizations, perhaps aware that he is accustomed to my kind of exuberant enthusiasm.
As I read more of Adonis’s work over the years, in the original and in translation, I felt
repeatedly that only a large of selection of work could give a sense of the myriad stylistic
transformations that he had brought to modern poetry at large, through his esthetic
renderings of the cultural dilemmas confronting Arab societies in particular. Thirteen
years after receiving his letter, and after completing several translation projects, I picked
up Adonis’s collected poems and began to translate, this time beginning with the earlier
poems. I did not tell the poet that I was working on his poems, as I was still unsure that I’d
do him justice. I vowed to contact him only when I had a substantial selection to offer. In
2006, when I was about to begin translating ‘‘This Is My Name,’’ I was contacted by
editors at Yale University Press who were interested in assembling the volume that I’d
dreamed up way back in 1992. Furthermore, the editors said, Adonis had suggested that
they contact me for the task. This was a chance that I did not want to miss.
Many questions arose as I began to contemplate the selection of work. Since a sizable
representation of Adonis’s early work had been translated lucidly and lyrically by Samuel
Hazo and Abdullah al-Udhari, I intended to minimize retranslation, if only to increase
xxiv A Note on the Translation

the total availability of the poet’s work in English. Shawkat Toorwa’s translation of A
Time Between Ashes and Roses and Adnan Haydar’s and Michael Beard’s translation
Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs—both from Adonis’s early to middle period—necessi-
tated that I forgo all anxieties about repeat translation and forge ahead, selecting what I
perceived to be the best of the poet’s work.
While keeping in mind a balance between his most critically acclaimed poetry with
work that would show the continuum of his evolution as a poet, I also focused on what I
could translate in a way that satisfied me as a reader of English verse. The matter of
choosing was based on the English results, along with the goal of representing the
majority of the poet’s books. And so, with only a few exceptions, all of Adonis’s seminal
works are represented here. I hope that the arc of his development as a poet, and the
continued broadening of that arc, are amply evident.
Avid readers in Arabic, however, will note that this selection includes no poems from
Adonis’s second book, Leaves in the Wind (Awraq fi al-reeh), 1960. This book falls
between the first selection of poems (First Poems) and Mihyar, the poet’s first significant
early work, but does not seem to constitute a discernable development in the poet’s
unique voice. Readers also may question the absence of Al-Kitab, Adonis’s three-volume,
fifteen-hundred-page late work. Al-Kitab, as Adonis himself recently noted, ‘‘is very
difficult to understand for someone without a very good grasp of Arab history.’’ How to
excerpt such a work in a decidedly limited space was, at first, a beguiling challenge.
Eventually, however, I became convinced that no small sample of Al-Kitab would offer
an adequate sense of the work’s scope, and that the absence of the work is a better
indicator of its magnitude than any reductive sampling of it would be.
The other gap is the exclusion of two of Adonis’s books published in this decade. Here
my choices were more decisive. None of the five books that Adonis had published
between 2003 and 2008 can be seen as a separate development in his sixty years of poetry,
despite the range of subject matter. Each of these books can be seen as a deliberate
recalibration of the poet’s voice, but to include them all would have overloaded the book
and perhaps presented a lopsided image of the poet’s development. I have chosen three
books that demonstrate the breadth of Adonis’s work and his voracious appetite for
experimentation. Printer of the Planets’ Books, firmly reminding us of the poet’s roots and
 A Note on the Translation xxv

his continued attachment to poetry, has an intimacy that helped round out this selection.
In noting the stylistic and thematic variety of these late books combined, the reader will,
I hope, see how open-ended and self-regenerative Adonis has been.
The language of modern Arabic poetry, especially when coupled with metrical ele-
ments, rings a few notches above middle diction. It can step into poetic or even archaic
diction yet not seem to readers archaic or even too obviously allusive or overly self-
conscious. Perhaps the last time English could do something akin to what Arabic poetry
is doing today was in the hands of T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens, a
language that believed in its alterity and trusted its formal bearing. But what American
poet now can mimic Eliot and Crane and not sound derivative? American readers
reading Adonis, especially in ‘‘This Is My Name,’’ perhaps should try to imagine that his
poetry has that formal high-modernist lilt.
As a translator and as a poet who only occasionally steps into formal diction, I felt that
my own style and inclinations needed to be the base from which I would begin this
project. I felt sure that as I translated more of Adonis’s poetry I would grow with the poet
and develop a harmonious accommodation of style, listening to the words I’d chosen and
comparing them with the literal meaning of the originals and trying to weigh them
emotionally to find the appropriate tone and cadence. In this process I was aided by
recalling a conversation I had with Adonis in which we briefly talked about his own
translation process. I had asked him about the critics who attacked his work. ‘‘These
critics claimed that I erred in the literal sense,’’ Adonis explained, ‘‘but I did not, I
believe, make any poetic errors. That I could not allow myself to do.’’ I took this advice as
a vision for this translation project, the most difficult one of the nine I have undertaken.
I have been asked often about translation approaches and strategies but have become
increasingly mystified about how to answer. In essence, I am not capable of describing the
methodology of this translation project or any before it, as I believe it is impossible to
determine a method of translating a work, particularly one of poetry. As my old teacher
Willis Barnstone astutely notes, deciding on one approach to translating a work will only
prove frustrating. Sooner rather than later, the translator will end up breaking any prom-
ises he has made about his method or process. And determining what one’s approach had
been after the project is complete is like trying to describe a long journey with a single
xxvi A Note on the Translation

episode in it. In this regard I take it for granted that these translations of Adonis’s poetry are
neither literal nor so flexible as to stray from the literal content of the poem. The methods I
have used to match fidelity with artistry are basically all the means I could muster.
Much of Adonis’s early poetry makes frequent use of rhyme, but I have not tried to
replicate his rhyming. The same can be said for meter. Given that Arabic metrical feet
are quite different from Western ones, I have not stuck to any metrical pattern, even
when the poems are metrically composed. All the poems as rendered in English are free
verse but with an attention to rhythm, musicality, and compression that I hope will
please both the eyes and ears of English-language poetry readers.

This project could not have taken place without the help and encouragement of
several friends and fellow poets. I am grateful to Larry Goldstein, Elisa McCool, Jessica
Young, Alana Di Riggi, Tung-Hui Hu, Catherine Calabro, Rasheeda Plenty, Sarah
Schaff, Elizabeth Gramm, Lauren Proux, and Charlotte Boulay for their incisive feed-
back on several sections of the book. Thanks also to Suhail Eshdoud for his assistance
with especially difficult phrases. I am grateful to Shawkat Toorwa, Adnan Haydar, Mi-
chael Beard, and Alan Hibbard for the suggestiveness of their translations, which have
informed mine. Finally, I would like to thank Adonis for entrusting me with this task, for
making his time available to me, and for granting me the freedom to rove among the
splendors of his work to choose among them. I hope that he and those familiar with his
work find this volume a fair and judicious representation of his work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some poems published here previously appeared in the following publications:

Bat City Review: ‘‘This Is My Name’’ (excerpt).

Diode: ‘‘Home,’’ ‘‘Love,’’ ‘‘To a Soothsayer,’’ ‘‘Song.’’

Green Mountains Review: ‘‘The Poets,’’ ‘‘The Experiment,’’ ‘‘Prodigal,’’ ‘‘The Beginning
of Poetry,’’ ‘‘The Beginning of Sex,’’ ‘‘The Beginning of Encounter,’’ ‘‘The Beginning of
Sex II,’’ ‘‘The Beginning of Death.’’

Guernica: ‘‘A Mirror for the Twentieth Century.’’

The Kenyon Review: ‘‘Desert.’’

The New Yorker: ‘‘West and East,’’ ‘‘Celebrating Childhood,’’ ‘‘The Beginning of Speech,’’
‘‘A Mirror for a Question.’’

Pleiades: ‘‘Tree of Winding Curves,’’ ‘‘Morning Tree,’’ ‘‘Tree [‘I have not carried . . .’],’’ and
‘‘Tree [‘He does not know . . .’].’’

PEN International: ‘‘I Imagine a Poet.’’

SubTropics: ‘‘The Wound.’’

Two Lines: ‘‘The Beginning of Doubt,’’ ‘‘The Beginning of Love,’’ and ‘‘The Beginning of
the Road.’’

World Literature Today: ‘‘Season of Tears.’’

First Poems
1957
This page intentionally left blank
 3

LOVE

The road and the house love me,

the living and the dead,
and a red clay jug at home
loved by water.

The neighbor loves me,

the field, threshing floor, and fire.

Toiling arms that better

the world, love me,

and go unrewarded with joy.

And tatters of my brother scattered about,

torn from his wilted chest
hidden by wheat spikes and season,
a carnelian from which blood shies.

He was the god of love as long as I lived.

What will love do if I too am gone?
4

SECRETS

Death holds us in its embrace,

reckless and modest,
carries us, a secret with his secrets
and turns our multitudes into one.
 5

ELEGIES (for my Father)

1.
My father is a tomorrow
that floats down toward us,
a sun,
and above our house clouds rise.

I love him, a difficult buried secret,

a forehead covered with dirt.

I love him, his decaying bones and mud.

2.
Above our house silence heaved,
and a quiet weeping ascended—
and when my father fell to death
a field dried out, a sparrow fled.
6

T H E Y S AY I ’ M D O N E F O R

They say I’m done for

and nothing remains of my joy
no oil, no flame.
I walk past roses, and what do they
care if I laugh or weep?
In roses, inside my eyes
and in my soul, there is a morning
in which I erase and am erased.
I love, I love beauty
and in it I worship my follies,
the ones I found on my own,
and the ones to which I was led.

You’ve become thirsty—

when will you say,
‘‘I’m sated,’’ my blood.
I thirst for an hour
for which I would bet all my days.
I thirst for a deep, open heart.
I’ll light its flame along my road
store it among my veins
somewhere between alive and dead.
You’ve become thirsty—
 First Poems 7

when will you say

‘‘I’m sated,’’ my youth, my blood.

They say I’m done for

even as the earth’s glory stands before me,
her largesse.
Her hands wound me
and her chest worships me.
And when her thorns heal me
her roses capture me again.

They say I’m done for

as the ages hold me dear,
and become drunk
at the mention of my name.
They say I’m done for
while on every path
a thousand hearts greet me,
shadows and houses laugh.
I drink to every heart,
I drink until rapture.
I say, soul, you are released,
become now what you always wished.
8

HOME

The story of ghosts in our house,

a horizon that crosses our lips
hidden by plow and threshing floor.

In it
we are lit by our distant journeys,
our dreams of the unknown.

From it
we leap from one universe to another,
and fly one generation after the next.
 9

THE BANISHED

On the first day of the year

our groans said to us,
‘‘Tie the ropes of travel and aim far
or live in tents of snow.
Your country is no longer here.’’
We who rebelled against the intruder
who were destroyed and banished—
emptiness now feeds on our cries,
ahead now walks behind us
and our days are frozen on our limbs,
cramped like our blood.
They have begun to live on seconds
to spin without time.

Banished, lost among the roads

a cipher to arms and heart,
hunger is all our cries
and the wind our clothes.
Even the morning flees from our sight,
glares hatred into our eyes.

Stay here, our hearts, do not leave us,

do not dare your fate
10 First Poems

among hunger and bitter despair.

Stay here on this soil and grow
and tomorrow it will be said
from this earth a struggle arose,
fed on our arms,
nourished by our call,
an endless search
for a new dawn.
 11

RAINS

He holds the plow to his chest,

clouds and rain in his palms.
His plow opens doors
toward a richer possibility.
He scatters dawn on his field
and gives it meaning.

Yesterday we saw him.

On his path there was
a geyser of daylight’s sweat
that returned to rest in his chest,
clouds and rain in his palms.
12

A C OAT

In our house there is a coat

that my father’s life had stitched
with threads of fatigue.
It tells me—you sat on his rug
like a cut-off branch
and in his mind you were
tomorrow’s tomorrow.

In our house there is a coat

tossed somewhere, uncared for,
that binds me to this ceiling
to this mortar and stone.
In its holes I see
my father’s embracing arms,
his heart, and a yearning
housed deep within.

It guards me, wraps me,

lines my road with prayers,
entrusts his flute reed to me,
a forest and a song
 13

T O A S O O T H S AY E R

Her eyebrows are bells that ring

my unknown fate,
my now and my apprehension,
and all that I have been.

She looks and the signs

light up like lanterns
as if she’d clung
to time’s eyelashes.
In morning
or under cloud or wind,
in ease or in distress,
she carries the knot of every epoch.

She holds my fingers and stares

and ponders,
rummages through caves,
unearths alphabets.

Won’t you laugh, won’t you frown?

Won’t you whisper?
This is my hand, take it,
take my tomorrow.
14 First Poems

Divine, improvise
and whisper, but beware
not to speak out loud.
 15

L A B O R PA I N S

For whom does dawn open my eye’s window,

for whom does it blaze a path between my ribs?

Why does death pulse through me

and tie my life to the flutter of seconds?

I’ve known my blood to be time’s womb,

and that on my lips quake the labors of truth.
16

O B S C U R E D I S TA N C E S

Whenever my hands gather her things

and bend like wheat stalks,
like a horizon unharvested,
a light passes through me silken-stepped,
its path studded with thorns,
and silence begins to call out my name.

My house and I in midmorning light,

a flower grown old
and a dead swallow’s beak.
 17

LONGING

I have a longing other than longing,

other than what fills the chests of the years.
Things approach it as if
they know no other destination.
They say: Without it we would not have become.

As if it is greater than itself,

this longing rises, extends, and is never satisfied.
It wishes to release itself from itself
and to fasten sky to earth.
18

A PRIESTESS

Around my forehead, a priestess burned

her incense and began to dream
as if her eyelids were stars.

Seer of generations, tell us

something about a god who is born.
Tell us:
Is there anything to be worshipped in his eyes?
 19

SONG

from ‘‘Elegy for the First Century’’

Bells on our eyelashes

and the death throes of words,
and I among fields of speech,
a knight on a horse made of dirt.
My lungs are my poetry, my eyes a book,
and I, under the skin of words,
on the beaming banks of foam,
a poet who sang and died
leaving this singed elegy
before the faces of poets,
for birds at the edge of sky.
This page intentionally left blank
Songs of Mihyar of Damascus
1961
This page intentionally left blank
 23

PSALM

He comes bereft like a forest and like clouds, irrefutable. Yesterday he carried a continent
and moved the sea from its place.

He draws the unseen side of day, kindles daylight in his footsteps, borrows the shoes of night,
and waits for what never comes. He is the physics of things. He knows them and gives them
names he never reveals. He is reality and its opposite, life and its other.

When stone becomes a lake and shadow a city, he comes alive, alive and eludes despair,
erasing a clearing for hope to dwell, and dancing so the dirt will yawn, and trees fall asleep.

Here he is announcing the lines of peripheries, etching a sign of magic on the brow of our
age.

He fills life and no one sees him. He shapes life into foam and dives. He turns tomorrow into
prey and chases desperately after it. His words are chiseled on the compass of loss, loss, loss.

Bewilderment is his country, though he is studded with eyes.

He terrorizes and rejuvenates.
He drips shock and overflows with ridicule.
He peels the human being like an onion.

He is the wind that never retreats, water that never returns to its source. He creates a race
that begins with him. He has no offspring, no roots to his steps.
He walks the abyss, tall as the wind.
24

N OT A S TA R

Not a star, not a prophet’s inspiration

not a pious face worshipping the moon,
here he comes like a pagan spear
invading the land of alphabets
bleeding, raising his hemorrhage to the sun.
Here he comes wearing the stone’s nakedness
thrusting his prayers into caves.

Here he comes
embracing the weightless earth.
 25

K I N G M I H YA R

King Mihyar
a sovereign, dream is his palace and his gardens of fire.
A voice once complained against him to words
and died.
King Mihyar
lives in the dominion of the wind
and rules over a land of secrets.
26

HIS VOICE

Mihyar, a face betrayed by his lovers,

Mihyar, bells that do not toll.
Mihyar written on the faces,
a song that visits us unawares,
on white, abandoned roads.
Mihyar, the castaway’s bell
echoing on the hills of Galilee.
 27

A N I N V I TAT I O N TO D E AT H

(Chorus)

Mihyar strikes at us.

He singes and chafes the skin of life
right off of us,
rids us of patience and soft features.

Surrender then to terror and tragedy,

land that wedded gods and tyrants,
surrender to his fire.
28

NEW COVENANT

He does not know how to speak these words.

He does not know the voice of the wilderness.
He is a priest who sleeps like a stone
weighed down with strange languages.

Here he is crawling under rubble

in the climate of new alphabets
offering his poems, rough and magical
like copper, to dejected winds.

He is a dialect that rolls in waves.

He is the knight of unfamiliar words.
 29

THE END OF THE SKY

He dreams of tossing his eyes

into the well of the coming city,
dreams of dancing toward the abyss,
of forgetting his days that devour things,
days that create them,
dreams of rising, of collapsing
like the sea—forcing secrets to birth themselves,
starting a new sky at the end of the sky.
30

HE CARRIES IN HIS EYES

He carries in his eyes

a pearl; from the ends of days
and from the winds he takes
a spark; and from his hand,
from the islands of rain
a mountain, and creates dawn.
I know him—he carries in his eyes
the prophecy of the seas.
He named me history and the poem
that purifies a place.
I know him—he named me flood.
 31

VOICE

He lands among oars and rocks,

encounters the lost
in jugs proffered to brides,
in the whispers of seashells.
He declares the birth of our roots,
our weddings, harbors, and singers.
He utters the rebirth of the seas.
32

THE WOUND

1.
The leaves asleep under the wind
are the wounds’ ship,
and the ages collapsed on top of each other
are the wound’s glory,
and the trees rising out of our eyelashes
are the wound’s lake.
The wound is to be found on bridges
where the grave lengthens
and patience goes on to no end
between the shores of our love and death.
The wound is a sign,
and the wound is a crossing too.

2.
To the language choked by tolling bells
I offer the voice of the wound.
To the stone coming from afar
to the dried-up world crumbling to dust
to the time ferried on creaky sleighs
I light up the fire of the wound.
And when history burns inside my clothes
and when blue nails grow inside my books,
 Songs of Mihyar of Damascus 33

I cry out to the day,

‘‘Who are you, who tosses you
into my virgin land?’’
And inside my book and on my virgin land
I stare into a pair of eyes made of dust.
I hear someone saying,
‘‘I am the wound that is born
and grows as your history grows.’’

3.
I named you cloud,
wound of the parting dove.
I named you book and quill
and here I begin the dialogue
between me and the ancient tongue
in the islands of tomes
in the archipelago of the ancient fall.
And here I teach these words
to the wind and the palms,
O wound of the parting dove.

4.
If I had a harbor in the land
of dream and mirrors, if I had a ship,
if I had the remains
of a city, if I had a city
in the land of children and weeping,
I would have written all this down for the wound’s sake,
34 Songs of Mihyar of Damascus

a song like a spear

that penetrates trees, stone, and sky,
soft like water
unbridled, startling like conquest.

5.
Rain down on our desert
O world adorned with dream and longing.
Pour down, and shake us, we, the palms of the wound,
tear out branches from trees that love the silence of the wound,
that lie awake staring at its pointed eyelashes and soft hands.

World adorned with dream and longing

world that falls on my brow
like the lash of a wound,
don’t come close—the wound is closer—
don’t tempt me—the wound is more beautiful.
That magic that your eyes had flung
on the last kingdoms—
the wound has passed over it,
passed and did not leave a single sail
to tempt toward salvation, did not leave
a single island behind.
 35

SPELL

I see among the battered books

under the yellow dome
a punctured city flying.
I see walls made of silk sheets
and a murdered star
swimming in a green vessel.
I see a statue made of tears,
of the clay of limbs—and prostration
at the feet of a king.
36

T H E FA L L

I live between fire and plague

with my language, with these mute worlds.
I live in an apple orchard and a sky,
in the first happiness and the drollness
of life with Eve,
master of those cursed trees,
master of fruit.

I live between clouds and sparks,

in a stone that grows, in a book
that knows secrets, and knows the fall.
 37

DIALOGUE

—‘‘Who are you, who do you choose, Mihyar?

Wherever you went, to God or the Devil,
one abyss comes, another goes,
and the world is a choice.’’

—‘‘I’ll choose neither,

both are walls
both shutter my eyes.
Why would I replace one wall for another
when my sorrow belongs
to the one who brings light,
the sorrow of having known everything.’’
38

S E V E N D AY S

Mother who mocks

my love and contempt,
you too were made in seven days.
The waves were made then and the horizon,
and the feathers of song,
and my seven days were once wounded and estranged.
Why so unfair then
when I too am made of wind and dust?
 39

A VISION

Mask yourself with burned wood,

Babel of fire and secrets.
I am waiting for the god who arrives
dressed in flames,
adorned with pearls stolen
from the lungs of the sea and from shells.
I am waiting for a god who loses his way,
who rages, weeps, bends, and shines.
Your face, Mihyar,
prophesies the god who will arrive.
40

W H AT T O L E AV E B E H I N D

Go on, move, go and embrace the waves and the air

and lift with your eyelashes lightning and clouds.
Let them shatter
our mirror then, and the vessel of years.
And leave for us behind you—
No, no, leave nothing behind
except some sorrow and some mud
and the blood dried up in veins.

Ah, go on, move. No, wait, you’re

not leaving, are you?
If so leave for us behind you
your eyes, your tawny corpse, your clothes,
a poem for the strange world,
the world borne of longing
holding in its eyelashes
your sky.
 41

A BRIDGE OF TEARS

There is a bridge of tears that walks alongside me

and breaks apart under my eyelids.
There is under my porcelain skin,
a knight from childhood
who ties his horses to the shadows of branches
with ropes of wind.
And in a prophet’s voice
to us he sings:
O wind
O childhood
O bridges of tears
broken under my eyelids!
42

I TO L D YO U

I told you I heard the seas

recite to me their poems. I heard
the bells tolling in shells.
I told you I sang
in Satan’s wedding, in the feast of myth.
I told you I saw
in the rain of history,
in the luminousness of the horizon,
a nymph and a house.
Because I sail my own eye,
I told you I saw everything
in the first step of distance.
 43

IT SHOULD SUFFICE

It should suffice you to see.

It should suffice to die away from here
to embrace the dust.

No silence in your eyes, no words,

as if you were smoke.
Your skin falls somewhere
and you stand somewhere else.
It should suffice to live lost,
defeated, mute like a nail.

You will not see God on human brows.

It should suffice you, Mihyar,
to keep the secret that he erased.

It should suffice you to see.

It should suffice you to die away from here.
44

LIGHTNING

Lightning bent low toward me,

wept and slept
in a forest of doubts
not knowing who I am
not knowing that I am the master of the dark.
Lightning bent low toward me,
wept and slept
in my hands
having looked into my eyes.
 45

MY SHADOW AND THE EARTH’S

Come down toward me, sky, come rest

in my narrow grave,
on my wide brow,
and become faceless and without hands,
without a rattle in your throat, without a pulse.
Come down, draw your shape as two,
my shadow and the earth’s.
46

T H U N D E R B O LT

Green thunderbolt,
my spouse in sun and madness,
stone has fallen on eyelids
and now you must redraw the map of things.

I came to you from an earth without sky

filled with God and the abyss,
winged with eagles and gales,
barraging, thrusting sand
into the caverns of seeds,
bowing to the coming clouds.

Redraw the map of things,

dear image of madness and sun,
my green thunderbolt.
 47

A BLOOD OFFERING

In the caves of an ancient pain

when I loved the god
and loved the palace courtesans
where we lived—I and madness, my friend,
I was lost among the months
so I crossed the desert
and left the road behind.
In the name of a god writing his book
in the caves of an ancient pain
I raise this blaze
and sacrifice a fly.
In the name of the suns coming toward me
I begin this wake.
48

SCENE

(A dream)

As if a storm interrogating stone

a storm interrogating sky
interrogating things
as if history is being washed inside my eye
as if the days fall from my hands
as if like fruit . . .
 49

DIALOGUE

‘‘Where were you?

What is this light weeping from your eyes?
Where were you?
Show me, what did you write?’’

I did not answer her. I did not speak a word

for I have torn my papers
for I could not find a single star
through the clouds of ink.

‘‘What is this light weeping from your eyes?

Where were you?’’

I did not answer her. Night was a Bedouin’s

tent, the candles a tribe,
and I a thin sun
under which the earth changed its skin
and the lost one met his endless road.
50

PSALM

I toy with my nation.

I see its future glimpsed through the eyelashes of an ostrich. I toy with its history and days
and fall on them like meteor and storm. On the other side of daylight I begin its history
again.

A stranger to you, I reside on the other edge, a nation that belongs only to me. In sleep and
in waking, I open a blossom and live inside it.

It’s necessary that something else comes alive. This is why I open caves under my skin for
lightning to charge, and I build nests for it to reside. It’s necessary that I cross like thunder
through sad lips parched like straw, through autumn and stone, between skin and pores,
between thigh and thigh.

This is why I sing, ‘‘Come to me, shape that suits our dying.’’

This is why I scream and sing, ‘‘Who will let us mother this space, who is feeding death to
us?’’

I move toward myself and toward ruins. The hush of catastrophe overtakes me—I am too
short to circle around the earth like a rope, and not sharp enough to pierce through the face
of history.
 Songs of Mihyar of Damascus 51

You want me to be like you. You cook me in the cauldron of your prayers, you mix me with
the soldier’s soup and the king’s spices, then pitch me as tent for your governor and raise my
skull as his flag—

Ah, my death

Come what may, I am still heading toward you, running, running, running.

A distance the size of a mirage separates you from me.

I rouse the hyenas in you and I rouse the gods. I plant schism within you and enflame you
with fever, then I teach you to travel without guides. I am a pole among your cardinal
directions and a spring walking the earth. I am a trembling in your throats; your words are
smeared with my blood.

You creep toward me like lizards as I am tied to your dirt. But nothing binds us and
everything separates us. I’ll burn alone and I’ll pierce through you, a spear of light.

I cannot live with you, I cannot live but with you. You are tidal waves inside my senses; there
is no escape from you. Go ahead scream, ‘‘the sea, the sea!’’ But be sure to hang above your
thresholds beads made out of the sun.

Rip open my memory, search for my face under its words, search for my alphabet. When
you see foam weaving my flesh and stone flowing in my blood, you will see me then.

Shielded as if inside a tree’s trunk, present and ungraspable like air, I will never surrender to
you.
52 Songs of Mihyar of Damascus

I was born inside the folds of lilac, grew up on an orbit of lightning, and now live between
light and grass. I storm and I waken, I gleam and cloud, I rain and snow. The hours are my
language and daylight is my homeland.

(People are asleep and only when they die do they awaken) or as it has been said, ‘‘Never
become conscious in your sleep, otherwise you will die.’’ Or as it will be said . . .

You are dirt on my windowpanes, I must wipe you off. I am the morning coming down, the
map that draws itself.

Still, there is a fever inside me that burns for you all night through

and I wait for you

in the shell of night by the shore
in the hum roaring from the depth of the sea
in the holes in the sky’s cape
in linden and acacia
among pines and cedars
in the underbelly of the waves, in salt
I wait for you.
 53

SPELL

You have no arteries.

Your skin, alive, spins around itself alone
and dives in a whirlpool of scales.
Your skin lives desiccated, naked,
your skin a rubber made of
living words wrapped on a house
of marble and sand.

Your decrepit days will come

in the pupa of a blind locust
reaching toward you dressed in spider skin.
54

FA R E W E L L

We bid you farewell years ago.

We wrote you a repentant elegy.
O halos of dead angels,
O language of rampaging locusts,
words are mired in mud,
words are adorned with labor pains.
Our missing wombs have returned,
and now come the rains and floods.
O language of ruins,
O halos of dead angels!
 55

THE FLOOD

Fly on, dove, we don’t want you to return.

They have surrendered their flesh to the rocks.
And I, here, am lurching toward an abysmal decision
clinging to the ark’s sail.
Our flood is a planet that does not revolve,
decrepit and old.
Perhaps we’ll catch in it a scent of the god of buried ages.
Fly on, dove, we don’t want you to return.
56

ADAM

Adam whispered to me
choking on a sigh,
on silence and whimpers—
‘‘I am not the world’s father.
I never saw heaven.
Take me to God.’’
Migrations and Transformations in the
Regions of Night and Day
1965
This page intentionally left blank
 59

FLOWER OF ALCHEMY

I must travel to a paradise of ashes,

walk among its hidden trees.
In ash, myths, diamonds, and golden fleece.

I must travel through hunger, through roses, toward harvest.

I must travel, must rest
under the bow of orphaned lips.

On orphaned lips, in their wounded shade

the flower of that old alchemy.
60

TREE OF THE EAST

I have become a mirror.

I have reflected everything.
In your fire I have changed the ritual of water and plant.
I have changed the shape of sound and call.

I have begun to see you as two,

you and this pearl swimming in my eye.
Water and I have become lovers.
I am born in the name of water
and water is born within me.
We have become twins.
 61

TREE OF WINDING CURVES

In the fields of melancholy, on grass,

I draw my rainbow days
breaking the surfaces of mirrors
between the noonday sun
and the water in Adam’s pool.

My years float like hunger then descend

to a forest of winding curves.
Years and years
I see their beaks entangle,
then fall in a forest of winding curves
into their eternal nests.
62

TREE OF FIRE

A clan of leaves
throngs around a spring.
They scrape the land of tears
when they read fire’s book
to the water below.

My clan did not wait for me.

They left,
no fire,
no trace.
 63

MORNING TREE

Morning, come meet me—

toward our field—
on the road to our field.
Dried up trees, as I’d promised,
two beds as before, two children
in their dried-up shade.

Come meet me. Have you seen the boughs,

heard their call,
the sap their words leave behind?

Words that hold eyes in their grasp

words that pierce through stone.

Come meet me
come

as if we’d met before

woven the fabric of the dark
and dressed up in it, knocked on its door, lifted the curtain
opened its windows and lay
among the bends in the branches,
64 Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day

as if we’d sought the help of our eyelids and poured

the pitcher of tears and dreams,
as if we’d remained
in the land of boughs
and lost our way home.
 65

T R E E O F M E L A N C H O LY

Leaves tumble, then rest in the ditch of writing,

carrying the flower of melancholy
before speech becomes
echoes
copulating among the rinds of the dark.

Leaves wander and roll about seeking a land of enchantment,

forest after forest,
carrying the flower of melancholy.
66

SEASON OF TEARS

(a poem in the voice of Abdulrahman al-Dakhil, falcon of Quraish)∞

It falls quiet, the call of the wilderness.

Clouds traipse above the palms
and from the edge of the groves
the towers are tinted rose.
It falls quiet, the call of return.

I ask her, and Damascus does not answer

does not come to the stranger’s aid.
Will he stop here if he passes by?
He died without a sound.
Without a secret to his name.
I live where she sleeps, among her long exhales
in the weeping fields
in the bed spread by her tears
in the small hallway
between her eyelids and sky.

It falls quiet, the call of return.

Of my life, nothing remains in my eye

except these sad ghosts.
Still the trees that weep on the city’s ground
are lovers who sing my songs.
 Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day 67

Mirror of endless wandering,

change the face of the moon,
for my beloved’s face is no longer there.

Yesterday, we climbed toward that star,

saw him in the nude,
saw him clothed
and what we saw struck us—
a face made of dirt.
Change the face of the moon,
now that her face is no longer there,
O mirror of endless loss.

It falls quiet, the call of return.

I walk and the Euphrates alongside me walks,

the trees follow like flags
and a pair of eyes from the embers of years.
I sway with the swaying waist of the beast.
I dance with a black star.

And the towers

are melodies displaced from their scores.

My body and its captors are in one land,

my heart and its owners elsewhere.
68 Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day

It falls the quiet, the song of return

and the towers are a country of tears.

If she’d only known, she’d have wept

the Euphrates and its banks of palms.

It falls quiet, the song of return.

Confused, confused, I own a choked language that raves, towers I own

confused, crucifying day, tempted by a terror in its depth, tempted to rage
confused, the shores rob my inheritance, the waves defend my dawn,

I sang of gardens and a towering palace

while in wretchedness, in attics hid.
Tell him who used to sleep on soft cushions
that the heights are being punished by a star.
Tell him to ride through the specter of hardship
or he’ll become the lowest of men.

It falls quiet, the song of return.

Wronging myself, I roll my history, slit its throat

in my hand, rouse it back to life.
I shepherd my eras, torture my mornings.
I feed them night, and feed them mirage.
I have a shadow that fills my earth
and lengthens. It sees, and greens, it burns its past
and like me,
 Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day 69

burns itself.
And we live together, walk together, the same
green language on our lips.
And in the face of midmorning light
and in the face of death
our ways part.

It falls quiet, the song of return:

I dream of Damascus,
of terror in the shadow of Qassiyun,
a past era stripped of its eyes,
of a calcified body, wordless tombs
calling out, Damascus
die here and let your promises burn,
calling out, Damascus, die and never return,
you chased prey of fattened thighs,
woman offered to whomever comes your way,
to chance, to a daring wayfarer,
sleeping through fever and through ease
in the arms of the East.
I drew your eyes in my book.
I carried you, a debt on my youth
in the greenness of Ghota,≤ the foothills of Qassiyun,
woman of mud and sin
temptress made of light.
A city,
Damascus once your name.
70 Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day

Yesterday
poetry, daylight, and I
reached Ghota and stormed
the gate of hope
howling at trees,
howling at water and fields
weaving out of them an army and a flag
to raid your black sky,
and Damascus, our hands continue to weave.
Nothing, not even death, can dissuade us.
When will we die, Damascus,
when will we find ease?

And last night, in dream, Damascus,

I shaped a statue of clay.
In his white curves I planted
your history, Damascus,
and I began in terror and in joy
to fall like a quake
on the hill of Jilliq.≥
I embraced her, stroked her and sang
mmm mmm crescent moon.
And I said, No, you’ll remain in longing, Damascus
in my blood,
and I said, let Damascus burn,
and my murdered depths arose
calling out to Damascus,
their frightened cries.
 Migrations and Transformations in the Regions of Night and Day 71

Woman of disobedience, without certainty,

woman of acquiescence,
woman of hubbub and shock,
woman of veins filled with forests and swamp,
naked woman lost to her thighs
listening to the dead, to graves, to dens,
listening with pious ears,
in love with your yellow corpses, your victims
feeding on mud and tears.
City all eaten up, Damascus, feeding on skin and hide.

O love . . .
No,
O Damascus
if it were not for you
I would not have fallen into these gorges,
would not have torn down these walls
would not have known this fire that calls out,
that thuds our history and illuminates,
vessel of the world coming our way.

Pardon me, Damascus,

you sinner beatified by your sins.
72

TREE

The hungry plant

a forest for hope.
The sound of weeping rises
to the trees, and the branches become
a country for pregnant women,
a country for harvest.

Each branch is a fetus

that sleeps on a bed in the air
green, calling out enchanting cries
that had escaped the forest of ash
and the towers of catastrophe,
carrying the hungry’s groans
seeking nature’s sustenance.
 73

TREE

Every day
behind the chapels, a child dies
planting his face in corners,
a ghost before whom houses run fleeing.

Every day
a sad apparition arrives from a grave
returning from the farthest reaches to a land of bitterness.
He visits the city, its squares and lounges
melting like lead.

Every day
from poverty, the ghost of the hungry arrives,
on her face a sign:
a flower or a dove.
74

TREE

He does not know how to beautify

swords with severed limbs.
He does not know how to make
his canines shine and glare.
They come after him from a river of skulls and blood
and they climb the short wall
and he is behind the door
(he dreams of remaining like a child behind the door)
reading the last book of the starved.
 75

TREE

I told you: Wake up! I saw water

as a child shepherding wind and stone.
And I said: Under the water and fruit,
under the surface of wheat grains
there is a whispering that dreams
of being a song for the wound
in the dominion of hunger and weeping . . .

Wake up, I call out to you. Don’t you recognize the voice?
I am your brother, al-Khidr.∂
Saddle up the mare of death,
tear time’s door off its frame.
76

TREE

I have not carried a spear, or gored

a head,
and in summer, and in winter
I migrate like a sparrow
into the river of hunger, into its magical watershed.

My kingdom wears the face of water.

I rule absence.
I rule in surprise and pain,
in clear skies and in storm.

No difference if I come near or move away.

My kingdom is in light
and the earth is my house door.
 77

TREE

In Jeirun∑ there is a door made of roses.

Passersby bathe in its scent.
There is a tent for wounds,
there is a forest for the morning,
its branches are bridges that eyes track
toward the wind’s ferry
leading to another morning.
Nights are houses where the tired rest.
They spike their flutes and read
the books of water and dust.
They turn their trusted tears into
beads and laurel garlands,
necklaces, and a wound of roses in whose streams
passersby bathe.
78

TREE

He was wrapped with basil leaves,

with transparent angst and a clear conscience,
wrapped in silence
and a luminous tearing.
It was said that after the grave
he split open the grave, tossed his death and flew
searching for motherhood
on the earth of man.
And it was said his wife was poor.
Here behind that tiny hill,
pregnant
and in between day and night
in silence
in luminous tearing
she waits for the child who will arrive.
Stage and Mirrors
1968
This page intentionally left blank
 81

A WOMAN AND A MAN

—Who are you?

—a mad mystic without a home
a stone fallen from sky, demon-bred
—Who are you?
Did you travel in my body?
—Many times
—What did you see?
—I saw my death
—Did you wear my face?
and saw my sun as shadow
and saw my shadow as a sun
and slid under my bed and revealed me?
—Did you reveal me?
—And now that we reflected each other, have you found certainty?
—No
—Were you healed by me, and remained afraid?
—No
—Do you know me now?
—Do you know me?
82

MAN’S SONG

Sideways,
I glimpsed your face drawn on the trunk of a palm
and saw the sun, black in your hands.
I tied my longing to that tree and carried night in a basket
carried the whole city
and scattered myself before your eyes.
Then I saw your face hungry like a child’s.
I circled it with invocations
and above it I sprinkled jasmine buds.
 83

WOMAN’S SONG

Sideways,
I caught sight of his old man’s face
robbed by days and sorrows.
He came to me holding his green jars to his chest
rushing to the last supper.
Each jar was a bay
and a wedding held for a harbor and a boat
where days and shores drown
where seagulls probe their past and sailors divine the future.
He came to me hungry and I stretched my love toward him,
a loaf of bread, a glass cup, and a bed.
I opened the doors to wind and sun
and shared with him the last supper.
84

THE HUNGRY ONE

He draws hunger in his book—

stars and roads—
and covers the page
with kerchiefs made of wind.
And we see
a loving sun flicking its eyelids
and we see dusk.
 85

RAGE

The Euphrates rages,

daggers rising from its banks,
towers of quaking earth and thunder,
and the waves are fortresses.

I see dawn, its wings clipped,

and water, its floods sharpened, embracing its spears.

The Euphrates rages.

No fire to extinguish this wounded rage. No prayer.
86

F O U R S O N G S F O R TA M O R L A N E

A Mirror for Law

Shock and shake
the virgin’s body
and the pregnant woman’s . . .
Shock and tear asunder.
Leave no old man or child . . .
This is my law.

Conquest
A sparrow burns
and horses and women and sidewalks
are split like loaves
in Tamorlane’s hands.

They
They came,
entered the house naked.
They dug,
buried the children
and left.
 Stage and Mirrors 87

Flood
Mihyar sang tenderly, absolved, prayed, and accused.
He blessed the face of madness,
melted the wound of the ages
in his throat and longed
for his voice to be
a flood, and it became.
88

A MIRROR FOR A TYRANT

Spike of wheat by spike of wheat,

do not leave a single grain behind.
This harvest
is our paradise restored
our nation retrieved.

Tear the hearts before the chests

pull out all the roots
change this soil that has
carried them,
erase the time that told their history
and erase the sky that bent toward them.

Spike of wheat by spike of wheat,

so the earth will fulfill her covenant
spike of wheat by spike of wheat.
 89

BULLET

A bullet spins
oiled with the eloquence of civilization.
It tears the face of dawn. No minute passes
in which this scene is not replayed.
The audience
takes another gulp of life, and livens up.
No curtains drawn
no shadows, no intermission:
The scene is history,
the lead actor, civilization.
90

TWO POETS

Between echo and sound two poets stand.

The first speaks like a broken
moon
and the other is silent like a child
who sleeps every night cradled in
a volcano’s hands.
 91

A MIRROR FOR A DREAM

Take my dream,
sew it, wear it,
a dress.

You made yesterday

sleep in my hands,
leading me around,
spinning me like a moan
in the sun’s carts,
a seagull soaring,
launched from my eyes.
92

A MIRROR FOR A QUESTION

I asked, and they said, the branch

swathed in flame is a sparrow.
They told me my face
was the waves, the world’s face a pile of mirrors,
a lighthouse, and the sailor’s sorrow.

I arrived and the world in my way

was ink, each gesture, a phrase.
I did not know that between it and me
there was a bridge named ‘‘Brotherhood’’
made of steps, prophecy and fire.

I did not know that my face

was a ship that sails inside a spark.
 93

A MIRROR FOR THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

A coffin that wears the face of a child,

a book
written inside the guts of a crow,
a beast trudging forward holding a flower,
a stone
breathing inside the lungs of a madman.
This is it.
This is the twentieth century.
94

A MIRROR FOR CLOUDS

Wings
but made of wax
and the falling rain is not rain
but ships that sail our weeping.
 95

A MIRROR FOR KHALIDA

Wave
Khalida
is a sadness
that leafs the branches
around it,
Khalida
a journey that drowns the day
in the waters of eyes,
a wave that taught me
that the light of the stars
the faces of the clouds
and the moaning of dust
are a single flower.

Under Water
We slept in sheets woven
out of night shade—Night was oblivion
and our insides sang their blood
to the rhythm of castanets and cymbals
to suns shining under water.
Night became pregnant then.
96 Stage and Mirrors

Loss
Once, I was lost in your hands, and my lips
were a fortress longing for a strange conquest
in love with being besieged.
I moved forward
and your waist was a queen
and your hands were the army’s commanders
and your eyes were a shelter and a friend.
We welded to each other, got lost together, we entered
the forest of fire—I drew the first step to it
and you blazed a trail . . .

Fatigue
The old fatigue around the house
now has flowerpots and a balcony
where he sleeps. He disappears
and we worry about him in his travels, we run
circling the house
asking each blade of grass: we pray,
we catch a glimpse of it: We cry out: ‘‘What and where? All the winds
have blown
and every
branch shook with them,
but you did not come.’’
 Stage and Mirrors 97

Death
After these seconds
the small time will return
and the steps and the pathways that had been trod.
Afterwards the houses will grow ancient
the bed will put out
the fire of its day and die
and the pillow will die as well.
98

THE MARTYR

When I saw night in his swollen eyelids

and found in his face
no date palms
no stars,
I stormed around his head
like the wind
and broke like a reed.
 99

A MIRROR FOR BEIRUT

1.
The street is a woman
who reads Al-Fatiha∞ when sad,
or draws a cross.
Night under her breast
is a strange hunchback
who fills his sack
with silver howling dogs
and extinguished stars.

The street is a woman

who bites any who go past,
and the camel asleep by her breast
sings
to petroleum (each passerby singing past),
and the street a woman
in whose bed fall
days and vermin
and even man.
100 Stage and Mirrors

2.
Flowers painted on shoes
and the earth and sky
a box of colors—
and in cellars
history lies like a coffin.
In the moans of a star or a dying slave girl
men, women, and children lie
without blankets
or clothes.

3.
A cemetery:
a navel above a belt
made of gold,
and a poppy-like woman sleeps—
a prince and a dagger
doze on her breast.
 101

A M I R RO R F O R T H E LOV E R ’ S B O DY

Each day the lover’s body

melts in the air, becomes a scent
swirling, evoking every perfume.
He comes to his bed
covers
his dreams, dissolves like frankincense,
gathers like frankincense.
His first poems are a child in pain
lost in a labyrinth of bridges.
He does not know how to live in their water,
and does not know how to cross.
102

A MIRROR FOR THE HUSSEIN MOSQUE

Do you not see the trees hunchbacked

half-drunk, walking
slowly
to perform their prayers?
Do you not see an unsheathed sword,
and an armless executioner
bawling
and circling the Hussein Mosque?
 103

WEST AND EAST

Everything stretches in history’s tunnel.

Everything decorated is mined,
carrying its oily, poisoned child
sung to in a poisonous trade.
It was East, like a child asking,
pleading
and West was his flawless elder.

I turn this map around,

for the world is all burned up:
East and West, a heap
of ash gathered
in the self-same grave.
This page intentionally left blank
A Time Between Ashes and Roses
1971
This page intentionally left blank
 107

THIS IS MY NAME

Erasing all wisdom this is my fire

No sign has remained—My blood is the sign
This is my beginning
I entered your pool Earth revolving around me, your organs are a Nile
flowing We drifted settled You split through my blood and my waves
traversed your chest, you melted so that we begin: Love has forgotten the blade-edge
of night Shall I cry out that the flood is coming? Let’s begin: A scream
scales the city and the people are mirrors on the march When salt crosses over
toward . . . we’ll meet Will you be who you are?
—My love is a wound
My body a rose on the wound, unpluckable except in death My blood is a bough
that gave away its leaves and lay down to rest . . .
Is stone the answer? Does your death, that sleeping master, beguile you? I have
halos of craving for your breasts, and for your childlike face, a face like it . . . You? I did
not find you
It’s my flame that erases now
I entered your pool I bear a city under my sorrows
I have what turns the green branches into snakes, and the sun into a black lover
I have
Come closer, wretched of the earth, cover this age with your rags and tears,
cover it with a body seeking its own warmth The city is arcs of madness
I saw revolution bear its own children I buried millions of songs and I came
(Are you in my grave?) Let me touch your hands: Follow me
108 A Time Between Ashes and Roses

My time has yet to come, but the graveyard of the world is already here I bear
ashes for all the sultans Give me your hands Follow me

I can transform: Landmine of civilization—This is my name (a billboard)

The footsteps of life ended at the door of a book I erased with my questions
What do I see? I see sheets of paper where it is said, ‘‘Here civilization came to rest’’ (Do
you know a fire that weeps?) I see a hundred as two I see mosque and church
as two executioners and the earth a rose
An eagle flies toward my face I sanctify the scent of chaos
so that a sad time will come for the people of flame and refusal to rise
My desert grows I loved a befuddled willow, a bridge that gets lost, a minaret
that suffers old age I loved a street where Lebanon set its entrails in rows, in pictures,
mirrors and amulets
I said, I will give myself to the abyss of sex and allow fire to conquer
the world I said, stand like a spear, Nero, in the forehead of creation Rome
is all houses, Rome is imagination and reality Rome city of God and history, I said,
stand like a spear, Nero
I had nothing to eat tonight except sand, my hunger spun like the earth Stone,
palaces, temples I pronounce them like bread In my third blood I saw the
eyes of a traveler who soaked people in his eternal dream,
carrying the torch of distances inside the mind of a prophet and into savage blood
 A Time Between Ashes and Roses 109

a
And Ali, they threw him into a well and covered him with straw as the sun carried
her victims and left Will light find its way to
Ali’s land? Will it meet us? We heard blood and saw moaning

We will say the truth: This country

raised its thighs
as its flag

We will say the truth: This is not a country

but our stable on the moon,
the sultans’ staff, the prophet’s prayer rug

We will speak plainly: There is something called presence in the world,

and something called
absence Let’s tell the truth:
We are absence
The sky did not birth us, neither did dust
We are foam spewing from a river of words
Rust in the sky and its planets,
rust in life
(a secret manifesto)
110 A Time Between Ashes and Roses

My country is a refugee inside of me

Let my face become a shadow

An eternity of enamored rocks circles me, for I am fire’s first lover
And fire is pregnant with my days, a rattle ringing on her breast
Her armpit is a well of tears, a lost river The sun clings to her like a dress,
then falls A wound she deepened into tributaries with vigor and spices
(Is this your fetus?) My sadness is a rose
I entered the school of grass, my forehead cracked, and my blood stripped of
strength:
I asked, what should I do Should I ring the city with a belt of bread? I scattered
myself in fire’s colonnades We divided the blood of kings and we hungered
We carried the epochs
mixing pebbles and stars
driving clouds
like a herd of fortresses

I can transform: Landmine of civilization—this is my name

The nation rested

in the honey of sanctuary and violin
The creator fortified it like a trench
and barricaded it
 A Time Between Ashes and Roses 111

No one knows where the door is

No one asks where the door is
(a secret manifesto)

And Ali, they threw him into a well Embers were his shirt We burned
and gathered his remains I burned: Good evening, rose of ash!
Ali is a land whose name is without a language hemorrhaging oblivion
that binds grass with water Ali is an immigrant

Where does the master of sadness sleep, where does he carry his eyes? My sky is
choked,
my shoulder falls, and the earth is a helmet filled with sand and straw Terrified, I ran;
a swallow shelters me I rose, her breasts are flames I rose, opened a window:
Green fields I am the other conqueror The earth is a game A mare totters into the clouds
The besotted trees emerge A branch shakes me awake Water gushes out The old epochs
end and I begin My face is made of orbits There is a revolution inside the light

a
A village awakens me inside the wind’s well Silence breaks apart
Embrace me, maker of fatigue, offer me your pendulum I am
rock, quest and question There is no fire, no festival I am the specter, standing guard
at the edge of the city while its people sleep I fell into light’s trap
pure like violence, luminous, and weightless like loss My limbs are lightning, sculpted
winds My bones do not taste of crown and silver I am not a thing to be owned My
blood is the sky’s migration,
my eyes are birds They say your skin is made of thorns Die then and let
my sky reflect your yellow skins They say your skin is an eternity, sludge found at
the bottom of a dream
112 A Time Between Ashes and Roses

Let the spears of endless war be born

There is a hole of devastation between us, and my voice
is the ravings of a warrior as he breaks the crutches of song and roots out the
alphabet

And the women gathered in the temple courtyard

invoking the alphabets of holy books
turning the sky
into a doll
or a guillotine
and Ali shared his sorrows
with the devotees of misery
who became like eagles
and were torn apart

And Ali is a flame

a magician that burns in all waters—
storming he rages, invades all books and soils
He sweeps away history and blots out
the day with his wings
It pleases him that the day
had gone mad

This is the time of death, but

in each death there is an Arab death
Days tumble into its squares
like hacked branches of cedar
 A Time Between Ashes and Roses 113

They were the last song heard

from a bird leaving a burning forest

a
My country runs behind me like a river of blood The forehead of civilization
is a floor slathered with algae I gathered up a crown, I became a lamp Damascus
went adrift, Baghdad fell to yearning The sword of history is broken on the face of my
country
Who is fire? Who is flood?
I was desert when I held the ice within you and like you I broke into sand
and fog I cried out, You are a god whose face I must see to erase what unites it
and me I said, my ‘‘I’’ embodies you, you crater filled with my waves I am night,
and you were barefoot when I tucked you into my navel Within my steps you
procreated a way
You entered my infant water Light up, root yourself in my labyrinth

A fruitful numbness grows around my head, a dream under a pillow My days

are a hole in my pocket The world has gone haggard Eve is pregnant and wears
my trousers
I walk on the ice of
my pleasures I walk between miracle and confusion I walk inside a rose

The flowers of despair wilt, sadness rusts an army of pulverized

faces crossing history, an army like a thin thread that begged for peace and surrendered,
an army like a shadow
I run inside the cries of the victims alone on the lip
of death like a grave moving inside a ball of light
We melted into each other—the blood of our loved ones tender and protective
114 A Time Between Ashes and Roses

like an eyelid I heard your pulse inside

my skin (Are you a forest?) The barrier fell (Are you a barrier?)
the seagulls asked a thread woven by sailors, and the ice of travel sang
a sun it cannot see (Are you my sun?) My sun is a feather that drinks
the horizon The lost one heard a voice (Are you my voice?) My voice is my time,
your tasty pulse your breast my blackness and all night is my whiteness
A cloud crept toward me and I surrendered my face to the flood
and fell lost among my ruins

a
This is how I loved a tent:
I turned the sand and its eyelashes into
trees that rain
and the desert into a cloud
I said: This broken earthen jug
is a defeated nation This space
is ash These eyes
are holes I said madness
is a planet hidden inside a tree

I will see a crow’s face

in the features of my country I will name this book
‘‘shroud.’’

I will name this city ‘‘stinking corpse’’

and name the trees of the Levant, ‘‘sad birds’’
(a flower or song
may grow out of my naming)
 A Time Between Ashes and Roses 115

I will name the desert moon ‘‘date palm’’

and the earth may waken and return
as a child, or a child’s dream

Nothing sings my songs now

The protestors will come
and light will arrive on its appointed hour

Nothing but madness remains

Ashes of the hearth,

is there for my history a child in your night?
The revolution’s rage is the embers of a lover
and a woman’s song
Is there for my history a child in your night?

The dust of legends is in the bones now Need I seek shelter? Need the dust?
No place for me, no use in death This is the dizziness
of a man who sees the corpse of the ages on his face and falls No motion
He believes old age
is a nipple for infants

I can transform: Land mine of civilization—this is my name

Go back to your cave Histories are swarms of locusts This history

rests on a whore’s breast, gargles, heaves in the belly of a she-donkey, craves the
116 A Time Between Ashes and Roses

earth’s rot,
and walks inside a maggot Go back to your cave, cast down your eyes

I see a word—
All of us around it are mirage and mud Imruulqais∞ could not shake it away, al-Ma‘ari≤ was
its child, Junaid≥ crouched under it, al-Hallaj∂ and al-Niffari too∑
Al-Mutannabi∏ said it was the voice and its echo ‘‘You are a slave,
and it is your angel master’’ The nation is tucked deep within it like a seed
Go back to your cave
What? Did they banish him or kill him?
They killed him I will not talk about my friend, death: A countryside of yellow
flowers around me, but I will write about the last branch of the cedar
in my home, the flutter of the dove dragging the night’s rug away from the dream, high
as a tower
They killed him I will not utter the names of witnesses or murderers, and I
will not weep
I will weep a nation born mute, the swan hatching the blueness of shores weeping
But why weep over a child, or a poet? I will write the last shadow
our cedar cast, the flutter of the dove as she drags night’s rug away from a dream high
as a mountain
His majesty, the caliph issues a law made of water His people are broth, mud,
and wan, wilted swords His majesty’s word is a crown studded with human eyes
Is this city a holy verse? Are the women wearing pages of the holy book?
I tucked my eyes into a tunnel that the hours had dug I asked, are my people
a river without a sound?

I sing
the language of the spear tip I cry out, time is ruptured, its walls have fallen
 A Time Between Ashes and Roses 117

into my guts I vomit, no history left in me, no present

I am the sun’s insomnia, abyss, sin, and motion Wait for me,
rider of the clouds What I own beguiles me, and the sun strikes my limbs I live
in the horizon and in psalms I am a branch seeking shelter: Listen, can you hear this
crying coming from the liver of the world? Listen, I hear death sounding
from my wrinkles We hallucinated
I raved so to die well I chose two breasts and they became my rites

Is your skin
the fall, are your thighs a wound that I filled with the world’s
healing? Are you night’s fissure in my skin? My axe is sharp and
I have become another stream, my banks overflow You scoop me into your arms An
arc
My face is a flying ruckus divided by sound Ask me I answer
An oracle spoke Its horses sought me, and the whispering died out Do you or I have
anything to whisper? A bridled fire, ships stranded in a pacified sea?
A seagull opened its eyes—close yours—it forgot that the opening
in its ruffled feathers is water and sparks If only there was thunder, if only it knew,
if only it were in my hand

Be still This is a dome, and my house is the nozzle of a breast I will go on

digging
If I change, if dust changes, if fire becomes a glottal stop

a
You melt into my sex, my sex without borders or swords Annihilate yourself
And I annihilated myself We are a single face, my shirt is not made of apples and you
are not a paradise We are
118 A Time Between Ashes and Roses

a field, a harvest, the sun stands on guard I ripen you Come to me from that
green edge there, this is our yield, our bodies, sower and reaper
Come to me, my limbs, along from that edge as I invoke
my death Break me into a chain of epochs The ember of time is our domain
Longing is
our domain The riches of the universe
are ours as it dresses itself in humankind and as we discover a way

I read in yellowed papers that I will die banished The desert broke up into pieces
of light,
and my people scattered We scratched the earth for words that tasted
like virgins Damascus enters my clothes, in dread, with love, shaking
my insides with raves and tremors

You shed your skin Let your lips be Melt them between my teeth I am night
and I am day I am time We have melted into each other Root yourself into my
labyrinth

a
This is how I loved a tent
how I turned the sand in its eyelashes
into trees that rain
and the desert into a cloud
I saw God, a beggar on the land of Ali
I ate the sun on the land of Ali
baked the minarets like bread
I saw the sea raging out of the fog of smokestacks
whispering
 A Time Between Ashes and Roses 119

‘‘Whoever made us
made no more than a roofed shelter
Storms shook it and it fell and became
wood to be burned in the caliph’s hearth’’

The sea rarely speaks, but the sea

did speak: ‘‘We’ve become bone dry
and history has ground itself to death
in its repetition in the windmills’’
The creator has fallen into his tomb
The creature has fallen into its tomb

And the women gather to rest

in the temple courtyard
luring night out of its wells
sewing the sky
and singing:
Ali is a fire
a magician burning in every water
And they ask the sky:
Is it a star or mummy,
this earth?
Then they unthread the sky
and patch it up again

Dajjalπ buried a people in his eyes

Dajjal excavated a people from his eyes
and we heard him praying above them
120 A Time Between Ashes and Roses

and we saw how he made them kneel

and we saw
how the people were like water cupped in his palms—
and we saw
how water became a windmill

Islands made of fire, Asia rises among them Tomorrow rises, and sunlight
goes out We dream what did not happen at night My day is measured
in fire So I cry out The voice of the masses conquers the universe and confuses

I am not ash or wind

My bed is tastier and further Cages, abandoned pathways

and the horse of the past is all ash
and the color of God is another hue
No hand weighs me down

Ali, eternity of fire and childhood, do you hear the lightning of the ages,
hear the sighs of their steps? Is the road a book or a hand? The fingers
of dust are like a dervish singing to a king in a legend Bring the country, bring the
cities near Shake the tree of dreams, reshape the trees of
sleep, and what the sky says to the earth:
A child is lost under the navel of a black woman searching and lost
A child whose hair grays
and the earth’s god is a blind man dying
 A Time Between Ashes and Roses 121

Peace!

To the faces walking the solitude of the desert, to the East dressed in grass
and fire Peace to Earth, washed by the sea, peace to its love
Your nakedness has unleashed its rains It has stored thunder in my chest
and time leavens there Come close This is my blood, the brilliance of the East
Scoop
me up and disappear
Lose me I hear the echo of thunder in your thighs Cover me Come and live inside
me
My fire is direction, the planet is my wound, a gift I pronounce
And I pronounce a star, I draw it
escaping from my country to my country
I pronounce a star that my country draws
into the footsteps of its defeated days—
O ashes of the word
Is there a child for my history in your night?

Nothing but madness remains

I see him now out of the window of my house

sleepless among sleepless stones
like a child taught by a sorceress
that there is a woman in the sea
who carried his history inside a ring
122 A Time Between Ashes and Roses

and she will come

when the hearth fire dies out
and when night melts in sorrow
among the ashes of the hearth

And I saw history inscribed on a black flag shifting like a forest

I did not write it down

I live in longing, in fire, in rebellion, in the magic of its crafty poison

My country is this spark, this lightning in the darkness of the time that remains
Singular in a Plural Form
1975
This page intentionally left blank
 125

B O DY

1.
The earth is not a wound
but a body— Can one travel between a wound
and a body?
Can one reside?

Physicians, herbalists, magicians, diviners

readers of the unknown
I am working your secret trade
I become an ostrich = I swallow the embers of shock
and grind the boulders of murder

I work your secret trade = I witness the unknowns of my state

I pant like someone trying to make home of his exile
I scatter—am diffused—my surfaces spread and I own none of them
my insides reduced, no place in them for me to live
Then in an instant
I dry up I dew
I move away approach
I retreat attack
I worship shake off belief
Something separates me from me
126 Singular in a Plural Form

How do I show myself to my body?

A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun ∞

Two lips attack his thighs they repeat

a history that repeats itself
Who sees eternity now?
Who touches the beginning?
E T E R N I T Y = B E G I N N I N G
Seduce him pulse that rules the unknown
become his rhythm
Offer his head to fall into your arms
He is the tried the pure
He is eloquent water
He is the shape that streams semen and light

2.
His stay among trees and grass had the dark shiver of reeds and the drunkenness of
wings
He bonded with the waves
He gently seduced the stones
He convinced language to procure the ink of poppies

A ladder called ‘‘time’’ leaned on his name and ascended

prophecy by
prophecy Ø
 Singular in a Plural Form 127

From wings an ether streamed

from coincidence to certainty

But
sun O sun what do you want from me?

A face that gathers into lake and breaks into swan

A chest that shivers lark and calms to lotus
A pool that opens to rose closes in pearl
These are the jungles of migration and the flags of poverty
The day has the hands of a toy
The heavens burble like a clown

But
sun O sun what do you want from me?

Death wears the state of narcissus

Narcissus inhabits bowls of ice dreams that love is a face
and he is its mirror
Stones are blossoms, the clouds butterflies
and on the threshold a body—a spark with which to read the night
Death is not the body’s desolation
Death is the solitude of what is not a body
But
sun O sun what do you want from me?

Barricades multiply me
Veils render me luminous
128 Singular in a Plural Form

I breathe in the herbs of the depths

and between my feet there is nothing but cages

If the cage ignites and time is a jungle

if jungle is a woman
if the sky undoes its buttons
I will heal from ‘‘if ’’ and ‘‘wish’’
to say, ‘‘rush out, sky, and find you
another motherhood
release your eyelashes from tears
surrender to another water’’
I am not dream or eye
No wisdom to me My wisdom is that the wind bears the fruit
that feeds my days
that my days have ships that carry the shores

But
how to calm these ports that guard the waves
and you
sun O sun what do you want from me?

I seek what never meets me

In its name I plant myself a rose for the winds
north south east west
I add height and depth
but how to find my way?
My eyes look like pieces of bread
and my body descends toward an illness that has the sweetness of a woman’s down Ø
 Singular in a Plural Form 129

Love cannot chase me

and hatred cannot reach me

But
how do I find direction, and what do you want from me
sun O sun?

3.
He erases his face he discovers his face
Rapture advances A temptation wears you in her first dawn
Time advances Where do you chronicle life and how?
Darkness advances What tremor will spread you, woman, among my blood cells
so that I’ll say ‘‘you are climate, turn, and sphere’’?
What aftershock?
Light advances It becomes night in my regions
I am torn and assembled
Time takes the shape of skin
and escapes time

And your conquest

befell
me Ø

My metamorphoses heaved toward you—

When you entered,
why did you take the burning fields even though my hands were the
first fire
and why, every night
130 Singular in a Plural Form

did I carry the softness of your breasts to another night?

Enter, woman,
with dirt
on your knees, the dirt of the road that leads to you, to
mountains
and the cypresses of the mountainsides
and the larches of the valleys I say we shall meet-separate
and I will gather my regions:
Bitter apples that scatter like salt on tables of licentiousness
you are the sweetest, and I offer you the first taste of me

Enter
we meet-separate Separation is not a wing, and meeting is not a shadow
I hide among the features of my face
you hide between your breasts—
Mix us together, mountainsides
a body bolting out
a body taming
Draw us
The book of ladders is now complete
the suitcases of migration are now open Ø
Your body is a loss I leave behind
and you are the books of my departure
I take you, a land I do not know
hills and valleys covered with the herbs of seeking
mysterious stretches
and I take you standing
sitting
 Singular in a Plural Form 131

lying
None but you convinces me
I take you
in my sighs
in waking in sleep
in the states between
and in what time promises me
I take you
fold by fold
and I open my entries to you
I stretch within you and do not reach
I circle and do not reach
I stretch like wire, I thread myself into yarn
I rove your expanses and do not reach
You are beyond distances, beyond victories
You are Where and If, and What and How and When and you are
not you
Lie on my body, woman, and plant yourself
cell by cell
branch to branch
vein to vein
Let thousands of lips bloom from you
thousands of teeth
Let them be unknown, let them correspond to the measure of our love
This while
a limb is stupefied
a limb abducted
and in the folds of our hips and thighs a trickle covers you and covers me
132 Singular in a Plural Form

and whose light goes out with each stroke

I would have hung your image by then
next to all the images
and revelation would have reached me and I would have said,
This is our last meeting Ø
Who are you?
I take you, man
angelic animal
who places poison on one lip
and balsam on another
and every night I say
this is our first meeting
singular man
m
o
l u m i n o u s
n
Nothing between us except this call
these flashes of lightning
and all that floats
My body will shake with the divinity it demands
and the gifts it acquires
and I will cry out: You are dust
you are omnipotence
Who are you?
 Singular in a Plural Form 133

A body grows in lavender and lilac

it descends, it rises, it oversees
it gathers the banks and reads the mutterings of the reeds
I spied you, woman, with my eyes
a dance moving in steps with the season
I sighed in spikenard
I took shapes that came and went In the tidal waves
of our waists one drowned body bumps into another
I leave the bamboo thicket
I enter the pestle
I penetrate to the calyx
where the ovules rest and the pole of the stamen ends
I gather myself like pollen upon pollen
I take you off
I wear you
I skin myself off of you I unite with you
and between us I create
a delusion as high as the sun
lies that break time branch by branch

Who are you?

Under skin, your true self

and in my arteries a streak of madness
I roll between the I of ember and the I of ice
and between the ‘‘Ya’’
and the ‘‘Alif ’’
I dangle
134 Singular in a Plural Form

I create in day another day

and I tie my whims with a rope of minutes
The mirror says break me
the steps say tie me up
and between the machinery of death and the animal of pronunciation
I plant myself I root
and play nature’s dice

A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun

You once said:

Hire me to guard the coffers of your body and store me
your body white lilies, my body a lake
And said:
You whose wide banks are sprawled on the horizon of our dominion
you O ship Ø take wing
Maybe the mosses will flake off
and the bedrock of our secret will blaze
There are caverns covered with rust— take wing
to where a wing’s sway is the body’s temple
and the body is the priest of madness

And man, you once said:

hand in hand heart on heart
body and wind walk Ø the storms do not cease
 Singular in a Plural Form 135

and the skin does not seek shelter

and the body maddens its way to sense
and the wind takes up the madness of oceans

And man, you said:

how do pebbles swim while cupped in hands
how does water stream from fingers?
And said:
I will ask my time to release me so that I become a sign of what love will be
And said:
Love also wounds life Ø it uproots and banishes
The body also becomes a liquid and takes the shape of the vessel
And said:
It is the body, not love, that is the skin of time, the pores on the earth’s hide
The body, not love, is the arc of the horizon and the wind’s muscle

You want to know?

Stop knowing what you are
and stop knowing others

And man, you said:

I mixed and bent
I stole my voice, stripped my words
and placed language in its sheath

And you cried,

O man
136 Singular in a Plural Form

you who were created ill

when will you heal?

4.
Enter, woman my limbs have become wanton
for you they grab and grope
I wished into you
and anchored my elements Ø
Enter We meet = separate We erase = discover
our faces
We mix bread and wound to keep the earth intact under our words
We sustain the courage to refuse so that we write another history
We see a woman=lake a river=lover’s body
our bodies levitate
and rise into the heights

Naked
a celestial body leaves its home and descends our steps
Things murmur a noise we bathe in
We befriend time’s beasts
We roam the countryside we settle in cities
scatter gird ourselves
We become familiar we differ
Things do not have names
things have thighs like stags
and faces like lovers
And here the horizon is Ø
white fur
 Singular in a Plural Form 137

Pillows exude the perfume of jungles

and here is the body-father body-mother
heading to—
and we head to—
The bells of desire enliven us
beds high as childhood and truthful as the sun enliven us
and invent a death that lengthens life
and we invent a treachery
between you and me
a hypocrisy
that breaks time branch by branch
We meet = separate = erase our faces = discover them
two silhouettes on the bed
one seeking to be seen one hiding
and the two bodies are four
half for the absent ones
half for the present

A throng of needles strikes our bodies

and the body on whose door we knock does not shelter us
There are cracks that reveal what was covered
There are furrows and grooves that recite the world’s first secrets
to us
How can one body flower into jasmine and boxthorn?
How can one heart dress itself in two bodies?
138 Singular in a Plural Form

We join = we differ
We create treachery as high as childhood
a hypocrisy honest as the sun
we invent a death that lengthens life
and say
love is three: man and man and woman
man and woman and woman

There
is
always
a distance
between us Ø we said
It is erased by a fire we call love
Day attaches itself to day and night attaches itself to night and a distance remains
between us
We put out what is not extinguishable
We light what is not lightable
and a distance remains between us
and in the hours of joining heave and heave, droplet to drop
a distance remains between us
O Love, extinguished species,
come and sit on my-knee/her-knee
take the needles of tears and weave the water
The bells of desire enliven us
We invent a day that lengthens life
we invent a treachery that rises toward childhood
 Singular in a Plural Form 139

a hypocrisy honest as the sun

Who are we?
A bridge unites us that we cannot cross
a wall unites us, separates us I enter you exit myself
I exit you enter me Ø
What I build tears me down
and you appear as space itself
and I, vision’s vision

I held a rose walked down into your valley and waited

A river between us and the bridge between us is another river
I heard you asking: Which of us is the liver
Which of us is the wailing
I mixed myself with impatience rolled in its fragile nests
I cried out, we are one, a ball of fire
Put yourself out, woman Put yourself out, man
so that we know the grace of embers
We erase our faces we discover our faces
premonitions
shells
mirrors

Through them we cross to our other selves

We open our chests to the highest among them
and the lowest open us
and each of us enters the tower of aloneness
in the solitude of a bird dying
and each of us tastes the other
140 Singular in a Plural Form

and his organs are drunk on life while the other’s are drunk on death
and each of us denies yes while confessing no
and denies no while confessing yes
How do you wash your body, woman
while your other water disappears?
How do I wash my body and make my first water return?
I am your question
and you are not my answer
I knew you with my longing
I tied it to you and welded you with my being
A I

L
A D N I S
O

So that your body moves wisely

so that I move with it
with what is above it
below it
and in between
so that I surround you and break any barrier that separates you from me
I read the book of your priests
I grow into your origins
I taste their creatures and personify them in my delusions
so that you become the dot
and I become the script and shape
so that you become ‘‘From’’ and what follows it
 Singular in a Plural Form 141

‘‘about’’ and what it possesses

where words cannot contain me
where only imaginings and symbols can contain me
I did not intend you
I am not your sea
I am not the swans you wait for
I have nothing but limbs
limbs that get lost lost in a fever whose outer reaches I have yet to
discover
After
I erased-discovered you
I spread my wings on leaves and invited you
I said, death is an old man
how can he still chase us?
I said, my body is north and time is south
how could they ever meet?
For you are all that is before me and that cannot grow old
for you are the eternity of the directions that remain in my limbs
and you my eyes of insomnia and my sleep of despair
and for your sake I have equated desert and sea
eye and thorn
and for you I have plucked meaning from crowds of words and named him
‘‘image’’
and in honor of your names which I sent down by decree
I told the alphabet that I longed for you and craved you
and for you I have changed, and convinced my years to be the ember of change
and for you I have bestowed errors to fire and convinced the body
to become the glory of all adjectives
142 Singular in a Plural Form

I devour you cell by cell and you do not sate me

I contain you heartbeat by heartbeat and there’s no comfort from you
Neither jealousy separates you from me nor hatred
only a feeling that has no name
And now that you are time and death
how can I retrieve you?

You breathe your last Ø I rush toward you

I seek the pulse of your traces
and touch your departure

I
never was

I am but a mist of desire

I was the slow one and my clothes went past me
My death is a ladder for my body, and my body is indecisive Ø where shall I rest
I have affixed the clouds I commanded foam to become
the key to the waves Ø Where shall I rest?
A name is not a root, a root is not a woman, is not Ø where shall I rest?
Straw is dressed in roses and words break their crosses Ø where shall I rest?

The horizon came to me named itself after me

a name is not an embrace
an embrace is not a woman
I take my lips away from you tonight
you lustful earth that never ovulates
So that I know how you, desert, fall like rain
 Singular in a Plural Form 143

how you expand

so that I know the seal of despair
so that I know how we love when we do not love
how what bore our first name wilts
so that I quench my thirst with what we thought will never know wilting

Memory-forgetfulness
Wherever narcissus follows me I follow the blueness
I read your body
its guests and subjects

And I say a fog rises out of my face

threads stream out of my body
They knot and unravel and unravel
I ask someone who saw pebbled earth expand
and call out—
Spread on, fire
Guts, dry up and shrivel
spread
as coldness punishes muscles
spread
as time softens, softens
as exhaled breaths swirl into halos and halos

The good road is not good for me

and my steps belong to no one
In each dot on my body is a false clue Ø
144 Singular in a Plural Form

A rib is not a lover, a sign that misleads the roads

and woman is not earth so that I am forced to wear the sky
I make the triangle doubt its vertices the circle doubt its
radius
I make bread suspicious of salt
Will a fixed habit leap out of its orbit?
Am I a fish that hates water?

It is older than stone, this muscle

It has crossed all rationale for stupor
It has discovered oceans of nonsense
With them we followed the arc of a sunflower
We lived with them among the angels’ grass
The road is made of limbs and motions
There is no difference between the moon and its shadow
the bird and its branch
And I see the sea through the forest’s skirts
Ice becomes king of water The sun guarded me, the galaxy’s
circumference was my orbit
A ram’s horn carries me, a bull’s lips choose me
I witness how light becomes the body of thorns
how mud releases the moans of the sky
how truth erases me and delusion roots me How do I cross the distances
between them?
There is always a distance between us
 Singular in a Plural Form 145

You striking into the artery of distance, surrender

to the wind that scatters space into bits
to space that walks with the feet of a child
to love that has become the exile of love

A Piece of a Secret History of Death Ø

Goodbye to the body with whom he leapt and that has now walled
its limbs
Goodbye to a high tide that hides between the childhood of his body
and the old age of his dreams
Peace to his dying kingdom

A Piece from the Book of Stories

He erases desire discovers it

Thorns are the hands of whoever plants flowers
The angel is the beginning of the animal

He erases discovers
He dreams with the body he writes
but the words are dreams and the writing is a woman
who had died: Is love love?
He can no longer see—I mean he can see now
146 Singular in a Plural Form

When death visits him he will not hear her voice

and if she asked him, Who am I? he will not know the answer
Perhaps he’ll whisper, have we truly met?
and say,
a new name for love now rises

A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun

To be what he is
he exited himself—exited
and someone he does not know now lives there

I tuck night under my arm

an offering to each body I convey this message:
Reach out the way the sea reaches dry land Ø
They attach, but there is no bond between them
Each is the other’s contrary

—But Bahlul, why am I beautiful?

—Because a ship sees you, not a wave

5.
Night nudes his lovers
becomes a mystic unites with his smallest parts
Tell the sky to change its name
Tell the earth to take my shape
 Singular in a Plural Form 147

My face is a glimpse into the eye of a drying lake

My body tastes like a shroud

This is why
the thunder of labyrinths snatches at me
This is why
the world becomes a window too small for my eyelashes

I know the shell

the sea’s lantern
thigh of night the moon’s blade
tongue of carnation lip of basil
I know the face and the back of the head
and there is a surface on which I spread, but I don’t know its reaches and colors
The body to whom I gave my body, I didn’t see it
The body that asked me to read it, I wrote another
Write me, I read another
This is why
I echo as a voice without words on a stage without thresholds
This is why
I hear words without a voice:
The hand of dawn touched you once
and disappeared

Seasons, adorn yourself with the candles of a history being extinguished

The grass closes it chambers
Spring breaks its first keys
148 Singular in a Plural Form

There are some who wound and insert a fly in the wound

Here I am
falling from the second horizon of birth
and another space is torn up before me
Longing etched on the walls of time
wake your beasts and release them
Babylonian ink
retrieve your stupor and become drunk on me
My time is a shirt tightening and desire is a body expanding
I erase you, Desire
I discover you Ø
In the pool I hear horses neighing
I see the stretch of flatlands in a navel
a muscle turning
a muscle that resists me
a muscle that turns some of me against me
I touch the cranium and the heart
the pulse of bones
the drone of arteries
Your face spills out as my blood
and I take and I repeat and I mumble
The horizon is the smoke of hope

Let my body find its balance on paper

A pathway and your steps are the trees
A scene and your body is the actor and the play
A shadow and your body is the waves and gesticulations
A surface and your body is the depth
 Singular in a Plural Form 149

Letters and your body is the writing

And you stroll on
inside a shroud you wove thread by thread
Tell the needles to slow
and you too slow down

Labyrinths of love
I foresaw you and my eyes beheld you
I cooled you, froze you
I became your swamp, I bridged you
I am now the breeze blowing on you
and my body is a tremor inside you

A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun Ø

He erases desire discovers it

he tumbles into it
her embrace is dispersals and reunions
He reigned her over his body
He accompanied her with his breaths and enthroned her
He mapped her into an elixir and surveyed his illness
They preyed on each other
and one of them ate the other
He has no words for what is revealed to him
150 Singular in a Plural Form

Then
she traps him in a tunnel
a species of a spider web
He fights with a wing that fell off a dead fly
He imagines an eagle followed by the sun who follows a dying star and says
This is how I live
He imagines a canary killed by the hands that soothes it and says
This is how I love
From dream
to dream
he proceeds Ø hope closes in on its last autumn
and love is like water and grass
no roof except delusion
no delusion except the depths
and the wave said
I am the future

I erase my body I discover my body Ø

You said to me: You complain of solitude
You said: I will embody love for you:
a branch
covered with thorns
inserted into the lover’s cavern
each thorn clings to a vein
then it’s pulled
and it takes what it takes and it leaves what it leaves
My cells multiplied and became larger than the sea
I slide on the slope of an unknown hollow
 Singular in a Plural Form 151

My language crawls on the edge of an abyss

and between the ecstasy of sunflowers
and the lips of an invisible demise
I dangle
No almost
between
in
Perhaps n/ever
and denial is an epoch and each epoch is an object a flame that drags the body’s
alphabet
and dies out

My body is made of things contradicting each other

It ties its shroud to the foot of the sun
and says to a moth
with the color in my face
‘‘write me on your wings
and burn’’ Ø
This is how
I slide into shapes masculine and feminine
Memory has a curtain that smothers me
Movement has symbols that erase memory
They bared my surroundings from below
They covered my surroundings from above
My body is a line My wrinkles are expressions
—Are you kin to what is written?
—Are you kin to what is said?
It is more eloquent
152 Singular in a Plural Form

to wear engravings and codes

more profound
that my limbs become margins and appendices
more transparent
that time becomes a flower wilting (or opening) where my face is its vase
Skin equivocates
I delve into the pathways of the depths
I revolve
I tumble
I break into tidal waves
and my terrors stream Ø

The wound is Delta

the balsam is Alpha
and the body is an alphabet without its dots

What abyss can fit me now?

The place has no reed for me to lean on its climate has no clouds to predict
rain
Now in my body I hear
branches being cut
limbs flying off
I stream into shrapnel
then wilt
Love-Mind that the body tears into strips
Love, you who are the essence of water
widen
 Singular in a Plural Form 153

become ruin and sun

settle dust down with dust

Open into your stages, body, from now to death Ø

—When were you born and how old are you?
—I do not count, I am not numbered
I collapse and I am distracted
My whims overwhelm my motions and soak my face with despair
I repeat: I own regions that I do not know
Ash turns me into legions, and flames drag me before them Ø

A Piece of a Secret History of Death Ø

Expand, dear fog, expand my blood and strengthen vigilance

There are waves coming from invisible shores
saying they are what I foresaw
There is clay that has changed its name
a letter that has spun away from the sound it makes
a horizon on the lip of the horizon
saying it is what I foresaw
and between nerve and nerve there is a desert
saying it is what I foresaw

And you, flower of pain, offer me other possibilities

become motherhood a flower with thousands of patterns and hammers
cups and coronets
154 Singular in a Plural Form

Offer me—remember my face

You used to lean close toward it whenever we gathered by water or air to read death
and our scents mingled
and our limbs became pairs of twins
I tell you, woman: You will die taken by water
You tell me: You will die taken by the sun

But
in a instant you wilt between my eyes Ø
We are separated by flame and flame and flame
and the labyrinths of Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Thursday
I link desire and the taste of dirt within you
happiness with the flavor of death
Here is my body
tattooed with spots of regret
crawling between my words
The jungles of insomnia thicken
Mountains rise before me
Trees sleep
and all the pebbles turn their ears toward me

I imagine that a hand is a hand and a face is a face

I do so in sympathy with the sand
 Singular in a Plural Form 155

A Piece of Bahlul’s Sun

The body remembers Love forgets

Love is to leave The body is to arrive
Love is to imagine The body is to lose one’s mind
Love, a cosmic farce
so that eternity remains distended
so that we soothe our doubt

A Second Piece

Love is the angel of dispossession

a child who remains in its birth labors
Love is clothing the more lovers there are, the less love
A bed inhabited by divine insects spluttering the ravings of the universe
where the thigh of the moon is entangled with the leg of a mouse
and the sun’s jaw and a lizard’s tongue embrace
Love is a mouth mispronounced from its home

Don’t ask for ecstasy out of love

don’t ask of it in contempt
Ask for it as ceaseless mist
from a cloud swimming
in a wandering space that swims
in the space of a desire that has no name
that has no name
156 Singular in a Plural Form

A Third Piece

Since the sky began to feed the earth

her sad face split in two:
one half for error
one for regret

Error is too early

Regret is too late
and man is torn between them

6.
His ghosts said
you slept with the last star rose with the first sparrow
your body behind your body and your eyes shyly hid themselves
You drew maps of water knowing water escapes and erases
You asked how a premonition becomes a pair of hands and a pair of feet
and you said imagination touches my fingers
The place imagines me
What does an eye need an eye for?

The afternoon shed its skin and became a body

the horizon moss
thorns made of water

And his ghosts said, failure, you are his second body
Only you knew him You said
 Singular in a Plural Form 157

there are saplings inside him and machines

to banish what he embraces and to banish what he exempts
And you told all things to wear him
and you told him, dress yourself with me
Now you can begin

The body was new and told us:

My aim is to name fever the body’s memory
my aim to speak with the fires within
my aim to oppose the waves so that I can misguide the shores
and begin falling
into
the opulence
of strength

And the body was new and told us:

Water is too tight for my thirst
and I am too narrow for my ‘‘I’’
I have a thousand tongues and possess only one word
I have countless kinds of death
and I have only one grave

And his ghosts said: Wet yourself with the rain of things and smother them, grass of
language
He invents his organs, his enemies
He reads the history of dust
and he crowns matter as the king of his symbols
158 Singular in a Plural Form

And you, columns of memory, go ahead and blow yourself up

And you, ember of the past, go ahead and put yourself out
He empties his body of the names crowded within it
He offers them to a body that has no name
and he loves this body that has no name

And his ghosts said: his surroundings devour him

his pickaxe uproots him
his hands tear him up
From his ruins walls rose and his palaces stood tall
His shadow split itself in two and both claim to love him
One adores his corpse
the other prefers a silence that resembles it
and his corpse spread as an ether
from which heads and thighs dangle tables
and beds
and his corpse spread as a mirror
spread along the ruins of the horizon
And everything began to reflect itself in it:
Where is the sparrow? It flies with wings of mud
Where is the cockroach? It wears the face of an angel

And his ghosts said: misery, melt him and drip him as the rain of time
His organs have grown bored with their names
with pronunciation and silence
with stasis and movement
 Singular in a Plural Form 159

His organs have grown bored with him they pass him—he follows them
Melt him, misery, so that he knows if he is he, or someone else

And his ghosts said: Let’s move on

Before us the body is piling itself upon itself
secret by secret
Rot is also a heart
rot is also childhood
rot is also what love is

so that we are convinced

that love is to doubt love
that life is when your eye beautifies the mud that you are . . .

to become filth and filth becomes what your feasts and festivals will be . . .

And so that we are convinced:

that life pretends death
that you become from the beginning dead-alive
alive-dead

And his ghosts said: in the name of your body, dead-alive, alive-dead body
you are not on the edge
you are not in the middle
you are not wise
you are not wild
you are
fall and rise
160 Singular in a Plural Form

the moment you breathe and that repeats

a word not a word
something nothing
Absent what is before Absent yourself
and enter the festivals of erasure and thunder aim release
a command is not a command
a forbiddance is not a forbiddance
Pull out your blood thread by thread
follow it
become violent turn to kindness
penetrate Ø
without direction
without method
collisions
leaps
do not try to overtake others
burn thrive
become the place that has no place
time that defeats time
become desire desire desire
conjure the body
name it your messenger
your mouthpiece

7.
In the name of my dead-alive body alive-dead
body has no shape
my body has as many shapes as its pores
 Singular in a Plural Form 161

and I am not I
and you, woman, are not you
and we correct our pronunciation and our tongues
and we invent words the size of tongues and lips
and chin
and the beginning of throat
and our bodies enter the depths of jungles and weddings
They collapse
they build themselves
in the gales
of feasting
that has no shape Ø
slow fast
toward what we named life
and was the beginning of death

In the name of my dead-alive body, alive-dead

cedars rise between my name and face
language returns to her first house
Love was a grave I entered and abandoned
and the grave a stroll I took to give my arteries some rest
Grammar and conjugation died
They were stuffed into the hands of my first poem and my last
and this throng of words began to rule and arbitrate
vindicate and indict
so that night arrives
so that daylight flees the day
162 Singular in a Plural Form

and daylight comes

to chase night out of night
and so that the earth keeps the memory of grass
it covers itself with straw

In the name of my dead-alive body, alive-dead

now the body can distinguish between my body and itself
He can capture one organ with another
fight one cell with another
He can plant my blood and harvest it
and my body can be my body
Ø against my body

8.
INVOCATIONS

A:
Peace to you body
music released by pleasure as melodies that guided me
I loved them and delighted in them
I arranged the four chords according to the four types:
singular yellow bile
dual blood
tripartite phlegm
quartet black bile
and I ran the rhythm through countless rivers
Peace to you, body
 Singular in a Plural Form 163

B:
Come near me, olive tree
let this refugee embrace you
and sleep in your shade
Let him pour his life on your good trunk and allow him to call you:
woman

C:
‘‘At night
we, the women, leave our beds
we go naked to the edges of the village
we carry wands the color of dirt
we spray water on them
we lie on the dark earth
then there is cloud
then there is rain’’

D:
Lie down, beautiful woman
on this beautiful grass
place a beautiful flower between your thighs
and tell your beautiful lover
to remove it with his most beautiful part

E:
Strip naked, rose tree, wear the moon
Come down, master Moon wrap yourself in the rose tree
We have placed a ladder for you
164 Singular in a Plural Form

We made the rose tree’s foot the last of the ladder’s steps
adorned it with other flowers
decorated it with etchings and drawings
of roosters in the wild
of eels in the sea
so that we see the wedding of sky and earth

F:
You, who were followed by a woman
who covered herself with scraps of schoolbooks
and wrapped her head with rose coronets
her name was Princess of the Grasses
and her name was Feast Day
and her name was Words
You who have gone
we are now besieging your name
circling it
believing you are a tree
We break you branch by branch
make a doll out of you, wrap it with straw
and toss it to the foam
And we say:
foam
too
is one
of the
sea’s
keys
 Singular in a Plural Form 165

G:
Bring me a strand of your hair
tie it to a branch
place it in an embrace as wide as the wind’s horizon
in the eyes of lovers

9.
Peace to corruption peaceable as air
natural as if it were genesis itself
Peace to unseen machines I invent to create my other bodies
other hearts
Peace to my star sitting on the edge of the chain
who makes borders out of my foot and arms and flags
Peace to my face following a moth following fire

Shall I separate myself from myself ?

Shall I mate with it Is mat
ing a moment of singularity or doubl
ing? Shall I take up another face? and wh
at does a body do that is spotted with wounds that do not he
al? It is the desert
closing in on me locusts
gnawing at my peripheries

Death, sit somewhere else

and let’s swap faces
I make out of my pulse a sap for my alphabet
166 Singular in a Plural Form

I make you skin

I name you vision
the taste of things
and declare
I am the idolater and destruction is my worship

And man, I say in your name:

smile, river, to your drought
rejoice, flower, between thorn and thorn

And I say in your name:

in ashen things I open a body and scan its realms
where the rainbow walks with the steps of a child
and my imagination can prey on my eye
and destroy the bridges between me and what is around me
and I may rise and catch the surrounding air

And man, I say in your name, whispering to your ghosts:

perfumes that exude desire
adorn yourselves
and become my air

And I say in your name:

always on the lip of madness
but I never go mad
 Singular in a Plural Form 167

Sit down, dear death, in another place and let’s swap faces
I name you ‘‘body’’ and ask Ø
how can I live with the body I accuse
when I am the accused, witness, and judge?

And I name you my body

and I look to you to it breaking apart and assembling
the arm a leg
the wrist an ankle
the hand a foot
the shoulder an elbow
and what remains is not what remains
and I surrender, I the steadfast one
like an avalanche
my neck falls into the clavicle
which falls into my chest
and the chest falls into the backside
and the buttocks fall into the thighs
and the thighs become lead sinking at my feet
and my muscles light
up with their own light

And she says in my name

I name you lover
a face for the animal
a face for the vegetable
I listen to your hallucinations rising
among the panting of the elements:
168 Singular in a Plural Form

Dhal e Ta X:
—Woman, my state follows your motions
Night and day are my letters to you
They urge each other like two mares in a race
How can I quell my upheavals
while the need for you has beaten me?

Wawu z Nuun x:
How do I quell my upheavals
when need for you has beaten me?
Are you weeping?
Fire will not burn a place touched by tears
This is why I weep
Carnation grows in tears
This is why I weep
Yesterday I read: ‘‘Each desire is cruelty except
mating Ø it softens and purifies’’
This is why I weep

Siin i Alif Æ:
—Enter, woman, as if you have made a hole through hell and left it or
like a woman buying perfume with bread
I count you and find some of you missing
I become time within you, I planet my parts around you
I had befriended myself in you
and when I followed you
 Singular in a Plural Form 169

I said
parts of the self
chase after one another

But
why am I too much for myself and too little with you
why, whenever you come near me, I feel as if a part of me has disappeared
Nonetheless, enter
My body is still moist with your memory
But how can I quell my upheavals
when need for you has beaten me?

And in your name, man, I say to her body

your body is my voice I hear it
my vision lay scattered in it your body is my departure and each cell
is a leaping point
Your body is my harbor I mislead the ports Your body is stone
and aims to keep me
Dust flies me
Your body is my oblivion
and it shades me
Your body is your realm and I am its winged beasts
your body a rainbow and I am climate and change

And man, I ask in your name

Have I become desert no shelter in me
Have I befriended someone who purifies me?
Whoever shields me from words
170 Singular in a Plural Form

falls to grief
and from signs
shrinks to nothing
How will the cage be broken open then?

And she says in my name,

invent for your body what contradicts it
become a gust of wind and pebbles in one body
complete your body with its negation
let language take the shape of the body
let poetry be its rhythm

Sit, dear death, in another place and let’s swap faces

I say in my name and yours
we misguide life and it steers us on
What shall I do
when my body is wider than the space that contains it
when I am the seeker
and there is nothing but death before me?

And we say in her name, in your name, in my name

Because of you I have crystallized
and now wish to be obliterated
I opened you with my body Ø but
how do I seal you?
And though I am corrupted with you
I am a thing that leans on no-thing
 Singular in a Plural Form 171

not tied
or welded
not opening—
I flow without stopping
and my body tumbles with it, and falls
between two parentheses about to re-unify
I am the healthy-ill the meridian of sex Ø
I conquered
defeated the ‘‘how much’’ and the ‘‘how’’
crossed past all that is said

Still,
I have grown tired of your image on regions and layers . . .
I seek divine protection for our names from all certainty
(certainty is the trap of conscience
and to know
is to
know Ø and not know)

This is how I move in the chains of my madness and I vary the links
this one, my steadfast one
my changeling
my rock-like
body
and this way
and this way
and this
172 Singular in a Plural Form

This is how I ask:

you are my path, how do I walk you?
or
ask
Are you a false legend told about me?
This way
I deny all that breaks me apart
and all that gathers me

And man, I say in your name:

I am water playing with water
The Book of Similarities and Beginnings
1980
This page intentionally left blank
 175

SEARCH

/ . . . A bird
spreading its wings— Is it afraid
the sky will fall? Or that the
wind is a book inside its feathers?
The neck
latches to the horizon
and the wings are words
swimming in a labyrinth . . . /
176

THE POETS

No place for them, —they warm

the earth’s body, they make
for space its keys —
They do not create
a lineage or a home
for their myths, —
They write them
the way the sun writes its history, —
No place . . .
 177

THE EXPERIMENT

Fine, I will not sleep

I’ll study these roads, and know what the others know.
Fine, I’ll join this crowd, —
a step, two steps, three . . . /
a dead man, a policeman
a dead man, a policeman
a dead man, a policeman . . . /
/ And you will not be a witness against us /

Here I am in the ocean of words

sheets floating on top, — and I see that I am repeating what others have said
and I see that I am asleep.
178

CHILDREN

Children read the book of the present, and say,

this is a time that blossoms
in the wombs of torn limbs.
They write,
this is a time where we see
how death rears the earth,
and how water betrays water.
 179

PRODIGAL

No horizon between us—

the trees of love were dust
and night was a carriage ferrying my steps ferrying the desert toward itself.
No horizon between us—
the hour was nakedness
and my death was cloth:
Inheritor of sand
carrying black stones for bread,
the sun is his water and his shade.
180

THE BEGINNING OF DOUBT

Here I am being born—

seeking people.
I love this sighing, this space.
I love this dust that covers brows. I am illuminated.
I seek people—a spring and sparks.
I read my drawings, nothing but longing,
and this glory
in people’s dust.
 181

THE BEGINNING OF POETRY

The best thing one can be is a horizon.

And the others? Some will think you are the call
others will think you are its echo.
The best thing one can be is an alibi
for light and darkness
where the last words are your first.
And the others? Some will see you as the foam of creation
others will think you the creator.
The best thing one can be is a target—
a crossroad
between silence and words.
182

THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK

A subject or a pronoun—
and time is the adjective. What? Did you speak,
or is something
speaking in your name?

What to borrow? Metaphor is a cover

and a cover is loss—
Here is your life being invaded by words.
Dictionaries do not give away their secrets. Words
do not answer, they go on questioning— loss
and metaphor a transition
from one fire to another
one death to another.

You are this passage being deciphered,

born in each interpretation:
There will be no way
to describe your face.
 183

THE BEGINNING OF LOVE

Lovers read their wounds, and we wrote them

as another era, then drew
our time:
My face is evening, your eyelashes are dawn.
Our steps are blood and longing
like theirs.

Every time they awoke, they plucked us

and tossed their love away and tossed us—
a flower in the wind.
184

THE BEGINNING OF THE ROAD

Night was paper and we were

ink:

—‘‘Did you draw a face, or a stone?’’

—‘‘Did you draw a face, or a stone?’’
I did not answer
nor did she. Our love

our silence—has no inroads

like our love—no road leads to it.
 185

THE BEGINNING OF SEX

Rooms bend inside our arms, sex raises its towers—

A fall, a tumble
into a bay of sadness
a sadness
in the bays of our waists—sex opens its doors—and we enter.
Fire was sowing, night is harvesting its candles—We make a cradle out
of a hill, we fill the crater in, we whisper
to the horizon to give us its hands.
The light of bitterness is like a river whose banks
have gotten lost. We make its water
ours, and turn our banks
into a cloth
to cover love’s shores.
186

THE BEGINNING OF THE NAME

My days are her name

and the dream, when the sky spends its night inside my sadness, is her name.
Premonition is her name
and the feast, when the slaughterer and the slaughtered are one, is her name.

Once I sang: every rose

in fatigue is her name
in travel, her name.

Has the road come to an end? Has she changed her name?
 187

THE BEGINNING OF ENCOUNTER

A man and a woman,

reeds entangle them, reeds and moans.
Rain and dust meet,—
heaps of rubble collapse,
and from the language of ash, a spark.

Where is the oncoming cloud,

where is the book of sorrow? I ask—
Your eyes are bewilderment
and your face hears no questions.

I am the end of night

I love so that I begin.

And I say, they met

a man and a woman
a man and a woman . . .
188

THE BEGINNING OF SEX II

A room balconies darkness

the remains of wounds

a body breaking apart—
sleep

between one loss and another

Our bloods spin their dialogue

and our labyrinths are words
 189

THE BEGINNING OF WIND

‘‘The body of the night’’

she said
‘‘is a house
of wounds and their days . . . ‘‘

We begin the way dawn begins. We enter shade and our dreams entangle.
The sun opens her flowers: ‘‘Foam
will come dressed up as the sea’’—
We try to measure
our distances. We rise
and see to the winds that erase our traces.
We whisper
to recall our times
then we part.
190

T H E B E G I N N I N G O F D E AT H

Death rises in steps—his shoulders:

a woman and a swan.

Death descends in steps—his feet:

sparks and the remains
of extinguished cities.

And the sky that was all wings, expands

and expands—
 191

T H E B E G I N N I N G O F P R O N U N C I AT I O N

We can now ask about how we met

we can now utter the road of our return
and say: the beaches are abandoned
and the forts
tell the story of destruction.

We can now bow and say: We are done for.

192

T H E B E G I N N I N G O F N A R R AT I O N

Lead was whizzing past

children were shrapnel or flags.

—Here are the bodies of the burned

the slaughtered
the ones who died for freedom.

Sun spots
and words now, all words
have become Arab.
 193

THE BEGINNING OF SPEECH

That child I was came to me

once,
a strange face.
He said nothing— We walked,
each of us glancing at the other in silence, our steps
a strange river running in between

We were brought together by good manners

and these sheets now flying in the wind
then we split,
a forest written by the earth
watered by the seasons’ change.

Child who once was, come forth—

What brings us together now,
and what do we have to say?
This page intentionally left blank
The Book of Siege
1985
This page intentionally left blank
 197

DESERT

The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust.
Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space.

No road to his house, a siege,

and his house is graveyard.
From a distance, above his house
a perplexed moon dangles
from threads of dust.

I said: this is the way home, he said: No

you can’t pass, and aimed his bullet at me.
Very well then, friends and their homes
in all of Beirut are my companions.

Road for blood now—

Blood about which a boy talked
whispered to his friends:
nothing remains in the sky now
except holes called ‘‘stars.’’

The city’s voice was too tender, even the winds

would not tune its strings—
The city’s face beamed
198 The Book of Siege

like a child arranging his dreams for nightfall

bidding the morning to sit beside him on his chair.

They found people in bags:

a person without a head
a person without hands, or tongue
a person choked to death
and the rest had no shapes and no names.
—Are you mad? Please
don’t write about these things.
A page in a book
bombs mirror themselves inside of it
prophecies and dust-proverbs mirror themselves inside of it
cloisters mirror themselves inside of it, a carpet made of the alphabet
disentangles thread by thread
falls on the face of the city, slipping out of the needles of memory.
A murderer in the city’s air, swimming through its wound—
its wound is a fall
that trembled to its name—to the hemorrhage of its name
and all that surrounds us—
Houses left their walls behind
and I am no longer I.

Maybe there will come a time in which you’ll accept

to live deaf and mute, maybe
they’ll allow you to mumble: death
and life
 The Book of Siege 199

resurrection
and peace unto you.

From the wine of the palms to the quiet of the desert . . . et cetera
from a morning that smuggles its own intestines
and sleeps on the corpses of the rebels . . . et cetera
from streets, to trucks
from soldiers, armies . . . et cetera
from the shadows of men and women . . . et cetera
from bombs hidden in the prayers of monotheists and infidels . . . et cetera
from iron that oozes iron and bleeds flesh . . . et cetera
from fields that long for wheat, and grass and working hands . . . et cetera
from forts that wall our bodies
and heap darkness upon us . . . et cetera
from legends of the dead who pronounce life, who steer our life . . . et cetera
from talk that is slaughter and slaughter and slitters of throats . . . et cetera
from darkness to darkness to darkness
I breathe, touch my body, search for myself
and for you, and for him, and for the others

and I hang my death

between my face and this hemorrhage of talk . . . et cetera

You will see—

say his name
say you drew his face
reach out your hand toward him
200 The Book of Siege

or smile
or say I was happy once
or say I was sad once
you will see:
there is no country there.

Murder has changed the city’s shape—this stone

is a child’s head—
and this smoke is exhaled from human lungs.
Each thing recites its exile . . . a sea
of blood—and what
do you expect on these mornings except their arteries set to sail
into the darkness, into the tidal wave of slaughter?

Stay up with her, don’t let up—

she sits death in her embrace
and turns over her days
tattered sheets of paper.
Guard the last pictures
of her topography—
she is tossing and turning in the sand
in an ocean of sparks—
on her bodies
are spots of human moans.
 The Book of Siege 201

Seed after seed are cast into our earth—

fields feeding on our legends,
guard the secret of these bloods.
I am talking about a flavor to the seasons
and a flash of lightning in the sky.

Tower Square—(an engraving whispers its secrets

to bombed-out bridges . . . )
Tower Square—(a memory seeks its shape
among dust and fire . . . )
Tower Square—(an open desert
chosen by winds and vomited . . . by them . . . )
Tower Square—(It’s magical
to see corpses move/their limbs
in one alleyway, and their ghosts
in another/and to hear their sighs . . . )
Tower Square—(West and East
and gallows are set up—
martyrs, commands . . . )
Tower Square—(a throng
of caravans: myrrh
and gum Arabica and musk
and spices that launch the festival . . . )
Tower Square—(let go of time . . .
in the name of place)
202 The Book of Siege

—Corpses or destruction,
is this the face of Beirut?
—and this
a bell, or a scream?
—A friend?
—You? Welcome.
Did you travel? Have you returned? What’s new with you?
—A neighbor got killed . . . /
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..

A game/
—Your dice are on a streak.
—Oh, just a coincidence /

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..

Layers of darkness
and talk dragging more talk.
 203

PERSONS

Ahmad . . .
stars under his eyelashes
and spiders weave his dreams.

Suleiman shines with his own centrifugal pull—

he says, I found my way, then lets go of his eyelids
to the light that shined inside his house.
The face of the world outside was a crow on his windowsill.

Qassim did not say, ‘‘the dream carries an axe.’’

‘‘The dream heads to its field,’’ is what he said.

An oleander burst out crying

when Ali covered his face with its petals—
He was weeping for the birds that left
paying his condolences to the sky.

Suddenly, at the intersection of two paths, a face—

Is it him? But he died, or it was said he died. Noise
cars
sellers of lettuce and tobacco.
204 The Book of Siege

Should I call him? I call—a face—

I could not distinguish its features, he answered . . . Hello
What is his name?
Noise and bullets—suddenly a droning
the sound of a truck . . .

Every day
he awakes before the sun, to see out from the balcony
how flowers
greet dawn’s first steps.

—How does space enter his bloody room?

—The high fires of his limbs.

Apologize
to the paths that your steps have led
astray and succumb
to the prophetic darkness—
you are more than a trespasser into this Arab ascent.

Neither these orbits nor this hurtling language

could tempt you out of the city’s wounds.
It was you who surrendered to a passing moment—
your steps
 The Book of Siege 205

are nothing but prey being chased in the wilds of memory.

Your body is now a candle of doubt
and the place is a torrent of terror. Your eyes do not close
afraid the place will abandon them.

I don’t want you to talk or gesture. It’s better

that you remain an absence
so that you remain a question.

This was an alleyway to her house—many times

the trees there hid us—and on its features
we drew our steps.
Here Marwan brought his friends together
and their covenant died along with them
and erased these steps with it.
They took him to a hole, burned him.
He was not a murderer, he was a child.
He was not . . . was a voice
rose like a wave, rose with the fire, rose in steps of space
and he is now a reed flute suspended in the air.

Her kerchief was not to mask his face

or to block the dust or wipe away tears, her kerchief
was a plate of bread, cheese and eggs, and it was a wrapping
for her machine gun
and her kerchief was a flag.
206 The Book of Siege

He left the caravan

its trumpets and raucous air—
alone and wilted—
and that wilting flower
pulled him toward her scent.

You’ll continue to be my friend

between what was, and what remains
among all this ruin.
You’ll be my friend, light
that dresses itself in cloud, O master that never sleeps.

He did not notice clouds, did not notice fire.

From where will the water come?
Will he drag his steps toward words
and follow the caravan of things?

She took a piece of bread / the child

was playing with her cane
and pitter-pattered in her footsteps.
She carried him like a jewel, flooded him
smothered him with her face
and went on limping her cane
an inheritance from a father
who was murdered.
 The Book of Siege 207

Day is a loaf of bread

and evening is its duration . . .
and evening is a loaf of bread
and day is its duration—
paper blowing in its wind.
Winter will be long—
spring will die without song—

Is this an elegy for Laila who had not died?

Whether you were someone or no one

a flash of lightning or a cloud of ash
among the severed limbs of this age whether you were tossed into the darkness
of the abyss
or covered with mountains of foam
you are still the flavor of dawn, you are the light of distances,
you this horizon of
your suns, you this echo that still resonates.
For your song—my voice chokes up, my storms hesitate
and when I sing you at last, your face remains your face,
but your death becomes mine
except that I am alive inside a hemorrhage of your wound
and within the fire of its pain I explode.
I clear a space in myself for myself . . .
Your blood sepulcher reconciles me with my life.
Like you I travel deep into tragedy, massacre and terror
208 The Book of Siege

dig into your steps and mine,

and death becomes our Arab predator.

You died, but you are now my song and my companion.

I am not of you, but I belong to your murmuring, to whatever storms and torrents blow
between your arms
and your path is not my way to light, but it is my path
and I am now closer to you than yourself.
And when I approach your death, I ask, ‘‘Are my feet on the ground?
Is my body firm and set?’’
Do you think I am hung in a space of terror surrendered
and dangling?
And when I lean toward your death I ask, ‘‘Are you closer to me than I?’’
and I ask,
‘‘is earth my country
or is my country the death of your alphabet?’’

Let’s say, there was a covenant of sap between us

a road from root to blossom.
Let’s say, whatever there was between the first clot and its creator is now broken
let’s say, we begin now in the migration of the wind through the forest of sparks
and let’s walk, not to this place, or to that place.
Let’s walk to where there is nothing but road and this vow between us—
We are a fire of pull and push, our visions
and steps are an orbit
for the myth of our time.
 209

CANDLELIGHT

Through the years of the civil war, especially during the siege, I learned to create an
intimate relationship with darkness, and I began to live in another light that does not come
from electricity, or butane, or kerosene.

I despise these last two lamps,

they spew a foul odor that kills the sense of smell and poisons the childhood of the air and
the air of childhood. They repel the eyes with a beam that pierces vision like a needle.

Moreover they bring petroleum to mind and how it has transformed Arab life into a dark
state of confusion and loss.

The other light I love is the light of a candle.

An impulse makes me wonder, was this new companionship a celebration of childhood or a

desire to celebrate it? Was it a way to tap into the imagination of our ancestors hoping for
more than the poetry they left behind? Perhaps I longed to attach myself to the body of the
alphabet, as it had been imagined by that wrongheaded Phoenician who invented it and
suffered the consequences of his invention. I say wrongheaded, and I ask him across the
distances that separate us and unite us, why did you not let us write with the bodies of things,
the things themselves, and not these letters steeped in abstraction? Isn’t matter closer to
man’s nature, more deserving and expressive than these signs and symbols? And can you
prove, that you and your offspring who improvised upon your invention in this city of Beirut,
that the writer who inscribes letters and words and writes in bundles is more reasonable and
210 The Book of Siege

understanding than another who only sings words and runs them between his lips? You
yourself can see that those who took up your invention made a swamp of the world with
noises that pollute everything, while the other transformed sounds into musical chords
where the voices rising from the throats of nature intermingle and soar.

I chose candlelight as my companion though I never cared for the shape or color of the
thing itself. The one I have here is sky blue, an unusual find, and I had no choice in the
matter. That was determined by what was made available to me, and that in turn was
determined by time and circumstance.

A skyblue candle . . . It set me in a mood reminiscent of lives spent in caves, caves that led to
our first conscious choice, which ties us to the first womb of our knowing: our exodus from
the world’s night to its day, from the dimness Plato spoke of to bright life, from delusion to
truth.

But have we truly left the world’s darkness? I wondered as I watched the shadow the candle
spread on the ground or on the wall, and the shadow my own head made. And I began to
realize to my own dismay that this shadow we call delusion is not less real than myself or the
candle. And I said, as I witnessed death snatch many around me with the speed of a wink,
that we still stand with our backs to the sun. Perhaps Plato was the first to make this mistake
and we have persisted since then in separating shadow from light, truth from illusion, setting
eternal boundaries between them. But where does illusion begin and truth end?

A candle in a skyblue dress . . .

Some of us perceived ‘‘light’’ and ‘‘truth’’ according to Plato as only an ascent on the ladder
of electricity, and the higher one rises, the more deserving he becomes of plucking a star
and making a throne for himself out of it. This may explain the reason why people looked at
candlelight with a degree of revulsion and contempt . . .
 The Book of Siege 211

I was among a few who were taken instead by the notion of descent, by shade, this
transparent night that braces vagueness and clarity, making them move as a single wave. We
used to say that illusion, or what was called illusion, was nothing but a truth our visions have
yet to discern, and what was called truth was nothing but an illusion we have exhausted. We
used to say that the normal state of things is shadow, and light is its transitory condition. For
if the whole world had turned into light, or to an electric light, the whole world would lose
its secrets, beauty, and attractiveness. So I sided with shadow and shade, and accordingly, I
sided with the candlelight while others sided with bright electric light. Their enthusiasm
grew from their belief that electricity was the offspring of an ancient Phoenician energy that
had existed for only a short while, only to appear again in a non-Phoenician shape
somewhere else.

This energy was symbolically, or let’s say mythologically, represented, in a Lebanese, Greek,
Syrian woman whose name was Electra. She, of course, was Cadmus’s sister and he, a
Phoenician who brought the alphabet to the West, Greece to be precise. She was the
daughter of Atlas who carried the sky on his shoulders, and niece of Prometheus who stole
fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. From Cadmus’s line comes Euclid, who was the
first teacher of optics (or let’s say electricity) in the Egyptian temples, focusing mainly on
yellow amber out of which the most beautiful prayer beads are made.

I wish to remind those who do not like prayer beads but love electricity of something they do
not know, or ignore: only through touching prayer beads can we touch electricity. This amber
body that rubs against ours without shocking us due to the quality of its shadowy light is a
transparent night dressed in stone. How pleasurable it would be, dear reader, for you to hear
my friend Samir Sayyigh talk about this electrified body of amber and the electricity embodied
in it. When Samir speaks of prayer beads, examining them and running them over the tips of
his fingers, or gently touching them with his lips, you begin to feel as if a great many clouds are
gathering, and that lightning is about to strike and overwhelm the place.
212 The Book of Siege

And Euclid himself is an early example of the interaction between the Phoenician/Egyptian
and Greek sensibilities. I have read also that Euclid was as long ago as 610 b.c. the first to
predict a solar eclipse.

I was recalling this mythological history as I sat in candlelight and compared it with the
living history we were experiencing then minute by minute, written with iron and fire,
rockets and bombs, and with human limbs, by our cousins, ancestors of Moses and Solomon
who are among our own prophets. Solomon, tradition says, had a way of speaking with
inanimate objects and living things. And Moses was the first human to whom God had
spoken, a singular honor indeed.

I was comparing this mythological, pagan history and this real Godcentric history that we
live today, and so I wish to register my surprise:

There was man who never spoke to God or never even knew of him, and who had no light
except candlelight. He nonetheless was able to create a history that lifts mankind and the
whole world and that opened before them horizons where they could proceed endlessly.

And here was man to whom God had spoken and whom he preferred over the whole of
creation, granting him electricity as if it were a dromedary crouching at his feet, and he
creates his history beginning with murder then descending endlessly into an abyss of severed
limbs and blood.

As I was thinking and deducing, I embraced the slim shadow of the candle and began to
whisper some of my secrets to it. Then I turned toward the Mediterranean and listened to its
groaning not far from our bodies, half frozen from confusion and terror, or from death that
could strike us at any moment. I turned toward the sea, who invented the light of the world,
and began to share in his rocky moaning rising from the ocean’s dark.
 The Book of Siege 213

It’s the siege: A flood, but where is the ship, and where shall we go? Nothing awaits us except
that mechanical specter, the F-16, that plans to turn us into a golden ash from which a
murderous lot among our cousins, the offspring of Moses and Solomon, intends to use for
their new crowns and thrones.

Each time the darkness pushed us into it, the candlelight held us, and returned us to its
shade and to the real living moment. This is how we rose back to ourselves and their
besieged light.

After this departure and return some of us would open a book to evoke another time or
mood more than to read per se, especially since some of us have developed elaborate
criticisms of reading: How can you read when you are sitting inside the book you read, and
as you find yourself moving within each line of it? How can you read when you are what is
written and what is read?

As for me, I sought companionship in other things. I imagined that the candle before me
has been traveling a road that it has followed from an inherited instinct. A road taken by an
ancient grandmother, followed by granddaughters and their granddaughters. I imagined the
corners that this candle had inhabited and the people who loved it as it burned between
their hands. And often I imagined hearing Abu Nawwas∞ comparing its light with the light of
the wine he drank (wine is another electric body and the difference between it and amber is
that the first is liquid and the second is solid). And often I imagined the poet Abu Tammam≤
turning in his bed in the light of a dim candle, his eyes have reddened and he in vain is
trying to sleep and failing because his limbs are on fire. I also imagined that this candlelight
would not attract poetry’s other clowns and brigands who, in this human desert, would have
preferred the light of the stars. Sometimes I imagined the Sufis and I could almost touch
their longing to melt in God the way a candle melted before their eyes.
214 The Book of Siege

Candlelight does not lift the covers over the one who is lost alone in the past or the present;
it lifts the covers off the faces that remain beside you as you sit or lie awake late into the
night, witnessing their bodies melting drop by drop.

The faces of the people who lived in our building would throng and gather around the light
of a candle, creating a panorama of wrinkles, features, countenances, blank gazes and
quizzical looks:
a face of a still lake without the flutter of a single sail
a face in the shade like that of a sheep led to the slaughterhouse
a face drowned in its sorrows like a hole in the darkness
a face, a white page open to the silence
a face, a sieve through which words drop and spread in all directions
a face, a book in which you can only read forgetfulness, or more correctly, the desire to
forget
a face of a woman who is a man
a face of a man who is a woman.

The light lifted the cover that concealed the candle from which it shined, and the candle
who is the mistress of silence, and who burned without moaning or seeking help, is another
face of night even though superficially it belongs to the day. Candlelight illuminates but it
does not spread the day. It makes night denser and more present. Candlelight allows
revelation, but does not reveal itself.

The candle is the light in liquid shape, is a night inside night, or night weeping, or night
wiping its eyes with the edge of a distant star, or night dressed in a nightgown, or night when
its desires have awoken . . .
 The Book of Siege 215

A candle has a bed, but lacks a pillow and does not sleep . . . perhaps to dive deeper into the
waves of night; perhaps to attach itself into the gorge of another night which is death;
perhaps to deepen the meditation of the outside world that blazes—the houses that rove the
ether, the bodies pierced by flack, the climates filled with the pollen dust of flesh and bones
where bodies that do not know each other embrace and acclimate, the thunderous voices
that weave a fabric for a horizon made of ash and embers; perhaps so that we understand
that hemispheric dust that carries principles and ethics, virtues and ideals, and their seas,
making out of them this expendable dirt that we call the glory of wars and their victories, or
so that we become convinced that what was called man was in truth an animal who by
mistake became able to walk on two legs.

Once again the candlelight takes us far only so that we return.

Return to the light of the interior at hand, that room at the bottom of the building, which we
have called shelter. This is when night takes on the shape of a desired body, a man for a
woman, and woman for a man.

This way all time becomes part of night, and in living with it, we begin to see desire dripping
from its extremities, and we see how its legs open and close in a motion made more agile
and expansive by the small, narrow shelter. We begin to feel that the moon and its sisters, the
stars, are an invisible river that sleeps within. Lighthouses from another strange ecology
begin to illuminate and reveal to us connections among contradictory things, uniting people
who would never meet anywhere else and for any reason.

It would have been easy, in the state we were in, to believe what was said about the ancients,
who were called saints in the language of old, how at night light used to drip from the
extremities of these blessed beings. Their heads brightened all that surrounded them and
they served as guides for the lost.
216 The Book of Siege

Taking advantage of the situation he found us in, someone in our group would begin to
speak of the virtues that fueled this internal light. He said these saints were inextinguishable,
that they were a light that illuminated light as they have dedicated themselves to the
shattering of darkness. Our companion compared this light with the loose light spewed by
rockets and bombs, affirming that those who spread such a powerful light, though they speak
of nothing except freedom and progress, are disseminating nothing but another name for
darkness that has no place in nature, a darkness-light intended to put out all light, whatever
it may be, and wherever it is found.

And he would continue, assured by the silence of the others and the appreciation some of us
have shown, saying that the ancient Egyptian farmer who used to write his dreams and
delusions on papyrus paper in the light of a slim candle, or the Phoenician sailor who
befriended the waves and shores, was richer and deeper in his humanity and in his
perceptions than today’s human being who is proud that he rides mechanical specters that
can destroy in seconds whole cities, and whole populations with their villages and huts.

The slim candle is about to go out. Good for it. It’s as if it too hates that light flashing from
rockets and shells, that oppresses the throat of our Mediterranean, tearing at its vocal cords
which once sang with distinction in the chorus of humanity’s glory.

And you, are you growing bored, dear reader, from this ancient one striking into the depth of
history? But don’t you too see how poetry can spring out of what we imagine to be poetry’s
contrary? And don’t you also see that what we call reality is nothing but skin that crumbles as
soon as you touch it and begins to reveal what hides under it: that other buried reality where
the human being is the poetry of the universe.

I said ‘‘the universe’’ not so that I could escape this dark, narrow shelter, but so that I better
roam all the expanses it contains, and all the internal light with which it abounds.
 The Book of Siege 217

A reckless perfume descends the dark stairway to the shelter. Leave the door open, or we’ll
all choke to death!

The candlelight is not, as it appears to me in this shelter, a light, but another sort of darkness
that makes limbs glow with their desire to possess themselves, the desire to know ourselves
and to know nothing but ourselves for a brief time, and to be possessed, or in possession, of
them. This darkness, this secret light, can wrench you even from your shadow and can toss
you into a focal point of luminous explosion. And you begin to feel, you who are unified and
coherent, peerless and singular, you feel that you are always in a state of waiting, expecting
some event, not on the outside, but inside you, in your guts. It is a condition that could be
called cloudiness. You do not know if you are in rain or in sunshine. And darkness no longer
becomes darkness, but a climb toward the threshold of an internal light that is just about to
glow. This is when it becomes possible to speak of the light of darkness as it would be
possible to speak of the darkness of light.

This is how the candle brought me back to the night of meaning—to a deliquescence into
the obscurity of existence. The night of meaning— I see, behind its terraces, our first
house—the first childhood, and I catch a glimpse of the lantern that I used to seek and in
whose light I surrendered to the whims of my body. There I retrieve some of my old habits,
how when I slept I placed nothing between the dirt floor and my body except a wool rug—a
beautiful bed made of light’s dust and the ether of dreams. Sometimes, I was glad to have a
rug made of tender reeds.

This is how the electricity of life grew inside my limbs:

Electra was sometimes kind to me then and spent a few hours with me.
And my friends, the poets, used to sit with me and speak of other energies that these
suspended modern tubes were incapable of containing.
218 The Book of Siege

The night of meaning— I used to feel my body extend inside a stream of sparks. I will try
now to translate to my body what remains of that memory:

A. I used to sleep alone,

afraid that solitude might leave me.

B. It is not possible to make the world more beautiful.

This is when it comes to an end.

C. Nothing needs me
because I need everything.

D. Death is near
because it is an idea not a body
and love is distant
because it is a body not an idea.

E. A mountain roofed with fog:

an adventurous man.
A forest roofed with fog:
a woman dreaming.

F. Dreaming is a shore
for a ship that never docks.
Nonetheless, I still belong to dreaming.

G. Cleanse your memory

of every moment that did not know how to meet you.
 The Book of Siege 219

H. This tree did not return my greeting.

Is it because I greeted the wind first?

I. My sadness wears night for its dress.

It has nothing to wear during the day.

J. The road is a sign of happiness

because it is an eternal crossing.

K. Water is an eternal lover

for one reason:
It knows nothing about failure.

L. Death is both a god and a devil.

This is why no one loves him.

This is another mood that will overtake you in the light of a candle: You seem to yourself to
be in your normal conscious state, but it is the body that thinks now, not the soul, rather this
tangle of motions we call the body. You’ll discover here that what we call thinking has limits,
and that it too possesses a body. And we discover that what we call madness is perhaps
nothing but the exhilaration of life: a euphoria of body-soul. It’s futile then to subjugate the
apprehensions and achievements of this being, or to imprison it in any cold, ethical
designation. The energy for meditation and the energy for action become one—a motion
open to the world, in a world where things are open to the senses, and the senses open to our
inner visions, and where our thoughts of reality, mankind, and history crumble into dust.
220 The Book of Siege

You cannot stop yourself once you have been illuminated by the light of a candle, you
cannot overcome the feeling that you are not in a shelter, but in a ship that is lost and clings
to and embraces the high waves of the sea. You begin to confuse things. You come from
nowhere and go to nowhere. The West in your step is merely a shadow, and the East is mere
soil. And you look at people in this dark extremity and they become things, not made by the
hands of God, but by other hands and with another clay: This one is a pistol, and that one a
bullet; this one an explosion and that one a bomb, and the place a fighter jet-ghost.

Enter the abyss then and read in the pages that are called faces, read all the varied ages and
epochs, from stone to atom, passing by Noah’s ship and her sisters, the ones that course
through the desert’s sands.

Read: The man is a gray lump, with a pointed or rectangular shape. The woman is a red
structure, round or bent. The man almost man, and the woman almost woman. You cannot
tell if they inhabit clay or if clay inhabits them. But you must find out, you must address your
questions to this species that talks about things of an utterly different nature, things like
heaven and hell, Satan and God.

And read: Even the sun’s rays appear like spider webs weaving the street/
The street that is still woven by priest, colonizer, and capitalist—the three symbols of three
European periods that met in Lebanon, surround us in this shelter, and are applauding
another accomplishment: the limbs that now fly about as smithereens in the deep darkness
of Beirut.

/ . . . And I used to read in the light of a slim candle how space begins to bow, and how all
things also bowed. It must have been for a reason, I used to think, to erase the barriers
between the visible and the invisible, to mix times together, to mock that upright stick called
the sky.
 The Book of Siege 221

. . . Night with its huge yellow legs is stomping on a yellow earth: This is when I began to
blather. I saw terror bring its fog and it began to roof our heads with it in the shelter. And I
saw the abyss embrace our days, the abyss through whose cracks I heard the sounds of the
nearby sea, and its wrinkled face, and the spots that colored the edges of a horizon that lay
on a pillow of foam.

In each of our hearts there was a pulse that nestled itself inside each second. We were like
creatures from another nature, sucking on night’s blood, not to strengthen ourselves with
thought, but so that we can shake the hand of the oncoming dawn.

I return then to the warm companionship of the slim candle, to Cadmus and Electra, to
names born under flame, from Gilgamesh to al-Mutannabi, passing by Imruulqais and Abu
Tammam, and not forgetting Abu Nawwas; and from Homer to St. John Perse, passing by
Heraclitis and Sophocles, Dante and Nietzsche, and not forgetting Rimbaud: the light of an
ephemeral candle that becomes an eternity of stars.

The scent of the candle climbs the dark walls, then descends and stretches
over the book I had used as a portable pillow.

It is morning: the sun renews its time and life renews its flesh.
222

THE CHILD RUNNING INSIDE MEMORY

An arch of basil leaves, a bower for doves

windows have flung their doors
to the hand of the wind / the fields—
a village of palm fronds and the ink of seasons.

Thunder’s anger and the clouds’ kindness raised me there

a village among whose underclothes we lay
and where fig and mulberry whispered what lips were too shy to say.

At the heights of the palms my memory grew.

Here we harvest sumac and here these beans—
We won’t go without that sweet spice this afternoon—
Here a child holding two eagles
so that roses greet each other.

At the heights of the palms my memory grew.

Violets came barefoot
and why not
since my friend the grass offered me an arm and I gave it my shirt
and we were sheltered under the hand of an olive tree.
I have a wind in the book of green and a promise in blue
I keep a book in the sun’s purse . . .
 The Book of Siege 223

At the heights of the palms my memory grew

a stream of willows, a weeping—
Is it the jinns playing their music
or is this the branches’ tune? Go on humming
willow, and let me listen
and let me see my face wearing yours
a premonition reading the voice of the water in the silence of stone
and blood writing on its leaves
a rain that combs the branches of the trees.

My memory descended
from the heights of the palms / Peace
to my friend, the boy running in my memory
he did not visit me today, did not confide in me
as was his habit—I surrendered my face
to his mirrors: Which of us is lost?
Who is silent, who speaking? His lips
darken—Does he live there now?

Boy running in my memory,

my bleeding wound is painful but
my body grows and grows strong.
The sea and I share the same death—
I am the lark of sadness, the wolf of joy.
And you, rising in these heights
are you a rainbow or are you another wound?
224 The Book of Siege

My memory descended
from the heights of the palms / Peace
to my look-alike, the boy settled at the bottom of memory.
Are you the force bolting in my pulse, are you the fire?
Peace to you, kind friend
you survived by luck and you renamed the moon
a horse sometimes, and sometimes a horseman.
The sun sistered you and you both built
the house you made of straw
and she played with pebbles like you / If you’d only given me your hand . . .

And peace
to you trees swaying in my memory—
Am I your utterance or silence, or what the wind carries toward you
from the dust of other trees?
If only you’d offer me your hands
if only the horizon, awake all through your sleepless vision,
would tell me what happened in the forest of my days, the winds of memory . . .

At the heights of the palms my memory grew—

I didn’t know that a lover’s body is drawn with a swallow’s beak
I didn’t know that only madness knows how to love.

For whom is the star letting loose her hair?

The horses of fatigue will meet her by the threshing floor
a road between her eyes and her hands
a tent . . .
 The Book of Siege 225

Is it true? Take me then

. . . / a pool of sadness and the lakes of night / we dove
and divided the water’s moon.

Yes, it’s true

even the stars dream of living in a hut made of reeds.
This page intentionally left blank
Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter
1987
This page intentionally left blank
 229

D E S I R E M OV I N G T H R O U G H M A P S O F M AT T E R

1.
It came to pass
knives fall from the sky
the body lurches forward
the soul trails behind.

It came to pass
blacksmiths’ hammers knocking inside a skull
dumbness the erasure of races,—
writing: an ideological acid
books: linden trees.

2.
(A)
Where can I hold my feasts of survival He named the language ‘‘woman’’
how can I release my wings writing ‘‘love’’
weeping in the cages of language and began looking for seashells
and how can I live in memory
a bay choked with debris? in the hoopoe’s lexicon
(the allusion is to elsewhere,
not Solomon and Sheba’s queen)
230 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

Will a stone or a poppy sprout between my shoulders, will the animals caged inside me
escape, will I doze off and betray my limbs, will I make plugs out of dirt to stopper my lungs
and lie on the black stone of obedience, will I anoint myself with engine oil and stuff my
throat with yes, yes, no, no?

No, I have no country

except for these clouds rising as mist from lakes of poetry.
Shelter me, Dhawd, guard me, Dhawd∞ —
my language, my home—
I hang you like a charm around the throat of this era
and explode my passions in your name
not because you are a temple
not because you are my father or mother
but because I dream of laughter, and I weep through you
so that I translate my insides
and cling to you as I tremble as my sides shudder like windows
shaken by a wind let loose from God’s fingers.

It is through you that I turn into a breath

that falls from the sky’s lips
and blows into the earth’s genitals.
This is how I embrace you and say again:
You are the body that names tomorrow
and it is on you that the dice of history are tossed.

3.
To make a mirror that deserves me
and to see myself reflected in it
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 231

to shape a space wide enough to contain my horrors

maybe I’ll put on a shirt with ripped sleeves
or walk in tattered socks and shoes
maybe I’ll slit a cloud’s vein
and sate my thirst
maybe I’ll whisper ‘‘Home’’ and only the history
of a dervish fated to die will be revealed to me
maybe I’ll cover his grave with my voice
or try to uproot the Eiffel Tower
and replace it with a sapling of Damascene jasmine
or maybe I’ll invite Adam back to earth
so that he can build a house for his beloved on earth
and call his children home.

Now the sun combs the hair of dusk as the bars of Paris rise up like the Virgin in
her ascent—
I summon angels and ambulances—
I turn into water and flow in the pool of my sorrows
or
I become a horizon and climb the heights of desire.

I know that we die only once and are many times reborn
and I know that death is only useful if we live it through.
I know that the hereafter is this rose
this woman
and that a human face is the other side of the sky.
232 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

I know that my skies will rise from the Edens of Earth

cloud by cloud.
Welcome to history, to its specks of dust!
How can a mortal despair
when the wind is his road?

4.
To my relief there’s no way to meet Richard the Lionheart or Louis XIV
or even Napoleon.
Dressed in fog I was free
and I enjoyed seeing dogs lying on women’s breasts.
I don’t remember seeing a single star dance
or read or walk like the stars of my childhood.
I have had to imagine the stars of my village Qassabin
guiding me as I wandered the streets
listening to people’s lamentations flow
as the Seine refused them reprieve.
He came to the café (the Deux Magots, I believe)
and with him came the church of St. Germain-des-Près,
a sky with a torn spine.
Jean Genet came to convince him to reconcile with God
(if only to discover the hell of heaven)
An earth, that had no wish to look at the sky, came.
Sorcerers came to read the stars
and voices from the Third/Arab world
heavy with messages from the beyond.
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 233

(B)
[(How can I convince al-Ghazzali≤ (in Orly
to see his soul the Third World is a crippled elephant
with Nietzsche’s light? falling with a parachute and saying:
I’ll remind him: ‘‘Paris is allying itself with other planets
You’ve been traveling toward the world learning the revolution of the sun’’
since its creation then suddenly, inexplicably
but you have not arrived)] the elephant dissolves becoming a river of
blood
flooding the houses and shops.)

5.
In the café
I ignore the noise.
I read Nietzsche and imagine him as a flood—
Yes, I should yield to the flood of meaning
bow like a sunflower, befriend the sun
or surrender to the lilies of desire
that float on the lake of my body
and empty myself to become the child
I had wanted to be in the future.
234 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

6.
(C)
Did you see the poet, his face transparent ( . . . in a place shaped like a windmill
in daylight, his feet where time is a wall of words—
lost in night? the mortar holding them together is ink
Did you see him lean his back against —There’s a solitary statue of Don
the light, trying to set water on fire? Quixote made of paper
Did you see his papers turn into crowns in a solitary statue of his horse—
the wind? The air is a cloak
falling from a leaden sky)

Sex assumes the throne:

Wolves, set to ambush their prey wrapped in the fur
of words,
leap out of the fables of La Fontaine.≥
Beggars lie on the bare ground cushioning their heads with empty bottles.
Some of them criticize Mallarmé
some dream of Rimbaud
some read de Sade.

The Sixteenth Arrondissement is a forest of bobbing heads; its museums

are made of sexual organs and can be found everywhere.
Ash covers the surface of space, vocal cords strum like
a warning:

Rimbaud
how can I cross this white world
I whose body is prophecy
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 235

and whose house is the Sahara?

And how can I explain the light from the beyond
with this world’s words?
I must, must . . .
make my own morals
write an inaugural poem for my death.

7.
(D)
They’re preparing their atomic dust/ (. . . this is what is told about contagion
we repeat the prayer of the dead. and how time’s ovaries turned to rot.
From water to sand, from sand to snow Machines cook humans in a purple soup,
the whole world is a fish, caught. an East equipped with gods, invisible to us
except for their cloven hooves
and a West that sees only guts and jaws
as it collapses beneath mountains of
electronic grain)

The East is a wound, its politics pus

and it will rain on the West
and it will rain on houses where the grass
tainted with diesel and uranium grows,
a rain of blackness and mud.

8.
Oh, monsieur’s mistress is pissing on the heads of Les Invalides;
monsieur’s dog is shitting on the pillow of l’Arc de Triomphe.
236 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

9.
(E)
A dead man gives, a dead man takes, Black clouds coming from all
and the one who holds my soul in his hand directions converge
and the one whose soul I hold in my hand the last remaining feasts reach their
their voices converge in a chorus of words end and the atom, a fly buzzing
echoing over the edge of a cliff. and creeping on the forehead of time—
Oh that secret bread
Is this world other that nourishes electric rats!
than what I see?

(F)
And you, supreme roving planets, moved The Western poet
by the flick of a finger must also learn
I invite you to this feast of disaster how to weep among ruins
history spiced by cooks who garnish plagues to write on sand
and where all labor is a sword spearing water. and learn how to bind
balm and poison
to solve
what cannot be solved
and learn
how to praise the wind

(G)
Here where the left builds its nests ‘‘What women! What books!’’
and the right lays its eggs exclaims the revolutionary
I see time rise in hills of white powder as he begins to disappear
while I measure the heights like a dot on a line
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 237

where dream birds soar in a footnote shrinking in a corner.

as the mosque of the Fifth Arrondissement Is your throat clogged with cement?
cleanses itself for worship Did your flood ebb in this café?
and enters the whiteness of prayer And the West, what can it give your
In the morning while Boulevard St. Michel coughs desert
out its innards and falls in a stampede of passersby except more sand
I enjoy watching the sky slip between my shoulders and why is your voice unheard
and a stray cat meow into the ear of the wind. except when it rises
I can detect only two types of people in Paris from the reeds that sprout
one still dreaming, lost among the paths of May ’68, around springs that still gush
one sprawled on sixteenth-century rugs. from your fertile land?
How can I reconcile the ashes of Paris O mysterious guest
with our bleeding sun? take no offense when I tell you
How can I reconcile the shores of the sea ‘‘work before death comes to claim you
we share while I contend with and die not like a moth
the emperors of futility but like a rose’’
and dethrone the sultans of sense?
How can I reconcile the Eiffel Tower
with the basilisk in the Place de la
Concorde—
for the tower is cold and half dead
and the basilisk a beautiful lover
standing tall and upright like an Alif.
Nowhere has the bed of mankind seen
a more beautiful nude.
238 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

10.
Paris (H)
your light deceives me 1. (say that time has come to feast
(it crouches on the ground, that life is a pebble that time cooks
it walks leaning on crutches) that death is life’s raw meat)
should I ask a magic carpet to show me around? 2. (say that words are the offspring
of paper,
prophecies made by the wind)

I take off from Monmartre, from the sill of

Sacré-Coeur.
I land in an oval plate adorned by the lamb
of Jerusalem.
I recognize Michel Simon
who raised goats in his room
I see people like M. Bisson∂
and his wife who groom animals
and hold their funerals.
I visit a secret cemetery (secret
for fear of grave robbers)
and sit in cafés that remind me of the café of the blind
in the Palais Royal arcade
filled with tired people (I)
exhaling their hours like cotton plumes. He sees the sky crucified
on an image of André Breton
and holds a star
deceived by the gleam of surrealism
and lets it weep in his arms
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 239

Paris
I have assembled your severed limbs
inside of me
and I have given you
a new body.
(J)
(The soul is a wordless ghost The phoenix is not a belly;
only the body can speak) it is imagination
So what is the use of knocking
on Karl Marx’s head as if he’s a door
and climbing him like a ladder
I am now tracing the footsteps of the hunchback as if desire can live without arms,
not the one in whose arms as if the dream remains a
frozen river?
Notre Dame slept He gave this speech in the confusion
but the one who can be seen of Bastille Square (and listening to it
every day, that ghost who creeps were Saint-Just, Robespierre, and
along the pavements of St. Michel Danton
and on whom night forms an arch when along with all the rest)∑
it reaches toward the Sixteenth Arrondissement, A voice cried out, ‘‘Death to
the void
where the male body is a zoo that swallows voices and souls!’’
and the female a garden of androgynous plants. Amen! other voices replied

‘‘Ghost,’’ I whisper, then turn to Nerval∏ and ask

‘‘Was the rope as soft as you’d wished?’’

Verlaine,
look, poetry’s arms extend all the way to the Opéra’s
240 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

dome; they’re holding a golden harp.

Oh, look again, it’s breaking into pieces where
your corpse passed heading to its final abode.

Your ‘‘feasts of love’’ rode along the carriage that took

Berlioz to Montmartre cemetery—their neighing farewell.

‘‘Ghost,’’ I whisper again and walk toward St. Germain

to greet Apollinaire: ‘‘Hello, dear ghost, hello to you!’’

11.
The Eiffel Tower Notre Dame The Louvre
(I must be dreaming. The Eiffel Tower has disappeared.
I see the Louvre heading toward the eastern shore of the Mediterranean
as if to follow in Alexander’s footsteps.
Notre Dame falls asleep as it prays it taps the shoulders
of the sky and rests its head on the pillow of its dreams.

The Eiffel Tower Notre Dame The Louvre

The Mosque of the Fifth Arrondissement

(Is a statue going to convince me that a Western virgin was the first to become pregnant
with reason,
and who was it that once said these famous words: ‘‘Now the stomach has spoken,
and we deem that East and West are mortal enemies
and dust shall be their judge!’’
I look at the faces and think, ‘‘There’s nothing inanimate in the inanimate, nothing
inanimate anywhere except in man.’’)
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 241

Notre Dame The Mosque of the Fifth Arrondissement

Weep now, angels of hell
there will be no more visitors for you to burn and relish in flocks and schools.
All the animals will enter Paradise, the speaking and the dumb.

12.
It has happened at last—
the memory of races shall explode—

Abu Nawwas Baudelaire

Among the human clan some can speak Congealed angels of Notre Dame
but never utter a word. need female shapes
They are not mute in order to walk on air
they have no defects
air that refuses to budge
In a desert ripe for invasion unless you blow it from your soul
war erupts where women are broken jugs
among this one and that and this lying in beds beneath
not to liberate anyone the Seine’s vaults—bridges are their
but to preserve slavery floating dreams

A hand now disrobes the air Here the robotic mind wraps itself
and dresses it in clean clothes in Krishna’s robes and the black minotaur
sleeps in the arms of a white woman

My body leads me to a house Angels of wisdom flee their prisons

that I know is not my body to embrace the angels of desire
in a nebula of signs
242 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

It is a beautiful night where each sign is a dictionary

that melts and disappears among my clothes
where God too is drenched
in the sweat of our time

It has happened—
Explode now, memory of races—

Al-Mutannabi Hugo

The creed hammers its nails An age—a brewery from which

prey chased by mice . . . the victims’ blood
and the murderer’s saliva
Creatures with chicken heads pour out together
and the bodies of giants
in kingdoms-concubines . . . Chaos where things mix—
animals made of straw run
Someone holds a spear chased by blind infants
with a head on its blade
a symbol of his power heads like Orpheus’
pieces of corpses and skulls that swim in smoke
commas and motions not in water

Fables pulse vein to vein In a scream that no lips have released

in a history wound in a reel for safekeeping you see hands flailing without bodies
(Praise be to camphor and celluloid!)

Feet walk in tandem, both to the left Workers return at night to their shacks
both to the right carrying twigs which are only
the thighs of the jobless
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 243

Does the body adhere to the state of the soul?

I ask a man in Beirut wearing red slippers
and riding a locust who screamed her refrain at me:
Vanity, all is vanity.
No, no
my body loves this pale sky
My dreams swerve off their course.

I imagine that creature making a noose out of his face

walking along the banks of the Euphrates and the Nile
at the same time.
He hugs the shores of the Seine, Hudson and Thames.
He sleepwalks so that he can feel his limbs.

Praise be to ambiguity!
Should I wait and harvest other seeds instead?

13.
My passion is sprouting seeds secretly, from Heraclitus and Nietzsche
because among my sorrows laurel leaves still rustle
and between my shoulders a sail has set forth
(I had seen it once on the Mediterranean near the island of Arwad
but my memory could not guard its name)
because I am chasing the head of an atom
coming out of an electric cave
wrapped around itself like an onion
spilling the sounds of clerical trumpets
and still attached to the trunk of the sixteenth century
244 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

because all you need now, to make the body of a man

are the legs of an ant and the head of a locust
(and for his soul place anything
that you can buy from the souq)
because the powers of the sky bow before the throne of Joan d’Arc
and because her sword still drips with water
that heals lepers
because the stomach of this age is still Nero’s
because when I read about freedom in this world
I find that I’m chasing a three-colored rat
chasing a cat with two tails and three wings.

14.
Is Paris’s body drying up? I asked myself
in Champs de Mars as I greeted a planet
that soon turned into a clump of mimosa fleece
around which the stars of speech began to orbit—
(they were small, the size of Marie Antoinette’s buttocks)
The trees did not believe the flowers
and the flowers were suspicious of the sun.
The wind did not give a care
and the dust clapped its hands.
While looking at the Eiffel Tower
I saw a girl carry it away in her arms
(it was almost like a Lewis Carroll story, but not exactly)
The faces around me were shaped like clouds that changed color
the heads were neither lunar nor solar
but from a strange planet.
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 245

I find it difficult to describe

(I’ll ask Littré about it)π
Oh, what paradoxes! They’re the only things that make sense.
What contradictions that we can imagine no harmony without!
My musings ended and I turned to Paris again,
Maybe when I dive into the innards of nature
chanting the names of your streets:
Waterfall Street, Brook Street, Poplar Street
Chestnut Street, Cherry Street, Mulberry Street
Plum Street, Fig Street, Rose Street, Linden Street
(and I won’t forget Mouzaïa Street with its ring of Arabic)—
maybe then I’ll tuck your vowels into my name
while the consonants continue their heavenly sleep
or maybe I’ll weave a fine rug out of them so that no French poet,
not even Francis Ponge, can tell it apart from a wing!

15.
She says, it is so
I say, so be it . . .
I toss my pens into a gash on the face of the moon,
I place my memories in a wrinkle on the Seine’s neck.
Run, river, take the dust and its seasons away
and don’t forget the river that runs between you and yourself.
Preserve your femininity that appears as your masculine,
preserve the voice inside that had perfected you.
Flow, Seine
in currents that make silt out of humans and other forms of debris—
246 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

(K)
I see the Seine flowing Time arrives with its beasts
carrying Europe’s moss-slathered bells How does it tame them?
Time arrives with its abysses
I see the Seine flowing— How is it reflected in them?
in its current horses from the Middle Ages Time arrives with its guillotines
chariots from the Renaissance, modern and everything begins to tremble
marionettes Time, your name
Baudelaire’s voice, Lautréamont’s, Nerval’s sticks in the throat
Hugo’s, Rimbaud’s, Mallarmé’s and Picasso’s. a kernel of nausea

It flows, and in its current (L)

revolutions and history (Life wilts in between man’s footsteps—
break into crumbs. Is this why he treats it
as if it is a sign of his impending
death?
Is this why he never stops asking
‘‘Will the world fall asleep
in beds made for murder?’’)

She says, it is so
and I say, so be it . . .
Flow on, river
let the world’s antipodes sit in your lap.
Give them the last inhale.

Water is desire—
the divers who invented desire and lust
keep the banks apart.
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 247

16.
It’s my desire that’s flowing (M)
on maps of matter now. Neither East nor West belongs
Every speck of time is now open to God (Forgive me, Goethe.)
like sexual organs on the beds of space. North is sinking in the ice of memory,
and South, whenever it imagines itself
cured of a disease, contracts another
On my morning walks and consoles itself
from 116 Lourmel Street by repeating this ditty:
to 1 Miollis Street, I read Joy is Sorrow’s
the ocean’s book closest friend
in a drop of water.
I touch a light that lurches
like a plough and I discover how
a poet remains an infant
though he is as old as the horizon. (N)
That’s why I do not hesitate to say: Why do his feet know the Seine
‘‘I and the Other better than they know
are I’’ the Tigris or the Barada?∫
What a fool! He loves mankind
and time is only a basket more than he loves the Earth
to collect poetry. and the Earth more than his homeland
.
I meet Rimbaud unexpectedly
and we renew our pact:
The veil is a light—
West is another name of East.
248 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

17.
No, the body is not a pelican’s or a water lily’s (O)
but under my eyelashes Ophelia sleeps. I—The Seine hasn’t flowed East, not yet
She discovers me by mistake and my dreams (this is not an allusion to the ‘‘holy
turn into rapturous lakes. blessings’’ that Goethe’s praised
in his Divan: the turban, the tent
Now, as Hamlet listens, the curved sword, the dirge)
I tell myself: This river’s waters have yet to mix
Be wise like the Euphrates’
and remember that love and suffering with the planet’s light
come from the same household.
Stop worrying
about day and night
moon and sun.
II—(We haven’t raised
another pillar of wisdom
It is true, as Hamlet has shown to help us build spaceships
that love often breaks out in war to take us, not to other planets
and that the body sometimes needs but to our own homes
a storm to rearrange its parts. or help us build winged creatures
So tonight in Paris I watch over the streets that would take us, the poor of this earth
as they wander about like a flock of animals who dream of pilgrimage
and I see fountains of flame and of circling their idols.
erupt from the thighs of towers. No, we haven’t turned the wind
I mumble: into a perfect roll of the dice.)
Nothing renders me clear as this obscurity
or maybe, nothing obscures me like this clarity.
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 249

III—How can he be so calm?—

a fish in the waters
This is I— of his era
from among my race, I waft like perfume How can he live in a body drained
from a dying rose. of its substance?
I move, slow-surge, I spread How can he take apart a real body
and like a bee I make my own honey. made of his own words
This life is cold a body held up
not even a wound by the columns
nothing but machinery of bodiless languages?
crowding the fields
of human breath.
There is no day or night
only an endless thread of disconnected moments.
The outside is no home for me
the inside confines me.
Among my race I waft like perfume
from a dying rose.
I have no wish to name.
I want to be exalted like light.
I do not want to hold fast any longer.
I want to run alongside the wind.
250

THE CRADLE

(Excerpt)

‘‘Twenty for the price of ten . . . next to nothing, next to nothing,’’ a boy repeats, repeats his
pitch, tossing the threads of his voice toward the Bazz and Nuhas markets, tilting his small
mirror toward the sky and letting its light wander among the shoppers’ feet In an
aromatic storm the markets intersect, arteries and veins in this body that is neither fact nor
dream

SanaaΩ I take you between my arms we walk with men who lift
the day to create a parasol of sadness with women who carry on their shoulders anxieties
the color of raisins their feet bear only one desire—
to be kissed by the wind

Lanterns the Arwa mosque leans on Sheba’s∞≠ calculations, candles

that have gone out but still bear a spark of divine revelation I read their secrets
scroll by scroll I hold back the allusions and the details There’s a
storm building up I ask you, candles,
where are those who stay up all night? Whose finger is on the trigger now?

The entrance to the market / Slow down, this is not water, but blood This is not a
wall but
the backbone of a man who once said, ‘‘NO’’
The end of the market / A woman, an ebony planet in the ether of sighs
—‘‘Will we ever meet?’’
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 251

I let night sleep on the doorstep, while a star was about to break into my room to recite its
body to me
The markets were rocking in waves when I recalled what Hamdani∞∞ had said:
‘‘No woman in the world can match a beauty from Sanaa’’

I speak to Sanaa and walk around Aden

Fishermen draw their shadows on the sea city folks and Bedouins
They press the body of matter to speak and shake the shore’s memory Their dreams are
horses that never stop neighing . . .

A mare of desire—
History, your light and skin play with our desires but your sword is
rusted and we are a stone of want . . . And stone, we chose you from among the
desert’s treasures . . . Because of you we took ‘‘splitting’’ as our name with
you we broke up and through you we firmed up and became welded to each
other . . . To us you are water’s brother
(stone is solid water water is liquid stone)

I say Aden and Sanaa and I harbor this cradle-boat

‘‘ . . . We are Asia and Africa washed in the waters of the future, dressed in the straw of
beginnings . . . We are not made of metal, we are made of man.’’

I say Aden and Sanaa and I mean this cradle/boat

—How can Ghamdan∞≤ remain a young man for thousands of years?
—How can I answer when I ‘‘have fortified Ghamdan with mysteries?’’
(Ikleel al-Hamdani)∞≥
252 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

Sanaa, a while ago I saw an image of you and you’ve changed already you are a dress
opening, lifting softly like an eyelid—how strange this mixture that weaves this moment /

Silk Market
A woman of the jinn of Sheba Her dress (feathers, embroidery, silk fuzz)
Pleasures barefoot her sleeves are birds
A sign board: ‘‘The rising of her motions like female horses
They would not relent except for neighing and frolic’’
(Belquis)∞∂

Grain Market
An engraving: ‘‘This world is never sweet to my eye
and what is not sweet to the eye is not sweet to the mouth’’

Gold Market
A sign board: ‘‘Everything that is near is broad’’
An engraving: ‘‘The wise one renounces life as if death is at hand
and works for eternity’’

Silver Market
An engraving: ‘‘The artisan is conscientious so that he betters himself
He excels at his work to better the world’’

Qat Market
Parchment: ‘‘My hands reach for what my eyes do not see’’
 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter 253

Spice Market
Parchment: ‘‘What I want leaves me, and becomes what I do not want’’

Raisin Market
Engraving: ‘‘I am the shepherd of the quarter; if I drink the whole place
gets lost’’

Henna Market
A sign board: ‘‘What is the color of God?’’
(Belquis)
I have a lineage in the soil of Yemen
I descend with her to the beginnings to better discover what comes:
Anemones
baskets of grapes rise from the soil of the hills . . . breasts in a hurry to be
caressed
and behind them the ceramics of the ages disintegrate Thanks to life and to
her
dual night Thanks to the wisdom of a stone who believes it is my friend
And you, be sure to stay warm, my secrets. Or do I need to cover you too?
Sanaa, the wind carries me I am beginning to master the speech of birds
the speech of all things
The mountains walk with me and the jinns stay behind . . .

I have a lineage in the soil of Yemen

on streets that begin to take on features when facing the light of
day
in night that wears the stars like necklaces and earrings
254 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

in the words that laugh and weep in the depths of everything

in an estrangement that overwhelms my depths
in hands that weave weeping into tents of dream
in an unknown I plant myself within
where the stump of creation had taken root
I say I have a lineage
in the soil of Yemen
I belong to it
a country without age
as if it were
the face of God
 255

T H E J OY I M P L E M E N T

(Excerpt)

Sit down
Let me tell you the story of smoke
This joy implement lives alone in the house of words
She is embraced by a reed that links water to fire
and in the bottom of its pole
where a specter of narcissus floats—the Arab name for the flower of the self—
where history dreams peacefully
under a crescent moon shaped like a pillow on which the reed pipe
leans
The reed is different, and its body does not belong to the
moon
but to someone else
Move your lips it could be you
The reed ends in a globe (also called coconut, pipe, and pomegranate)
On its back is a colorful garden of designs and engravings
Inside it is a dove holding up a lake, almost black, that I cannot see
but I think I see behind it or over it a mountain of smoke
and I see maidens reclined on sofas
One side of the reed is linked to where the smoke is distilled (the tobacco
chamber) and where there is a tip
that will remind of breast and suckling once you place your lips on it
You will ask yourself: Am I not this mixture of fire, water, and air?
256 Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter

Then you will enjoy whispering to yourself: You too are part of this fabric that weaves earth
and sky . . .

The water inside the globe is burning with my sadnesses But my sadnesses are
dressed in silence And in my face nothing can be read except the cloud-cover of
questions And when that red hue besieges my eyes, the fabric that surrounds the reed,
the one that my heart refuses to see except as blue or lavender, I say, ‘‘each color has
an inside and an outside’’ Otherwise life would have choked on the inks of nature, and
space would have been too narrow for the wind I say, the joy implement too is a
neighborhood in the city of my pleasures And what things there are in this
neighborhood! Some of its alleyways are like braids or streams and some of them bear
a great craving as if their embers burned with God’s fire

A light seeps from the water in the oval glass It walks among my limbs It
dances behind my shoulders

My neck is a ladder climbing the horizon and my head is a blue sun

Celebrating Vague-Clear Things
1988
This page intentionally left blank
 259

C E L E B R AT I N G C H I L D H O O D

Even the wind wants

to become a cart
pulled by butterflies.

I remember madness
leaning for the first time
on the mind’s pillow.
I was talking to my body then
and my body was an idea
I wrote in red.

Red is the sun’s most beautiful throne

and all the other colors
worship on red rugs.

Night is another candle.

In every branch, an arm,
a message carried in space
echoed by the body of the wind.

The sun insists on dressing itself in fog

when it meets me:
Am I being scolded by the light?
260 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things

Oh, my past days—

they used to walk in their sleep
and I used to lean on them.

Love and dreams are two parentheses.

Between them I place my body
and discover the world.

Many times
I saw the air fly with two grass feet
and the road dance with feet made of air.

My wishes are flowers

staining my days.

I was wounded early,

and early I learned
that wounds made me.

I still follow the child

who still walks inside me.

Now he stands at a staircase made of light

searching for a corner to rest in
and to read the face of night again.

If the moon were a house,

my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 261

They are taken by dust

carrying me to the air of seasons.

I walk,
one hand in the air,
the other caressing tresses
that I imagine.

A star is also
a pebble in the field of space.

He alone
who is joined to the horizon
can build new roads.

A moon, an old man,

his seat is night
and light is his walking stick.

What shall I say to the body I abandoned

in the rubble of the house
in which I was born?
No one can narrate my childhood
except those stars that flicker above it
and that leave footprints
on the evening’s path.
262 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things

My childhood is still
being born in the palms of a light
whose name I do not know
and who names me.

Out of that river he made a mirror

and asked it about his sorrow.
He made rain out of his grief
and imitated the clouds.

Your childhood is a village.

You will never cross its boundaries
no matter how far you go.

His days are lakes,

his memories floating bodies.

You who are descending

from the mountains of the past,
how can you climb them again,
and why?

Time is a door
I cannot open.
My magic is worn,
my chants asleep.
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 263

I was born in a village,

small and secretive like a womb.
I never left it.
I love the ocean not the shores.
264

C E L E B R AT I N G D E AT H

Death arrives from the back

even when it comes before us.
Only life confronts.

The eye is a road

and the road is an intersection.

A child plays with life,

an old man leans on it.

The tongue rusts from excess of speech,

and the eye dries from lack of dreams.

Wrinkles—
grooves on the face,
potholes in the heart.

A body—half doorstep,
half incline.

His head is a butterfly

with a single wing.
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 265

The sky reads you

after death writes you.

The sky has two breasts;

from them all people suckle
every moment, every place.

The human being is a book

life reads continuously,
and death reads in an instant,
and only once.

What about this city?

In it dawn appears like a walking stick
in a darkness named Time.

Spring came to the garden of the house,

laid down his suitcases
and started giving them to the trees
under a rain falling from his arms.
Why is the poet always mistaken?
Spring gives him its leaves
and he gives them to ink.

Our existence is a slope

and we live to climb it.
266 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things

I congratulate you, sand.

You are the only one who can pour
water and mirage
into the same bowl.
 267

C E L E B R AT I N G A B U TA M M A M

Excerpts from the Memoirs of Abu Tammam, a novel by Mihyar of Damascus ∞

I. Between Jassim and Baghdad

1.
Here’s space taking, evaporating, me:
I move toward someone else.
Night has horses, and the day is a horseman.
2.
There, my senses are traveling,
and are about to pass me by.
And here my voice is about to rise from the throat
of the wind.
3.
Trees are words
and light writes the distances.
4.
I read.
The innards of matter approach me,
and the limbs of time fill up with signals.
5.
Here I am, and Jassim is moving further from me.
My body is splitting away
and my head is running to catch up with it.
I lie under a willow tree.
Why does she refuse to unbutton her dress,
she, who never leaves water?
268 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things

6.
I rove,
listen to the wind moaning in my memory.
I surprise the palms strolling with my steps.
7.
Time in Baghdad is not old or young.
Time in Baghdad is a flower.
I do not know how to grasp it
and not make it wilt.
8.
The stones here wane like faces
and dust drags its cape to the gulf.
In every direction
a palm tree awaits
her share of pollen dust.
9.
Let this sheet of paper
describe what it saw on the banks of Barada.≤
10.
It’s Baghdad’s sun—
why do I guide the horizon to it
and it guides flight toward me?
11.
The nation? Yes,
on the condition that it too belongs to me.
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 269

II. The Story of a Day

1.
Clouds toil for the future
and rain must prove the virtue of that labor.
2.
Ships carry the sea.
Seas
groan under the weight of vessel-dreams.
3.
Frogs wear shoes made of water.
Birds migrate wearing their most beautiful shirts.
4.
The wind falls in the traps it sets for others.
5.
A princess, the sun sits in the lobby of the horizon.
Friends gather,
spiders and birds,
royal butterflies and worker bees,
crickets and lizards,
guests to one desire,
no difference between cicadas and lizards.
The sun rides her carriage
and her guests rule the realm.
6.
From the branches of this tree a voice rises
for the wind to carry
and not know.
270 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things

7.
When the poet writes
he becomes a lyre
in the hands of language.
8.
Because I am often silent
words seep out of my flesh.
9.
Time, you who are stitched to me,
my poetry embroiders you
and my voice is embellishments and decorations.
10.
A body becomes a lily and sleeps in water;
a body rules over a lake of fire.

III. Questions I Did Not Answer

1.
In all you have written
you have only left us another shape of night.
Is this why
there was nothing in your body except light?
2.
You wanted through language to know yourself and the world.
You provoked the thing against the name
and the name against the thing.
They are still wrestling, searching and not finding.
Why after all this
do you seem to know
only the things that have no name?
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 271

3.
Between your steps and space,
letters written by a stranger.
The letter ‘‘Mim’’
you called ‘‘Ha’’
and the letter ‘‘Alif ’’
you called ‘‘Ya.’’
Why, and how, do you maintain
this invisible history?

IV. Questions Posed by Mihyar of Damascus

1.
I descend countless steps toward your pediment.
Sometimes I imagine I reach it
but quickly I discover
there are more steps going down—
where do you live, O near one?
2.
Your poetry was a prophecy that preceded your steps.
Is this why, O grand mountain,
you flutter around us like a wing?
3.
You turn words into pinnacles.
You stay at the highest point
where descent is impossible
and where you wait for fate to reach you.
Is it not heading for you now
scratching the roads with its eyelashes?
272 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things

V. The Art of Poetry

1.
A sheet of paper is the letter (z)≥
flying circles, searching for its pillow.
2.
The seasons are not four.
A week is not seven days.
A year is more than it is,
and less.
3.
The pen writes the paper’s trembling
and paper writes the darkness that melts in light.
Whenever the pen wanted to write the end,
the words led it to the beginning.
4.
The sun washes the body of matter,
and a creature hiding
is now ready to pounce.
5.
In the dialogue between trees and wind,
the lips of the branches
surrender to the kiss of dust.
6.
Flowers dispense their nectar
in bottles the air makes.
7.
A butterfly is a suitcase
bearing colors.
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 273

8.
A picture is a lantern,
a rose-colored artery
in the body of speech.
9.
In words lit by images,
each seems a person
standing and dreaming.
10.
I enter the throbbing darkness
to learn how to welcome light.
11.
Transparency is also a veil.
The sun
is itself a shadow.
274

C E L E B R AT I N G A L- M A ‘ A R I

I. Childhood
1.
His childhood was a friendship between his cane and the road. Darkness was a memory
for his steps. Since then he has joined word and space, combined their faces. He knew
also that death was his sole paradise.∂
2.
He did not walk for pleasure, but to inquire. A certain music accompanied him, a
music rising from trees played by air. Wherever he went he felt he was falling into traps
where he wished to remain.
3.
He never cared to know where the wind was headed.

II. Days
1.
Say, the place is desolate.
Say, the world is clay, and humans are projects for humanity.
And here space is shackled in the chains of night.
2.
Damn this filthy, endless motion,
this four-legged child.
3.
How strange, this age, this vaporous shirt.
How strange this sky,
a roof supported by spears.
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 275

4.
Dust leans on the body.
History: bubbles on a lake of blood.
5.
I am not the lost one.
The planet I live on is.
6.
I merge with the nonexistent
to rotate in the entirety of the whole.
7.
Happiness is born an old man
and dies a child.
8.
Woe to the forest that kills
the wolf and the lamb
in one celebration.
9.
The world is a pot,
and words are its ruinous bottom.
10.
An hour of insomnia rules the earth.
Blood coagulates
and pain is the scent of time.
11.
Here is melancholy
sitting at home secluded from others
not finding a face
that fits its features.
276 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things

12.
Death, you are more truthful to me than my tongue,
gentler than my body, tell me
to whom do I belong? How can I
reshape myself, and move in different ways?
This is an impotent mood.
This is a crippled nature.
13.
Between a dawn rising with the face of a locust
and an evening falling with the eyes of a bat,
their sadness runs on paper
and mine runs with the streams.
14.
Who guides this dust? Who mixes the eye with straw?
I doubted.
I suspected.
Is it because I had the most premonitions that I have become the most confused?
15.
I ask ash and smile,
do you really think there is fire under you?
What wisdom is guiding you, old man?
16.
What right does the chaff have
to refuse the long march
back to the grain?
17.
Summer broke its jugs and winter’s clock has stopped.
There are sparks of spring
rising from autumn’s cart.
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 277

18.
I am not surprised by the man who grows like a mushroom and falls apart like moss.
I am not surprised by the victim
who learns from his killer.
19.
I trust neither sun nor moon,
and the stars are not pillows or dreams.
I trust ash,
where trees are fright
and stone is smoke
where fatigue ruffles its wings over the earth.
20.
Say the dead rear the living
and the world is the garden’s death.

III. Conversation
—What have you seen, blind one?
—How little the world is, how little I am.
—What have you seen, blind one?
—Fire hides even when its flames attack the stars.
—What have you seen, blind one?
—Who should I trust, when my self is the betrayer?
—What have you seen, blind one?
—As if my speech is the messenger of the wind.
—What have you seen, blind one?
—They exalted the heartless, repeated their lies,
and when asked if the lie was truth, they said, ‘‘Indeed!’’
—What have you to say, blind one?
278 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things

—‘‘The body is a rag dragged on earth.

Walls of the world, support me.’’

IV. Letters
1.
You were blind,
but now you are a future.
And here you are reading roads and space,
trees and fields,
and reading people.
2.
You are enigmatic. You say the thing and its opposite. But you do not contradict
yourself. And you do not care for so-called facts, but for discovering paths that lead to
the void, tossing your reader into nothingness. It is not a system, but the air of the world
and its movements and flavor. Is this why you create only what perplexes and destroys?

The only alliance you have made with the world is the bond of writing.
From writing you took your road to meet death. And writing is your death wish, a desire
that flows in words the way blood flows in veins. Are you trying to tell us that writing is
breathing an air that is death?

Death is silence. Writing is preparation for this silence and a celebration of it. We
master the art of silence to recognize the face of death, to learn how to die.

Writing is the body for that which has no body. It does not lead to any certainty, but to
doubt and confusion. Endless questioning. Another kind of death.
 Celebrating Vague-Clear Things 279

Is this why you speak

like the sea forming waves,
the way the desert’s body re-creates itself ?
Is this why you are two selves
that always disagree?

V. Explanations
1.
This is not a world that ends. It is already finished since it is essentially death.
2.
Death negates meaning. Death itself no longer has a meaning.
3.
Life produces death, which is its essence.
4.
Life uproots death to survive.
It is death yesterday, now, and tomorrow.
5.
The human being is a process of continuous death.
6.
Death is a human body,
and annihilation is its home.
7.
Death is separation. The greatest happiness is in not being born, in remaining the unit
of origin.
8.
Life is ailment, and death is recovery.
Death is water for this human narcissus.
This page intentionally left blank
Another Alphabet
1994
This page intentionally left blank
 283

IN THE EMBRACE OF ANOTHER ALPHABET

In the embrace of an alphabet that embraces the earth . . . Qassiyun stays awake
and I rise from sleep.
I write and read and say words to abnegation: not poetry, not prose,
bring on frankincense!
The sun resides inside me Night, offer me your shadows now

Haven’t you learned your lesson? Incense smoke

fills your house, dear lover
Air is now blowing like a cough in the throats of space
—Let me create a talisman for my condition
—I can lift you higher, lover, but who will heal you afterward?
—I will tell the whirlwinds of desire that my body has forests that suit its winds

* He left his solitude and entered exile

* A few steps always separate him
from the front. As soon as he reaches it he finds himself behind
it again
* He has no childhood; poetry is his childhood
* This wine is from the liver’s dust, not from the vine
* Damascus will not live on unless it rebuilds the sky
284 Another Alphabet

Gates
In a morning lifted by wounds, a neighborhood of Damascus escaped the walls of the city
and strolled the orchards of Zainabiya. It said, ‘‘I will never return. I have named myself
Qissa‘a’’
He came
he settled in this neighborhood, in the basement of a cement tower . . .
He spread a bed for dreams that evaporated in the steam of bathhouses he’d read about:
Musk Bathhouse Rose Bathhouse Bathhouse of the Beautiful
Chain Bathhouse Eyebrow Bathhouse Waterpipe Bathhouse
Qaishani Bathhouse Queen Bathhouse

and these are among the most beautiful names.

— Al-shaddad?∞ Is it another bathhouse?
— It’s a paste, a bather uses to massage her skin
ginger and cinnamon oil and peepal leaves
pomegranate syrup, eggs, and myrtle
Some add other contents, harbors for the body’s waves

His cellar seemed like a hovel bleeding,

a cave shaking and swaying about to collapse upon itself.
* Does truth always follow departure?
* Will the world be more beautiful, if it becomes free of ugliness?
* Is blood made for anything, but blood?
* Is writing also a sand clock?
* Is impudence the only flower to which the wind bends?
* Are severed fingers the only ones who know how to weld
history’s limbs?
 Another Alphabet 285

* Should loyalty be to ideas or to their creation?

* Is it a crime here to have a name?
* Is life here a pilgrimage to death?
* Does the veil Damascus wears reveal the city to him?

He imagines the words that echoed within him—the names of trees, stars, and
friends—sit around him under the sole porthole in his cellar
They walk the adjacent sidewalk that he strolls
binding with the dust or the air
resisting the authority of words on paper, or conspiring with new ink
From the lips of this window, words that he cannot confess descend upon him. Sorrowful,
he apologizes to them:
I am not the master of nature I cannot place my head in its hands
He came like one launching a history He found himself bobbing on an
ocean of secrets
* The women came as ships; they had the bodies of water
‘‘They came. Each one greedy, calculating. Blood ran in water’’
(Baladhiri, Futuh al-Buldan)
) * ‘‘The three conquests: conquest of expression, conquest of sweetness,
conquest of revelation.’’ (Ibn Arabi)
) Do not enter the sea, unless the sails are women
* Al-Ghota≤ is a tent and desire is the knot that ties its ropes
* The sky, in an ant’s mind, is also an ant
* You do not need to be a wave to understand the sand

After the bath and the musk

your limbs brighten and rise You’ll desire to stand at the gates of
mystery
286 Another Alphabet

Tell your body then, as it follows its secret, to soak in the light of the door
of deliverance/genitalia—
* No matter which of these two words you choose, you will not
turn words into things
) * Speak about what happened, not about what’s to come. Wage
wars, if you wish, but only between your lower and upper
lips

He arrived
and when he spoke of planets, he preferred Venus. She used to meet him, lying on her
bed, and spoke to him only after she put out her candles
Prophecies, you are exempt from visiting him. His mind is taken by regions that you
would never go to or could return from
* O train of ink, he has no stations on his papers
* Let him sleep in the arm of this word: Love
* He has yet to understand stone; he will not be able to write well
on wings
* Blood thinks, the body writes

As you exit the door of deliverance toward the door of peace, be assured that history is a
tunnel studded with lures of all kind
It is called
the door of the Honorable one, the door of safety. He was too powerful for those who tried to
conquer, he was guarded by trees that resembled bludgeons, swords, rifles. Water nymphs
also protected him, mermaids—the rivers Barada, Aqrabani, Daiyani. ‘‘His name was like a
gate unto itself, for peace and greetings. People came in droves to salute their caliphs.’’ The
arch offered them a place in the shade that now shades new visitors for a new
 Another Alphabet 287

salutation. Light itself is glittering, a mirror in which people find their faces as they enter
and leave. There are soldiers there, like angels that the eye can’t see
* Damascus, your seed is not in his hands, not in his steps, what
good will your fields do him?
* Wherever he finds a storage trunk he stops to awaken
Wadah of Yemen,≥ and invites him on a leisurely stroll

Here is Jareer offering his life to the caliph in the annals of poetry . . . And I see Al-Akhtal
handing his friends, as the caliphate observes, his oldest secrets . . . And I hear al-Farazadaq
stuttering in the presence of a woman who neither praises nor condemns and who spoke
only of love. Drink from Dhil-Rimma’s springs—look at him walking any distance that leads
to the horizon. The caliphs disappear; each one is shrinking to a hair, or a coin, or a sword∂
* My sky—not above my head, but under my shoulder: Peace to
the great Imam
* What wonders in this place that Ibn Taymiya∑ once called ‘‘my
orchard’’
* The horizon distributes the chants of the minarets, while paradise
is spread at the feet of Qassiyun∏
Become a follower of Saturn, so to excel at revelation by the gate of Kissan, or to descend in
a basket, like St. Paul, dangling from the walls, escaping to Greece or whatever is behind the
sea. Like him, do not seek a door for itself, but for what hides behind it. You open it to see
what it discloses/encloses. Maybe you’ll ask, is the body a door? And what is the body’s door,
and where does it lead? And why is it not inhabited by anything unless it is called
ephemeral? Are the most beautiful places the ones that you place your body within, and that
reside in you when you cannot see them? Don’t forget to imagine a door full of beauty open
wide to a door full of emptiness. And don’t forget the iron circle with which you knock on
the door so that you may hear ‘‘yes!’’ It allows you to swim in the most beautiful lakes of
light or allows you to remain in your familiar darkness. Is life a door—real and symbolic?
288 Another Alphabet

Arches lines that straighten, bow, spiral circles and half

circles squares, rectangles, pyramids, pentagons
octagons shapes at the whims of calligraphy

* We met—we did not speak, we gesture

* Streets—rivers rubbing their banks against the music of history
* Jasmine sings in a low voice, walks the alleys barefoot
)* White blood on the moon’s bed
) Don’t place the basket of dust in the hand of the wind
) Misery comes kneaded by the hand of God, stamped with his
seal, and happiness comes a refugee dressed in the clothes
of wilting roses
* Each star has a drum, dawn is a broken flute
) Black angels swim in pools of silver
) Streets—fields of plants that feed on meat
) The sky woke up and began to distribute the morning papers
Reality approaches you lightly and sits you on the tips of its fingers: its stones have vocal
cords, and wherever you turn, reality’s face appears like a mirage kissing the earth. Its days
are a soft soil on which the grass of history grows . . .
Is life here a kind of mail carried in the satchels of sand?
And what is that luxuriant effeminateness that knows how to bring beds together, and how to
climb to the silhouettes of desires and their rustlings? He becomes happy and thinks he is
sad. He is tasting pleasure and thinks he is in pain
Damascus, write again, your history on the fronds of the date palms, on the shoulders of
camels. My road into you is a hard one, and I walk it barefoot
 Another Alphabet 289

Al-Shaghoor Gate—
Dust is a wild horse, no way to tame it. The roads are covered with the imprints of
his feet

Al-Faradis Gate—
Bury him in his blood, forget not to forget him

Al-Jabiya Gate—
a whirlpool inside language’s head—

* How can Jasmine greet a body where only anemones grow?

* What of these names?—
they offer only balsams and there is nothing in their bodies but
wounds
* Dreams, lean your sadnesses on the windows of my eyelashes
* Qassiyun, you who travel while standing still, do you know that
the seasons have given everything else to others, but
entrusted me with their steps?
Damascus,
your shadow wears my body, and your doors surround me. Your secrets fall into me:
Happiness only resides in cuffs and folds

Cloisters
A.
A window-triangle, the light of nature’s essence cascades from it, and gusts of air
shaped like horses,—
(Al-Shaifia Cloister)
290 Another Alphabet

B.
Stairways made of thighs and heels. Henna and saffron awaiting a green shooting star,—
(Al-Qadiriya Cloister)
C.
Salt forgot its feet in the water. The shadow of the world is lead dipped in embers, no
difference there between speaking and mud. If there is such a thing as misery, it must be
happiness. Dust sits down to rest on this threshold. And hasn’t gotten up yet
—Can a woman mate with a male jinn?
—There has been a lot of dispute on this matter
—But it is allowed to curl the hair, and braid it
—A woman in paradise is paired up with her last husband, and it’s been
said to her first—
(Al-Taqwiah al-Hanbaliya Cloister)
D.
Time has soft weak hands, and eternity has a mouth that never stops yawning.
Horses come from all directions and sit among kneeling people. Trees of Damascene rise
take off their underclothes. Ah, how pleasure is effortless and confusion abounds!
(Al-Mawlawia Cloister)
E.
Laurels of stars dangle from the ceiling. The earth ruffles like a pair of wings, the elements
are the cells of dreams. Solitude is the ink of travel,—
(Al-Naqshabandia Cloister)
F.
Walk over the heads of flowers, mix with their blossoms. Your hands are violets and pollen
dust is climbing your body. Here you’ll learn how days have skins more tender than those of
seeds,—
(Al-Rifa‘iya Cloister)
 Another Alphabet 291

G.
An angle holds a brush and draws the emptiness
How kind they are these sails that descend from the sky!
Here the lover enters the species of the wordless and becomes like basil,—
(Al-Baktashiya Cloister)

*Become like the rose and live silently:

If you have to speak, utter nothing but fragrance.
*Is writing a dried-up nectar in an abandoned hive
*Stone is a book that teaches tolerance

Talismans

‘‘Seek a virgin whose time is ripe

undress her, ruffle up her hair
give her a rooster and tell her, rove with it all around the fields.
Your plants will be free of plagues
and the ryegrass will die off instantly.’’

‘‘Take a goat’s hoof, a gazelle’s horn, and roots of the lily of the valley, grind them with
hazelnuts, burn the mixture as an incense around the house.
All snakes and pestilence will disappear.’’
292 Another Alphabet

‘‘Take the heart of a large owl

wrap it in wolf skin
tie it around your arm.
You will be safe from thieves and all insects
and you will be respected among men.’’

‘‘Make a copper statue of a locust

and in the hollow
place a locust and fill the space with wax.
Bury it.
All locusts will disperse and not a single one will remain in the place.’’

‘‘Take some fennel flower seeds

some black alder leaves,
and shavings of ginger.
Mix them and add the mixture to food.
The spirit of love will fill those who eat it.’’
(from al-Milaha fi ’Ilm al-Filaha)π
 Another Alphabet 293

Escapades
What does a wall, what does smoke do between two breasts? What work does a
policeman do what does a prison placed between the liver and
the eye? Is the horizon here a pillar of salt? Oh, this air that fills this
space with wrinkles!

What do you do with the words you unearth while crouching in clay that evokes
Adam? What do you do with cities whose shores are abysses? What
do you do with streets that are nothing but floods of tears?
It’s better that you give this dove a kerchief to wipe its eyes

A cancer devours the body of reality and in the wind there are leaves that had not
fallen from trees, but from people. There is no ash in the air, only in the
lungs

There is no mud in nature, only in the nature of man.

* He apologizes about meeting others, whispering: a female jinn is

staying at my home
* The fingers are the body’s blossoms
* They believe in the planets, and they acquire science by its scent
* Bodies that learn to bow before they learn to walk
* His first wise discovery: People are hens whose teachers are
foxes
* These lines are posted above his bed:
‘‘God is a friend of the poor in dream,
and the rich in reality’’
294 Another Alphabet

* ‘‘The poor are granted stones to suckle until they die’’: the author of this
statement is an ancient one still alive
* He describes people:
‘‘A fertile tongue, and a barren heart’’
and himself ‘‘a healthy eye and a wilted body’’
* He used to say, ‘‘Man is not a body, but a number. Some of him is
subtracted in each passing day’’
* He struggles, but like someone who wants to turn stone into
sheep

I must take apart the body of the night, one piece at a time, to write a single step of
Damascus.
To uncover her day, I must dress her in night, and what I write must be dictated by not
knowing my way.
She is probably right: Writing is for the devils and these devils are her horrors.
Is this how time fortifies itself against her?
To her to this edifice where Artemis once lived I pledge these words.
But will she ever bend to Ishtar’s beckoning?
Prophesy, O Blind One
2003
This page intentionally left blank
 297

CONCERTO FOR THE ROAD TO DANTE’S CHURCH

1.
Why does the air need us, we who were born in the embrace of chains?
Take me, metallic dove, flying goddess, take me where my body intermingles with ether,
and my feet melt in air. Indeed, at this moment, I prefer the face of a god to many human
faces.

The airport—you are here merely as a name on a list. A digit among digits. You cannot exit
the narrow corridor that will fly you away. You are truly left in the hands of chance. Chance,
I say, to avoid ‘‘fate,’’ a word I dislike. Perhaps in your seat, someone who is now dead had
sat, or a child who dreams of being a pilot, a football player, or a woman who does not stop
crying.

No steps, no traces. You create a friendship between silence and your lips. You are truly
alone with yourself now. You fall into it, light and free. You test your silence and fragility.
You have the power now to ask it, are you who you are?

An old man dragging a suitcase stops at an office, asks and inquires. Behind him stands a
skeleton in the likeness of a man. I look at the old man mumbling. I sense what he is saying:
Whoever searches for comfort here is like a man chasing a spider’s shadow.

The airport—a mechanical spider web. Different threads of metal. What this web knows
may make the birds long to have metal wings.
Indeed, what humans need now is wisdom, the untamable kind.
But no one can move like a defiant sage except if he tears the chain of innocence from the
298 Prophesy, O Blind One

sky’s neck, and only if he seats the heavens on the throne of pleasure as our ancestors in
Babel and elsewhere had done.
It’s better for me to place the book of delusions under my arm, and improvise in the name of
the ink of travel.

Travelers—a long rope. I take my place, anxious about the rope. A child stares at me. He
awaits his turn with his mother outside the rope. He can’t remove his eyes from the book
opened between my hands as if he is asking indignantly, is this rope a school, a library?
A child-dream.
Don’t stop dreaming, dear piece of clay.

The last corridor to the airplane. A woman kisses her drooping lover on the lips whenever he
takes a step. A rhythm that equates steps and kisses. Next to me on the plane a woman pours
herself on her seat like a thin light. A crooked nose. She is weeping. I do not dare ask her the
reason.
Perhaps her heart, like this era, is full of holes.
The plane lands—
Wave your lives like a hand, a greeting to travel.
Why does the air need us, we who were born in the embrace of chains?
Before landing,
I was, while reading the air that blows from the living, detecting news from the dead,
not those taken by nature’s wisdom, but
those in whom the ember of war is embedded, and I
had no fear composing this bit of defiant wisdom:
Making death beautiful is a crime,
not like tyranny, but like murder.
But, but, do not stop dreaming, dear piece of clay.
 Prophesy, O Blind One 299

2.
Jerome Bloch, Alberto Caramella, a conversation on the road to Florence about everything
except Dante. I toss my suitcase into my room. The day is hot as if it has just been taken out
of the sun’s kiln. Fawzi arrives from Milan.

—Let’s go first to Dante’s house and church.

The house-museum. Old tiles that have known Dante’s steps and their rhythm, especially
when he spied out Beatrice. Etchings, as if embossed on Damascene silk, decorate the
broad gray tiles that cover the house and its inner staircase. Some of them are now drawn by
the hand of time, and some, time claims, are drawn by the hand of love. In the first room, on
the first floor, you are received by a copy of the death sentence issued in absentia on
15/March/1302.

‘‘The sword first, as it is in the house of the Arabs,’’ I whisper to Fawzi. He answers smiling,
‘‘But Dante managed to escape,’’ and adds, ‘‘Look, these are samples of letters Dante wrote,
metered and rhymed.’’

Three floors are used for his papers and for papers about him. Nothing. I prefer the interior
staircase that connects the other floors, I prefer the windows and the wood. The third floor
has a window.
Three pots of Damascene rose.
Everything remains except Dante.
Other things on display bear his traces in this house-museum, another death sentence on
him, and another on his city, Florence.
Despair in the vision, but the labor and care are matchless.
(No prophet can retain dignity in his own land.
Or rather, no land is ever fit for a prophet).
300 Prophesy, O Blind One

Next to the house is Dante’s church. He stole glances of Beatrice there, stored images of her
in dreams to retrieve them in poetry.
Beatrice is buried in this church. We see her grave, and bid it peace as if we are recalling the
Arabs’ farewell at the beloved’s abandoned abode and the dirges of our ancestral poets.
Before our last look, a throng of women enter the church in the company of a few men.

Next to the house and church, a shabby, pallid, narrow street called Dante Alighieri.

3.
Here where Dante used to dream and where he waited for Beatrice, a single image holds
me: A creature the size of the earth, his head is religion and his body is politics, or his head
is politics and his body is religion and what connects them is commerce.
Also, I see aluminum chairs being taken from cafés and spread out onto the street, grouped
lovingly in the grace of the cathedral that has taken the liver of Florence as the seat of its
throne.

I see nothing around this cathedral except pairs of scissors with sky-colored blades. I hear
nothing except voices rising from the throat of time, or from the test tubes of a science we
have yet to know how to name. I see nothing on the walls of this cathedral, raised high in the
name of the heavens, doubtlessly to imitate them, except angels in the shapes of cars and
bicycles and dancing dolls dressed in pink jeans.

I imagine Florence as a rose bush torn to shreds, blossom by blossom, between the hammers
of tourism and the anvil of globalization. Surely, if Dante were alive he would have
accepted his death sentence, as Socrates did, not to see his birthplace arrested and executed
each day.
 Prophesy, O Blind One 301

I imagine branches searching for air among sun rays that fall like tar on the city’s eyelashes. I
imagine Beatrice sitting at Dante’s doorstep weeping and trying to read Ovid’s ‘‘The Art of
Love.’’

I imagine I see the city’s other son, Machiavelli, walking the thin hair of politics, in front of a
church named after Dante, testing the hypocrisy of the human race and pretending to
himself that he came to pray.

I imagine hearing space guffawing at the death sentences Dante’s city issued against him.

And now, I have become more certain that the prehistory that resides in people’s stomachs is
the one that wrote and still writes the history of their heads.
In fact, since Cain, blood has been the first pleasure.
In the past, one myth fought another, and one idol fought another. Today, one divine
revelation fights another, one sky fights another, all sycophancies for this tortured, wretched
body, the earth.

How do we tell the sun

that her rays today are threads woven to fashion our shrouds?
With what language do we tell her that
her rising is a wound and her setting is nothing but a grave?

Oh, Dante! Tonight I see Florence’s moon. He does not stretch his arms as he used to in the
bed of your days. And nothing rings from his feet on his way to his loved ones except the
sound of chains. Now they break those bells of remembrance between his feet.
As if life is turning (as your friend Al-Ma‘ari had claimed) into a woman beggar and we have
no one to talk to except the dead, as if the sky has been emptied and filled with lead.
302 Prophesy, O Blind One

Dante, the roads to the purgatorio, paradiso, and inferno still pour with tears. There is no
one in the processions of the gods except corpses. Do the gods hate life so much?
I ask you and I cry from the gorges of my inferno: How strange monotheism is! How
wondrous her planets! Why did they banish us from that country whose gates to eternity
were the idols of the unknown?!

Where does the ignorance of your ‘‘paradise’’ come from? Why did you fail to recognize
Eros in its azure hue? Who told her the grave is the warmer home? Who taught her death is
happiness that never dies?

I declare, Dante (as you admit me into your inferno)

that one bough from a single branch of the tree of life is more divine, more glorious
than all the forests of death.

Florence, I wrote nothing about you. Pardon me, I promise to honor you another day.
 303

CO N C E RTO F O R 1 1 T H / S E P T E M B E R / 2 0 0 1 B .C .

Rest your backs against the cedars of God

or surrender to the wheels of the machine.

He, the defiant one, will chart the lower layers of creation,
empowered with water that carries desire
in an essence half lead and half myth,
in the avalanche of limbs
where the elements are shot and matter is shattered.
Eleven September 2001 b.c. 11 September 2001 a.d.
the science of another rhythm to conjoin nature and algae,
throat and sword, wind and soul.

And to you, my people, you may applaud the blood gushing from the vein of goodness
and you may prostrate to the divinity of desire in the temples of evil
in the flood of metal geysers
in waterfalls of fire
in stars carpeted with ash.

Apollo, god, lover, beloved,

can you still distinguish between a face and a pair of buttocks?
And you banished and despised one, rejoice and celebrate.
Paradise is here, there, under your feet.
304 Prophesy, O Blind One

He, the defiant one, will chart the lower layers of creation,
and dive into them, into the deepest depths.
He writes another history for voice, alphabet, and word.
To his right is a dromedary like Imruulqais’s
on his left a spaceship.
(k): a desert that never stops screaming
(o): the work of the wind in the belly of sand
(h): the dream of a body that saw everything while still in the womb
(p): the stars sang
({): the warrior king said:
Do not believe everything, wind. I ask nothing
of you except obedience,
and you, sky, where were you? Why were you slow to respond
when I invited you?

(x): a sobbing in the throat of history—

Averros, Decartes, Hegel,
where are your brains now? In Tiberias? On the Hudson?
Or between them in a red rocket ship?

The present is a slaughterhouse

and civilization a nuclear inferno.

And what do you say about human beings, each of whom lives inside a ball of ice and has
only one dream:
Where to stroll on the surface of Mercury?
And say: who colonizes the imagination of the West?
How can the hand of virtue grasp Moses’ staff
 Prophesy, O Blind One 305

and explode the fury of war?

And how did a thousand and one nights become a thousand and one armies?
And say, who had turned divinity into a form of entertainment?
My certainty resides
in the house of a spider.
And what is this crumbling among the ruins of orbits,
not a planet
and not a machine to conquer planets,
it is the poetry of matter.

Oh how now more than ever my senses need to read the holy books
with the eye of poetry.
Buddha will be happy.
Buddha reads with his body and loves poetry.

The lower layers of creation Kaf t Nuun x(Be)

Coincidence is the creature’s home
not the end of words
not the seal of knowledge.

The lower layers of creation Ta X Siin i

Camouflage your innards, technology. What are you inflicting now
on the body of the universe?
No matter how deep you delve, you will never reach the heart’s unknown.
And how miserable you are, gift of art—
one brush breaking another,
one ink murdering another ink.
306 Prophesy, O Blind One

The lower layers of creation Qaf r Lam v (Say)

p Guantanamo
a prison administered by capitalism on a communist island
a space flooded with alphabets like the clay
of which Adam was made—(‘‘the earth is a whore,’’ you said. But
is she not the mother of all the angels?)
j d Human, animal shapes of all sorts are slaughtered and spread raw on the
tables of time.
Blood spilled as if it is seeping from the gardens of God.
w The enslaver/the enslaved an adulteration or mollification of the
dualism of master/slave.
i j Sanctifying death Virtue that is
evil Evil that is virtue.
And thought that is merely wash water.

In the beginning was crime

(‘‘What do they want
those who do not want peace or justice,
and do not want terrorism?’’)
Saint-Just, for example.

h (Is there anything human in a human being?)

] No revenge without justice: thus spake Aeschylus.
Revenge first, this is how New York speaks.
You have done well, Jim Morrison,∞ speaking of an American night.
Imruulqais, al-Mutannabi, Al-Ma‘ari—
Say: who can now speak well of his planet . . . this Arab night?
 Prophesy, O Blind One 307

Ah, how tired the earth must be!

Truly,
from the struggle between x å and t (fuck)
the world’s tragedy began.

2.
w a procession launches the birth of planets, dragged by a soldier star.
Legs led by blind men where we read
the history of humanity
in a new translation
etched on the page of memory
with a plastic chisel.

And in the forest of uranium mushrooms

we build an oven that offers us bacterial bread.

I wish I knew how to tie the flag to the strings of dream.

I would have entered the bed of an oyster or mated with a tree.

Open my chest wide. Where are your arms, jasmine tree?

And you migrant bird, is it better to be hunted
in the land of your migration than to be choked in your parents’ bed?

Do not forget to kiss for me the first branch that

received your wings and I will kiss in your name
the air, for no reason, except to test the chain that clamps
my lips.
308 Prophesy, O Blind One

3.
V The most beautiful thing that distinguishes the body of the sea is that it is captive
to the recklessness
of waves. When will we place nature’s wedding ring
on the finger of God?
I ask and I know:
Ignorance, here-there, the key to knowledge.
Will I be mistaken if I said to necessity, bring your fruits. And to chance, pluck them?
Will I be mistaken if I said, culture has become a tunnel where we learn
how to obliterate life and exterminate mankind?
We erase color and replace it with mud. We imprison
the alphabet of the tongue and release the alphabet of the foot. We slay
knowledge on a slope of a history dripping with blood.
Will I be mistaken if I say: the road to tomorrow is an open wound?
I will clarify all this in a letter that I will address to the sun.
Life, I do not want to complain about you, or complain to you.
I only want to say this: I am still in love with you.

Gilgamesh on that night of September 2001 b.c.

found the herb that defeats death. He did not know
how to pluck it or cut it. Tiresius’ prophecies later
filled Homer’s eyes with a darkness that slides
down the thighs of the gods on Mount Olympus while one of Ulysses’ flies scratched
the skin of night, night
that walked on one leg while Penelope
woke up screaming: What a world!
 Prophesy, O Blind One 309

Flies in the day,

mosquitoes at night.
And I said to alembics as they conversed with a microscope,
or as they dripped into semiotic test tubes
where love had the shape of an ovum and poetry
traveled at the speed of light, I said,
How weak a house must be
when its wisdom is
dictated by the ink of New York.

4.
A Sumerian God listened to me wetting his feet with water
that unites the Tigris and the Euphrates.
God, you who are also a friend, did you once whisper
to your wife, ‘‘It is difficult even for God
to be himself in this world’’?
Suddenly,
a troop of angels fell upon us and began to stone language.
And because words are fire, silence is the beginning of hell.
I had woven a dress for New York with the threads of this language.
I stayed up many a night there
among the echoes of un-emaciated heifers≤
surrounded by dancing nuclear debris, and I saw
creatures made of cardboard chanting songs
written by hydrogen frogs.
310 Prophesy, O Blind One

5.
You can, poet, poke your nose in everything,
and shove what concerns you into the nose of your era.
You can set up camp on the forehead of the sun, and say
to your armies of images and your powers of visualization to stand guard at night
protecting the earth.

You can declare: Tragedy is the root of sky.

And you can point out: Stone, even in Baghdad, is about to drip out of shame.
It is not improbable that by now
the Tigris is wearing a long gray beard and leaning on a staff
and the Euphrates is trembling in terror
from an attack prepared by the silt of history.
You may not be surprised by this headache that quakes the universe. You may
hear a phone commanding you not to fear, and the most song-filled
of the Arab capitals will dance: Divination has proven
that the whole world is at its disposal.

6.
I was in my wretched room in Paris, trying to have my country sit
on my knee,
not to heal it as Rimbaud did with beauty,
but to catch the scent of autumn that hides shyly within her,
and so that I may compare it with the poet’s face, and possibly declare
new rights for mankind that I still hesitate to announce.
 Prophesy, O Blind One 311

A knock on the door.

No weapons here. Nothing except books.
Huh, who said letters do not bear arms?

Reality tears at Marx’s argument, and here the class struggle is a lost
cloud, and imagination whispers to us, ‘‘I doubt we are
the end of the vegetable horizon. I suspect we are stone tossed into water
to punish the devils of dust.’’

But I have been learning, even before 11 September 2001 B.C., how to color my ink with
resistance, how to place my catch of prophecies midair inside a quiver carried by a lovesick
dove. I’ve always known that bombs do not know enough to envy the planets.
Light befriended everything, and the gods were the skin of the world.
O how words in their old age long for the childhood of the alphabet!
Earth, allow the moon to circle his arm around your waist.
Until that time, the world will sit weeping, wiping its tears
with the bodies of the dead.

7.
How tired the earth is!
—Screams from a green audience.
—Have no fear, my country. This is the way you are. I will take you to the cedar at the end of
time.

8.
‘‘Everything is finished,’’ says a witness who is dying.
It is the era of humans who are not born
until their old age.
312 Prophesy, O Blind One

Truth is dreadful, a creature born dead.

Child inside of me, repeat to me your love for beautiful ruins. Assure me again that to
read is to write the future.
This is how out of destruction and foolishness
I raise my body to you, love.
Peace to you, ether that only the eyes of a lover can see.

And you, poetry,

will you continue your gifts, taking us to coincidences,
states where we see again people, creations, things, impulses,
abundance, diversity, uniqueness,
the wakefulness of nature and the insomnia of matter?

Will you take us where we can declaim:

No star exists that your imagination has not penetrated,
no sky exists that has not pronounced your name?
Will you take us to our same earth, the one that spins
on our wounds, where we can scream:
Rosy explosion in the volcanoes of our lives
when will you put a limit to the despair of this earth?

9.
In fog shifting between orange and the color of coffee,
I try to probe this rising century,
but I cannot detect a gravitational pull
even though I had transferred the whole matter to Mercury
and have thrown my arms waving to Mars and his guests and neighbors.
My path is obscured by smoke and fire
 Prophesy, O Blind One 313

and in all directions I see nothing except a mysterious boiling gushing.

How can I caution of what’s to come,
when caution itself is terror?

10.
Lean on the cedar of god
or surrender to the wheels of the machine.
He, the defiant one, will become a refugee
searching for the liver of the world.

Paths split by the blood of capitals—Jerusalem and cities

that build their thrones on the body’s joints—
where the dead live in books and in windows,
where the living lie in corridors of emptiness,
he will become a refugee, he who grew on the same earth where Christ
was born
between a tree about to be torn out
and a lamb about to be led to slaughter.

And who is he, who faces

four billion
and fifty six million
turns of the earth
around a sun
preparing for its twenty-sixth revolution
in the circumference of the galaxy?
No,
he wishes only to brighten his steps.
314 Prophesy, O Blind One

Love, will you not teach him again

how to mingle with other creatures,
how to pluck the lyre of the universe?

11.
Well,
what will she wear tonight,
this poor lover, the earth,
Ishtar’s linen or New York’s silk?

And you, lover,

with which sky
are you going to dance?
 315

CONCERTO FOR THE VEILED CHRIST

1.
I never saw roads fly as I saw them in Turin, Monday, 18/2/2002. I wanted to reach the
airport, fearing I would get lost, or miss the plane as happens to me often.

At the same time I needed to see the statue of ‘‘the Veiled Christ’’ by Sammartino. How I
envy him his poetic technology that reflects the pains of Christ, contentedly, as no
technology had ever shown them before. A wave in the shape of a statue; the water is a
crumbled, wrinkled kerchief wrapping a body in pain where the wrinkles say:
All of pain is embodied in this body.

I wanted to drink coffee again at Café Intra Moenia on Bellini Square, and to see the
Church of San Domenico and its piazza, and the Nile church (‘‘the terrifying place,’’ a
plaque on its entrance says in embossed Latin), and the statue of the Nile erected to salute
the merchants of Alexandria who built Naples.

But the road was flying under a sun that began to loosen its long braids on
balconies that stretched their rose-filled hands to the horizon. The colors in the opulent
alleyways began to shift to better remember old faces, Greek and Roman, and the echo of
steps . . . (Boccaccio, Petrarch, Thomas Aquinas, Giotto, Sammartino) . . . steps on the same
tile that my feet have loved (everything has changed except the tile).

I recalled Al-Ma‘ari and ‘‘the dust of creation’’ and I said, ‘‘perhaps I should step lightly as I
walked.’’
316 Prophesy, O Blind One

Do you think the dust that covers the gray tiles on the church’s threshold comes from
Aquinas’s body or Giotto’s? Is the hand of that dust now touching my shoulder? And the air
of this era, from which dust is it coming?
Francesca tried to catch signs of that era still waving at us. Francesco tried to record
rhythms for a poetry and music composition we were writing together while we all waited
for Guinaro.

But the roads were flying, and history hung suspended above us not knowing where to place
his feet on earth amidst the throng that reminded me of Antioch and Beirut.

My eyes asked me, how can exile still ring in someone’s steps while exiting a hall at the
University of Turin after he had spoken of ‘‘the other’’
and where he said, ‘‘There is nothing in the self except the other?’’

Thank you Naples for your sun that loves to lean on my shoulder for your breakers that
mirror themselves in my memory crashing against my limbs. Do you still need an
explanation, you, who refuses to read?

Francesca, Francesco, Guinaro, have you said ‘‘meet again’’?

Friendship again but the roads are flying. How can coming together be
like a tree soaring through a cosmos made of cement? How to translate the scent of roses,
beautiful one, who asks about translation?

Translation can grow old but poetry is ageless.

 Prophesy, O Blind One 317

Will Naples remain the sweet air that blows between Beirut and Alexandria? And what is
this time as if carrying its harrowing axe about to strike the face of the east, or as if
Rome is no longer where Rome used to be?

Francesca to the train Francesco to the airport in a little while.

Cars leaping one after the other red is green.

No astrologer has said this but eternity is the light of a candle whose rays break at
the corners of meaning.

Did I say the coffee was not good? Goodbye Francesco, the roads are flying.
I enter the gate that will lead me to the plane.

I discover that I did not check my luggage, and did not get a boarding pass. Here’s
Alitalia, here’s Lufthansa. Roads of the world, guide me!

At seventy, I am still a child. God, what are you doing to me? What am I doing to
myself ? The older I get the more I feel I am an inexperienced child an
ignorant child especially in travel. I need someone to take me by the hand
when I travel. My steps become confused my eyes befuddled. I
feel I should always ask someone to tell me where and how as if I’m inhabited by a
fear of loss of getting on an airplane that is not going where I want to go or
a train taking me to where I do not intend to go. A nail clipper paper
scissors the size of a finger. ‘‘These will not fly with you to Munich,’’ said
the Italian police woman. How did she see in my face a hostage taker’s when I’ve
always been a hostage? ‘‘Very well, you can have them then.’’
318 Prophesy, O Blind One

2.
In the gate I sat to think about what I was and what is happening to me. I
was almost tired from the roads that fly inside me.

This is how I began to write what you are reading now, reader.

The roads are still flying but around the statue of ‘‘The Veiled Christ’’
in Cappella Sansevero—
No, the veil will not unveil itself from its meaning—
Can a single human being be born out of two wombs?

Oh, there isn’t a single star in this drink and the moon that drowned in this glass
has been pressed and choked until it became a crescent, almost. Why
can’t I see the abyss as a green house sometimes? Will I wait long in Munich?
And what will I do in Berlin this evening and where does this desire come
from, to mix letters whose words are not easily read? Why do I feel that order is only
a way of choking words? The plane hasn’t arrived in Munich. I feel I have
not left Naples, that I am still mixed with it. Hybridity or mongrelization?
At any rate, the future will be either bastardly or murderous.

As if I have not left Naples, I who let her be trampled by roads that were flying.

You read your poetry in Galassia Gutenberg. You are surprised that you
have an audience in translation greater and better than in your original language. Is
this the beginning of mongrelization? Pardon me, mother tongue to whom only the
miseries of your children cling.
 Prophesy, O Blind One 319

Francesco, how were you able to harmonize the Arabic rhythms with your Italian cadences
between the word that slides from the mouth of the sky to the one rising from the
mouth of the earth? Is this how the Naples roads, flying among a thicket of sparrow
wings, were rescued by a citizen poet? Or flying out of the chests of Arab
immigrants who spit blood avoiding or escaping that other blood their nations spit?

‘‘I work here. I don’t know when I will return,’’ said a physician.

‘‘I write poetry in the language of the country that sheltered me,’’ said a young man who
looked old.

‘‘I will never return to my country,’’ said a young woman, almost crying.
Indeed, how miserable it is to be an Arab today.
Tell me, you dark, exiled, and banished one, in what language does the dawn of Naples
whisper to you? And you who never fail to wake each day to
embrace her like a child who has just awakened from sleep each day tell
me.

And the roads were flying around the statue of the Veiled Christ.

With a nail, Christ is veiled with a plank of wood with a ceiling of cloud

with the dome of a chemical planet with a voice that crosses continents

with the face of a worker not working with corners leaking blood with
peripheries and ruins.
320 Prophesy, O Blind One

Oh, where does this creature come from from each word uttered by his mouth a
sword comes out striking splitting throats? An angel at times a human at
others.

I know that the light sometimes changes into a mask worn by fingernails.
Cup, with whom will you share your bread?
The body is stubborn and the head has other bread.
Prayer, I invite you to the last supper.

3.
The plane swims. I swim with it over mountains of cloud. It has begun to
land. I now imagine the flying roads of Naples also landing. What shall I
call their flying? You are only passing, cloud that looks like a gazelle.
Nothing remains of a cloud, not even the word ‘‘remain.’’ Landing.
Earth and space on this trip are a single carpet. I am falling asleep. I slept
little last night after I read an article that said, ‘‘sleep little to live long.’’ The plane
has landed. I had never known the irksome face of childhood before this trip.
Another attribute to be added to roads that fly over the Mediterranean.

Who put those rocks on the heads of his waves?

The atom’s inquisition? The blood of wars? And this fire that leaps from
tree to tree in his blessed forests and these graves that open their depths to children
and their mothers. And this everpresent illness wearing a disappearance cloak.

Take my body, Mediterranean Sea. Place it beside Cadmus and Dante.

Repeat after them, Beauty is the earth’s alphabet and the alphabet is the
femininity of the universe.
 Prophesy, O Blind One 321

I think, that I, this planet of dirt,

can no longer see except with my severed limbs.

I think I am preparing to enter through the window of myth.

The sun is rising over the Levant stumbling in her old trousers. Tremble all you want now,
branches of Damascene rose, celebrating the wind.
322

I IMAGINE A POET

A salute to Jacques Berque≥

I imagine a poet
in Beirut, sister to Anatolia, friend of Athens,
a poet who stands with his friend Jacques Berque at the gate of the sea
leaning on his cane.
I imagine his voice as the sound of a tambourine,
that the tambourine is broken in his throat,
that his throat is a fire named God.

I imagine a poet
into whose innards history pours
drenching his words and pooling at his feet,
a poet who rains blood that some hoist as a banner made of sky.

Goddess of doubt, you who were born in the lap of our mother the sea,
why do you not announce this poet and his friend?
Say what you do not see,
what turns time on its back,
what holds the wind standing on tiptoe,
what pours the ashes of silence on the flames of speech
improvised by the world’s prose.
Announce also the inflamed eyelashes
the severed hands
the withered days
 Prophesy, O Blind One 323

and whether the lantern is a throat or a head

and how we can distinguish today between an insect and a flower.
And say is there a means now
to colonize the clouds?
And say
how this Mediterranean still needs
to reemerge from the childhood of the alphabet.

Alphabet, how brave they are these cicadas that inhabit your harvest,
how ferocious these angels that lie in the beds of your forgetfulness!
René Char
where is the storm then,
and why is poetry still an ally of the waves
and why has the sky left nothing of our history
except statues whose genitals have been cut off ?

The poet leaning on his cane

standing at the gate of the sea, with his friend
Jacques Berque
whispers to his friend, or perhaps to the waves:
‘‘If there is a sky, it is migration.’’

And his friends replies, also whispering,

‘‘No
the miracle is not above;
it’s the soil sleeping among the underclothes of the grass.’’
324 Prophesy, O Blind One

What time is it now? I don’t know

except that the spidery arms of the clock spin. Two or three flies circle and buzz above.
Poet, write a poem, and describe the scene
adding the wall upon which you were hung and the curtain
half torn under the lamp and the black window.
Do not forget to allude to modernity so that you may be counted
among the pioneers, but before that, don’t forget to describe the scene,
the old shoe resting alone under the clock as if
waiting for its owner’s return, and beware of the big issues: Poetry
must capture—not the things—but their crumbs.
And let your words rise to their covenant.

Owah!
The moon has fallen sad asleep
on his chair covered with clouds.
And the poet leaning on his cane accompanied
by his friend Jacques Berque
counted the moths that drowned in the clamor of the flame
on that night,
the flame of candles lit by children
who spend their nights standing in foam
hunting the waves.

An evening in Beirut,
lost and pining like a beggar soliciting in the vastness of space
brought down to his knees
resting his cheek on Ulysses’ cheek.
Do we think we are still alive by the shore of the Mediterranean,
 Prophesy, O Blind One 325

have we become herders of the stars?

A rose carries the whole of night in her sleeves,
leans on Beirut’s chest,
and gives her waist to the air’s forearm
while life embraces her hatchlings
placing her feet on the staircase of the future.

Is this really the world?

Shall I grieve? Shall I hope?
I prefer to sing.
This page intentionally left blank
Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea
2003
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 329

The rose leaves its flowerbed

to meet her
The sun is naked
in autumn, nothing except a thread of cloud around her waist

This is how love arrives

in the village where I was born

a
330

Your mouth’s light, no redness

can match its horizons

Your mouth, the light and shadow

of a rose

a
 331

In her name
I do not wish to exist so to exist

I make my lights blaze

and track my time
in her embrace

and I sing to us and sing to her

in her name—

Friend of my capture, her luminous body, teach me how to sing again

a
332

I wake and ask dawn about you: Have you woken?

I saw your face sketched around the house

on every branch I carried dawn on my shoulder:
She arrives,
or is it the dream tempting me?
I asked the dew
on the branches, I asked the sun, have they read
your footsteps? Where did you touch the door?
How did they walk alongside you, the roses and the trees?

I am about to break my days and split in two:

my blood there, my body here—sheets of paper
dragged into the ruined world by sparks

a
 333

I imagine my love
breathing with the lungs of all things
and it reaches me
as poetry
of roses or dust

speaks softly to everything

and whispers its news to the universe
the way the wind and sun do
when they split nature’s breast
or pour the ink of day
on the earth’s book

a
334

Our night is quiet

Over here flowers bowing
over there something resembling a stutter
no trembling, no artifice

Our night sighs in our lungs

and the windows shut their eyelids

—Are you reading?

—Make us some tea —A light
seeps from our bodies to our bodies
and changes the face of the place

a
 335

Every day we reach toward our bodies—

we turn over our days
in their books

One fruit
but the picking is a country
that has no borders

a
336

When we meet wherever our steps take us in cities

or fields let silence
enter its wound-speech

Do you want my love to have a face that lights the sky? Then let
your eyes become a house for my face Take me—talk
I cannot feel the rhythm of my body in your hands and eyes
unless you speak

a
 337

Love, give him, another body

because where no travel is possible

he wanted to take the earth by the throat
and to ascend, journeying
the midday heat of its passions

And now in his earth night has buried

his first murdered body

So yes, give him another body, O love

a
338

Every day
there is a dialogue between my face and its mirror
No, not to read love
and not to read the changes in my features
or the lightness of death in my gaze, but
to teach my love
how to ask the mirror: Why do I not sense
the night-nature of existence, the essence of its unknowns and mine?
Why do I not sense my life
except when I look into my face?

a
 339

Moon—how kind the moon is

when it comes and draws water from her pool
then says goodbye, fleeing
how kind, the bed, the mattress, the covers
where our
limbs used to entangle
in a long embrace as we begged the angel of wakefulness
to walk his bridge
but to slow his pace

How kind the planets were—they sang

whenever evening brought us together
and undressed our news

a
340

How can I call what is between us a past?

‘‘What is between us is not a story

not a human apple or a jinn’s
not a sign of a season
or a place
not anything that could be historicized’’ This is
what the vicissitudes inside us say

How can I say then that our love

has been taken by the wrinkled hands of time

a
 341

‘‘Each love is a misery’’—

or as some of its mad men have said
‘‘Happiness is an illusion in love’’

I do not love so to take something—

My love is not a mask or a flag
The way a spring gushes
the way the sun gleams
I love: a flood no purpose

My love is not illusion

My love is not misery

a
342

Maybe
there is no love on earth
except the one we imagine
we will win some day

Don’t stop
Go on with the dance, dear love, dear poetry

even if it were death

a
 343

I imagine I am the sound of singing

rolling in waves among the bending reeds
I mix with light in the sun’s chamber
in the tents of the trees
I hide
among springs sometimes
and sometimes I descend the slope
of depths I cannot see

Ah love—a spring
falling aslant from the heights of fatigue

a
344

From nothing
where meaning
wanders in the wilds
love comes, and remains strange
wider than we had pictured, and higher

Is there refuge among these embers burning?

a
 345

I will not sing my song—

No song if it is not burdened
with the bitterness of love
and what the wind’s folly leaves suspended
in the air

No song
unless its equivalent
emerges from the edge of weeping

a
346

Ah, no
I don’t want my eyes to swim in any space
other than his eyes No
I don’t want my love and its possession to become clearer
I don’t want belonging, or lineage, or identity

I want us to become a language

for euphoria, an alphabet of limbs

a
 347

Let’s return
to streets we used to wander in
where we saw the world settle
in the lakes of our breathing and time come and go
through broken windows

We walked on our ruins, into the mirrors of our follies

into the dictionaries of dead paper
and our steps left no trace

Let’s walk again

in the gardens of our high days

a
348

I don’t love you except for that I hated you once—

one, multitudinous in his body

Ah, how deep love is in its hatred

Ah, how deep hatred is in its love

a
 349

I measured myself to the woman I imagined

I went out seeking her but found
nothing bearing a trace of her—
no bridge
between my body and my dream

This is how I began to live in what I imagined—

how delusion and I became friends

a
350

I will visit the place that was summer for us

after we traveled
between Ulysses’ shores, through the night of Delphi
and the sun of Hedra
and I will walk the way I used to walk
lost among trees
I will remind his flowers and herbs
of the fragrance of our meeting

They will surely ask about you: What became of you?

Where are you? Which way do you face now?
But
what am I saying?
when seasons have erased other seasons

a
 351

Bitter insomnia comes to light its candles

Should I return my love’s letters to their ink?

Should I tear these pictures?

I read my body now

and I fill the candle of this long night with sadness

a
352

I check my house at night I turn on lights

but they do not light up Windows? I begin to open
the windows but they bring no light / Maybe I’ll find some
light through the door, I say
and begin to plead with it
but it does not illuminate / Darkness here is like a wound
that even as it heals continues bleeding—
Love says to me
Oh Love, how can light shine
when sky betrays sky

a
 353

I began to love that bed covered with our day

On its breast we flung our visions, sighs, and secrets
Now I almost see it staring at me, asking about us—
Our news?
Drowning among corridors, I lean on that bed
and declare my love to that screaming
that explodes in its silences

a
354

Me sleeping? No sleep, only wakefulness that pains me

and infatuations too—the echo of an era: What brings it back?
House? Some pictures here—The key to a caravan
of love letters This is a room whose colors
have dimmed and the ash
of our days is spread all over it Here, books
covered with dust A horizon—at play
in the wind, no lightning in it, no rain—
What are these pictures doing here?

Sleep? No sleep Only wakefulness that pains me

The moaning of our forests The dead our fruit

a
 355

Orpheus—I can swear that I see him—

the women tearing him apart and the wind
running with his limbs
As if touching his cheeks, I ask him:
Which of them cut off his head?
And I am surprised
poetry did not find him
love could not find him

Ocean whose waves intertwine

among the chords of his guitar
console us—tell us

Is it true that you saw Euridice among them?

a
356

I learn—I insert my eye among your eyes’ alphabet

until I see in a moment
how your eyes write my eye
how our limbs fall
in the trap of life
how our dreams dissolve
in the lakes of our motionless days

a
 357

Time is not a bed, the earth is not sleep

the trees of love are leafless
and the place that love desired is bare

Could it be that night awakened his dreams

and they’re now running down the sun’s streets? I suspect
that these suns yawning
in love’s orbit
are nothing to the earth but wounds

I will sing to this place

with the ruins of the lover who came before me
This creation is nothing but a clearing for a song

a
358

Dusk takes time by the throat

and dangles it in a hole
where my love’s prophecies writhe
half-choked

The suns that life still searches for

hide in a child’s face
who emerges from the femininity of his dreams

a
 359

What did we lose, what was lost in us?

To whom do these distances belong that separated us
and that now bind us?

Are we still one

or have we both broken into pieces? How gentle this dust is—
Its body now, and mine, at this very minute
are one and the same

a
360

I vow that you are the root—I tried to read

what remained of it, to pronounce the silence:
No sound How did this muteness
find us, this muteness
that is a language in itself ? My face
and your face, this evening, an ocean
for a wound’s vessel—
The face of its pilot is cold
No place on it for ‘‘no’’ or ‘‘yes’’

a
 361

After all this roving that has filled the world

after the years have worn out my body
I sing to us, to our childhoods

I can’t believe that I have become old, I walk, a stranger

No consolation needed, I do not complain—My love and death
are in one orbit but I still wish to tempt
those that come after me
to light the darkness of eternity
with the body’s glow

a
362

Life took us to it, tossed us

in the nets of its storms and gave its breast
to the windows of our days

When I ask myself: What did we take? and I see I see nothing
in the windows except nets

Could we have deluded ourselves

like our ancestors
that we’re out of the nets? Are we
like our ancestors
who still love the life that loved its chains?

a
 363

Every time you say, ‘‘These are my paths etched on you,’’ languages
that arose from unknown regions of my youth begin to grow
suspicious From where has my conscience gained
this bitter travel into doubt?

Imagined vessel sailing

the darkness of my love’s
tidal waves,
take me to you, help me
hold on to my self

a
364

A barrier between us—

a barrier of blood
a barrier of height

from barren winds

and lightless planets

A barrier that writes death and love in one vernacular

a barrier of powerless desire

a
 365

A room betrayed by sleep No dream And night is a grave

opening, and the door is a cane of light
and the chairs—no joy
A phantom of sand
obscures all their colors

A room—
nothing in it except death reading its walls

a
366

Will it console you that the clouds come and go in seconds

that other clouds come after them?
Will it console you that graves are houses
where people
become equals among their walls?
Will it console you that our seeing

only captures what the clouds draw? My consolation

is that the place from where I came
still whispers its secrets
to me, and that the time to which I belong
still renews its colors
turning over its leaves
in the book of trees

a
 367

Sunset—
Has the hour of not returning to the sunrise of love
come?
A room—and the minarets in every direction
are chattering within the shade of its walls
He remembers A death
on the pillows under the cover
turning its pages Dust
and scrolls of dreams
and dictionaries for dead reality Love—dusk

Ah, how far the East is from love, from its inheriting sun!
Ah, how beautiful tragedy is!

a
368

Here’s her house—

all its doors are wounds
the windows are shrouded
with curtains whose edges
are fringed with strange flowers
without coronets

In the darkness the curtains have imposed

a night of abandonment and despair
Its bleeding specters
settle in the abyss of my stormy depths

a
 369

Have I told you the wound? But (in between there was a lot
unsaid) We entered our house (what we called our house)
Our window was pronouncing our love Have I told you the wound?
(Were you listening?) A wound our night is still
not free from its echo from its chain

Its chain is what we made ourselves believe

was our love

a
370

What is he saying?
Those who loved him have died
Those whom he loved killed him

Springs of his love

if anyone inquires about him, embrace him, and say:
‘‘He walked past here
he did not say his name
and he did not stop’’
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2008
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 373

YO U A R E I N T H E V I L L AG E T H E N

1.
When he leaves home carrying his axe, he is certain that the sun is waiting for him in the
shade of an olive tree, or a willow, and that the moon that crosses the sky tonight over his
house will take the road closest to his steps. It is not important to him where the wind goes.

2.
The blueness of the sky, the redness of fruit, the greenness of leaves: These are the colors
that his hands spread on the page of day.

He is an artist who cares about his hands’ work, not what the hands of art achieve, but the
things inside things, and not as they appear, but how he describes them. And because he
knows how to listen to things and how to speak to them, he lives on the margin of what
people perceive. He believes that ‘‘the order that imprisons motion and interrupts the feasts
of the imagination will only lead to collapse.’’

And it collapses without theatrics or noise. He knows ‘‘that a bullet now replaces his
plough,’’ but he also knows, with growing certainty, that ‘‘his plough will go further and that
it will reach deeper than any bullet can.’’

3.
When you see this farmer carrying his plough, you sense then that he is competing with it as
if in a war. It proceeds ahead of him toward the weeds and thorns and he remains barefoot
following behind. The sound of the plough, as it tears at the thorns and soil, joins you,
374 Printer of the Planets’ Books

penetrates you, and it’s lovely to hear it become loud like a trumpet with a deep raspy blow
filling the sky.

4.
You are in the countryside then. It does not matter where you walk now, near the river or at
the foot of a mountain, or a village lost among the rocks, where mud houses mix with
cement cellars in a folkloric symphony that combines the tenth and the twentieth centuries.
Let your eyes swim in all that’s around them, forget the café and the street. Surrender like a
leaf flying in the air, like the fuzz coating the branches, like pollen dust. Become a child.
Only then will invisible creatures come toward you. Solitude filled with a treasure of hidden
murmurs. Absence that instantly becomes a presence. Each tree is a person, each stone a
sign.

There are herds of small animals that shine like distant stars, among grasses and plants. And
there are stones that have heads and arms and that may walk behind you at night. There are
small streams flitting among small trees that become beautiful maidens who appear to tired
people heading to their houses before dawn, during the first hours of enchantment.

5.
The village is not a poet, as much as it is a painter. There is a remarkable ease to its touch as
it draws the same picture every single day maintaining the same beauty. It is repetition that
does not repeat the same motion, something like the waves of the sea, or like the desert
renewed endlessly in sand, its only dress.

There is no uniqueness to this touch as if it comes from an absolute neutrality forever

positioned at degree zero.
 Printer of the Planets’ Books 375

6.
You are in the village then?
I remember now what I almost forgot. To contradict the light in the village, one will end up
choosing solitude, sitting on the other side of the mountain, or the square, or among the
barefoot children and black goats.

And I remember now that we used to gaze at the stream covered with green grasses, hardly
able to determine its course. We thought it was in pain, and moaning.

And I now know why we felt dried up in the memory of the stream.

And in the days now inscribed in the dust of the road leading to the stream, I also read what
we knew and did not know how to write:

Peace to the sun that always went ahead of us, without ever moving.
376

WA K E F U L N E SS

In the village, I always wake before the sun so that I can take a better look at the first steps
that the morning draws on the stairway of space. Also to better see the wakefulness of the
other shapes on the theater that surrounds me. They are shapes that change according to the
changes of light and shadow. For each tree, for each plant, for each stone there is a wardrobe
full of clothes to wear and take off. This all depends on the place—a tailor with beautiful
hands, a magical face, one cheek in the shade and one in light.

It is a moment that makes me feel that the movement of things is what writes the world with
an ink that is nothing less than the blood of time.

As wakefulness continues, and seeing continues, a feeling fills me that on this stage
appearance is the eternal presence, and that meaning is the eternal victor.
 377

RAG

I walk—nothing to hold on to but hands

that I barely see.
The leaves of time fly about as I ask,
why can I never finish reading them?

At the doorstep of the café, at the beginning of the street, poetry came
and went in the shape of a seer
on a day that was like a rag wet with muddy water.
378

MUSIC

Nothing, nothing—a light wind plays the trees’ guitars.

Nothing, nothing.
Emptiness. No way for words to fill it.

And I dream, dream

and the dream is nothing but reality in its infancy.
So ask yourself then, don’t ask me—
there is no blockade against the horizon except in your mind.
But, it is almost certain
that a poem rises magically like a house dangling from the sky.

In this house an immigrant lives and his name is meaning.

 379

MOTION

I travel outside my body, and inside me there are continents

that I do not know. My body
is in eternal motion outside itself.
I don’t ask: From where? Or where were you? I ask, where do I go?
The sand looks at me and turns me into sand,
and the water looks at me and brothers me.

Truly, there is nothing to dusk but memory.

380

WA R

War—time walks on, leaning on a cane made from the bones of the dead.
Lead holds its feasts on rugs woven by human eyelids.
Skulls pour blood, skulls get drunk and hallucinate.

War—chains proceed in a festival of broken necks.

History is feet, the days are shoes.

War—heads are flung in a dusty field without a goalkeeper or goal. In ash draped on the
streets, in streets dressed in their severed limbs. Not even the sun can illuminate this body
that bleeds darkness. And the sun almost says to its light:
Dazzle my eyes so that I do not see.

War—dawn rusts in an alembic filled with lead, in an air that rots on a horizon of black
magic, in blood that walks the book of dust, in dust that wears human faces.

War—minds collapse, ideas are rags fluttering their flags. Who can say where mankind lives
now? Who can confirm that this is our mother earth? In every moment, one more of love’s
offspring dies. The rose forgets to release its fragrance. War-resurrection writes. Death reads,
the corpses are ink.

War—Will we make paper out of death on which to write our days? Have we begun to
understand the silence of stone, the intelligence of crows, the owl’s wisdom?
 Printer of the Planets’ Books 381

War—the heifer of damnation is adorned with the knives of piety, as if life were a mistake
corrected only with murder.
382

FAC E

The other face/fatigue. When I say fatigue, I mean, daily life. Fatigue is a woman and a
man. Fatigue is a chair or a café. Fatigue is shadow and darkness. It is also the moon and
sun.

These days, these days of fatigue, have their own books, each step a word. And the words do
not end.

The other face / a mixture bonding, breaking apart, bonding in a circular motion that never
ceases. And each face is lonely even when it embraces another.

The other face / the immediate presence rises to the level of poetry and dream. You want to
embrace this reality, to inhabit it, because the fabric is the same, the space is the same, but
each step has its own rhythm and its own horizon. The other face / the debate between
estrangement and union, presence and absence. And so when you walk the Hamidiya souk
it’s as if you see things and you do not see them, as if you are seeking what you do not see in
what you see.
 383

RED

On a rug of red, of roses and anemones, the colors worship in the garden of our small house.
Red is a fabric—some of it is a sheet for the place, some a shirt for time. When red wears its
crown and climbs the ladder of the seasons, the earth waits for it on its green bed.

Oleander tree—each of your branches sways in waves, carrying red howdahs. Tenderly I
listen to you, lips trembling among their leaves.

Red is the sun’s throne.

384

C A F É S H AT I L A I N R O D H A

In the café a pregnant woman talks to her body. Next to her is a bare date palm about to dry
up in sadness because it could not shade the woman. The neem tree in the corner bends
flirting with a man sitting under it. From the nearby waves horses bolt out of the water and
each of the sitters imagines them as his dreams. And in every corner there is a hidden hand
dressing a wound. A light wind filled with the sound of organs, mixing with the sounds of
bells that rise from the throat of the lottery ticket seller, greeting the customers.

The sun has not stopped mixing its rays with the trees and people as it painted the sea.

The café rests its head on the pillow of the horizon.

 385

RUINS

The moon breaks its mirrors on the ruins as Beirut makes crutches out of blood and ashes
and hobbles with them.

It’s true. The sky has chains around her feet, and the stars have daggers strapped to their
waists.

The day rubs its eyes, disbelieving what it sees.

Weep, Beirut, wipe your tears with the horizon’s kerchief. You wrote the sky again, but you
were wrong, and now your wrongs write you.

Do you have another alphabet?

386

T H E S TA R S AT H A N D

A legend repeated here by the villagers says that night in the summer becomes an enchanted
person. He appears in the village throughout the summer, walking alone with his head
bowed. He spends his day counting stars and plucking out comets.

a
In the summer when the sky cleared I used to read the stars by interpreting the lines in my
palm. And I had a friend who opposed me, who read the lines in his palm according to the
stars:
We did not ask which of us was more scientific. We asked, which of us was more poetic?

He used to say: Poetry is nature.

I used to say: Poetry is the unknown dressed up in nature.
The difference between us was unsolvable, but we remained friends.

a
The river dried up.
The ink that wrote the willows dried up. Clover, daisies, and wild chicory were not its only
poems. Be kind, if you pass by, to these notebooks scattered among the hands of the drought.
Be kind to the bowed necks of the reeds, their broken heights. Be kind to the branches of the
weeping willow whose tears have abandoned them.

River, where is the horizon that stretched in your embrace?

 Printer of the Planets’ Books 387

No source, no basin. Mud all cracked up, breaking up into dust. Peace to the lagoons that
were beauty marks on your long throat.

Peace to you, river-grave.

What testimony can I carve for you and what do I write on it?

A fish dried up like a rock, lost among dust and pebbles,

brigades of ants . . . and other insects whose names I do not know,
and the days fall in layers on them like a colorless glue.
This is the path I walked, coming and going
to the river.

Tomorrow, I’ll wake the horizon that sleeps under its eyelids,
and I’ll disobey the rules and repeat:
The feet that walked this earth and disappeared will be replaced
by more beautiful and kinder footsteps.
I hear their sounds echoing the traces of the sun.
388

A CHILDHOOD BEHIND THE DOOR

Since childhood I have felt that I am walking a road whose destination still
confounds me. The summer sun, despite its clarity, was another vagueness. My road—
starting from Qassabin, that weeping rose in whose shade I was born—was a quest marked
by hesitance, wariness, and confusion. I remember that I stepped out with the music of
words that resembled prayers soon after I washed the face of the morning with cold water.
I used to become happy—not in reality, but in my imagination—thinking that I
heard voices saying that the trees here walked alongside a lover when they heard his steps.
Or that they say, in another delusion, they danced in happiness looking at a lover from
inside their home, seeing him go past their windows.
As for the road, it was hard and scabrous, hard to cross even if one had goats’
hooves instead of feet.

a
We did not have a garden. The field facing our house always complained of thirst. Except in
winter, its lips were always dry, its throat choked with dust.

a
When I think now of my childhood days, I am amazed. I grew up among villagers
in a simple rural setting. I never heard any of them speak of death as if it worried them or
that they were afraid of it. They all spoke of it as another spring. And some of them—those
who have experienced death in its different shapes in life—saw it only as a harmless
coincidence, or an ordinary event.
I say I am amazed, and I ask how did it find me this innervation, this awareness of
 Printer of the Planets’ Books 389

death? Why was I as a child constantly afraid of death, as if it waited for me in every step, in
every motion?

I do not know how it happened, how little by little I began to understand the wisdom that
the villagers unknowingly possessed and that I too began to acquire. I thought perhaps
existence to them was a single structure, or a single body like a poem: Life the beginning
and death the end, in the same way that prelude and closure in a poem are a single wave.
Is my nature winter-like, and the other seasons merely images and improvisations?
I ask because I think of death as the winter of creation, and because the old
anxieties return, especially in summer.

a
This moment in summer, under this tree, and among the village children,
reminds me of a moment in spring—the beginning of spring, when we used to rush out
trying to capture the rainbow as soon as its feet landed on our field.
I saw it in the tobacco field in front of our house. The rainbow stood on two poles,
one rising from the field and the other far away, or so I imagined. The sun wore a
transparent veil that only covered half of its face, a gray veil adorned with black and white
threads.
There was no hare or spider web to remind me of what Rimbaud said about the
rainbow he saw in a place he never named.
The tobacco had been harvested.
There were only a few grasses and plants lying leisurely on the field’s naked body.
The colors of the rainbow mixed with the colors surrounding them: green, red,
gray, yellow, and terracotta. All mixed within the eyes of the children who gathered to
witness it.
There was a soft mist falling from the clouds’ inkwells, messages sent to the fields.
Then the rainbow disappeared.
390 Printer of the Planets’ Books

I felt sad and began looking for it. I imagined the place of its first pole and in vain
tried to find its trace.
The clouds took over the sky and the sun sank in a bed from which it did not rise
until the next morning.
I spent the whole day waiting for the rainbow’s return, but it did not. I imagined
that the weather itself had become a lake of tears.

a
Farmers like trees among whose shade the sun comes to rest—
Earlier they carried the morning and broadcast it on their fields, even though the
day was a holy day.
A holy day is not an arrival, one of them said.
A holy day is another travel into the things we cannot stop imagining and that
never happen.
A holy day is not an answer, says another farmer, and adds, it is actually a question
that takes the shape of a throat.
A holy day is our other body exiled inside our body.
A holy day is a field.
Farmers, their steps are ointments spread on the wounds of the road.

a
Something from my childhood still waits for me behind the door. I feel it
whenever I come to my village Qassabin, but I never see it.
Once you told me, I’ll wait for you behind the door—
You’ll mix with my childhood. How will I distinguish you two then? I replied.
I expect nothing from time except that it becomes a shell closing on the pearl of
 Printer of the Planets’ Books 391

meaning. Meaning supersedes time, flooding and hovering. Time is a vessel for storage,
that’s all.

Mix me in with you, dear image.

Not a word from the sea has reached me this morning.
Not a speck of night remains in my bed.
392

TO THE POEM

Will you not change the black dress you wear when you come to me? Why do you
insist that I place a piece of night in every word of you? How and where did you
acquire this droning power that penetrates space when you are only a few letters
on a piece of paper?

It’s not old age, but childhood that fills your face with wrinkles.

Look at how the day rests its head on the shoulder of the sun, and how in your company I
fall asleep fatigued between the thighs of night.

The cart has arrived, the one that brings the letters of the unknown to you.

Tell the wind nothing will bar you from slipping under my clothes. But do ask the
wind, ‘‘What kind of work do you do, and who do you work for?’’

Happiness and sadness are two drops of dew on your forehead, and life is an orchard
where the seasons stroll.

I have never seen a war between two lights like the one that erupted between you and the
navel of a woman I loved in childhood.
 Printer of the Planets’ Books 393

Do you remember how I followed that war? And how once I turned to time and said,
‘‘If you had two ears to listen with
you too would have walked the universe, deluded and disheveled,
no beginning to your end.’’

Will you ever change the black dress you wear when you come to me?
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N OT E S

Migrations and Transformations in the Stage and Mirrors

Regions of Night and Day (1965) 1. Al-Fatiha is the opening chapter of the Quran.
1. ‘Abdulrahman al-Dakhil (733–788 A.D.), an
heir apparent to the Ummayad caliphate, fled A Time Between Ashes and Roses
Damascus when a popular revolt erupted in 750. 1. Imruulqais ibn Hujr ibn al-Harith al-Kindi
The rebellion brought down the Ummayad dynasty was one of the greatest poets of the Arabic language,
and led to the establishment of a new one, the ‘Ab- considered by many to be the father of the qassida,
basid. Al-Dakhil, also known as Saqr Quraish (Fal- and author of one of the famed seven mu‘alqat (sus-
con of Quraish), managed to evade ‘Abbasid spies pended odes). He was born in the Jahili (pre-
and agents who were tracking him. He reached Al- Islamic) era, sometime in the sixth century, in
Andalus (Muslim Spain) five years later after a per- Kindah, which is now part of Yemen. After his fa-
ilous journey. Though most of his family members ther, Hujr, the prince of Kindah, was murdered, Im-
were found and executed by the ‘Abbasid, al- ruulqais ended his bohemian existence and set out
Dakhil, believing himself a rightful heir to the ca- on a quest to avenge his father and assume the
liphate, succeeded in establishing an Ummayad throne. He sought help from various allies, ending
emirate in Córdoba that controlled most of the up in the court of Justinian I in Byzantium; Justin-
Iberian peninsula, which he ruled until his death. ian reportedly poisoned him after discovering that
Ummayad control of the region lasted for almost he had had an affair with a princess in his court.
three centuries. 2. Abul al-‘Ala Ahmad ibn Abdullah ibn Sulei-
2. An area on the outskirts of Damascus. man al-Tanukhi al-Ma‘ari (973–1057) was born in
3. A part of Damascus, and an alternate name al-Ma‘ara, Syria and is one of the great Arabic poets.
for the city. He was a philosopher who embraced rationalism
4. Al-Khidr (the Green One) is a mysterious fig- and rejected religious dogma and Islam’s monopo-
ure in Islam who is known as a guide to prophets listic claim on divine truth. He was the author of a
and saints. He is especially revered by Sufis. large body of poetry and prose, and his best-known
work is Risalat al-Ghufran (Epistle of forgiveness),
5. Jeirun: an area near the eastern gate of
believed by many to be a predecessor of Dante’s Di-
Damascus where a Roman arch stands.

395
396 Notes to Pages 116–213

vine Comedy. Al-Ma‘ari, who lost his sight at the age Mutannabi’s poems are chronicles of his age and
of four from smallpox, practiced asceticism and was demonstrate an unmatched command of complex
a strict vegetarian. Arabic syntax, a diction unrivaled in its richness,
3. Junaid ibn Muhammad Abu al-Qassem al- and a deep philosophical curiosity and insight.
Khazzaz al-Baghdadi (830–910 A.D.) is a leading 7. Dajjal, meaning ‘‘false one,’’ is the Arabic
Sufi saint who advocated a self-possessed form of name for the antichrist.
Sufism as opposed to forms of ecstatic mysticism ad-
vocated by Hallaj and others. His teachings brought Singular in a Plural Form
great renown to the Sufi movement in Baghdad and 1. Bahlul is an Arabic term with several mean-
he became known as Sayyid al-Tariqa (master of the ings, including fool, buffoon, and dunce, or, as the
sect). authoritative Qamus al-Arab states, ‘‘someone given
4. Al-Hallaj (858–922), born in the Fars region of to laughter.’’ The word has other connotations, such
Iran, is one of the greatest Sufi poets. A student of as ‘‘simpleton’’ and ‘‘naïf,’’ and is also associated
Junaid, he was imprisoned and later executed in with an individual who is so taken by the spiritual
Baghdad for claiming self-divinity during the reign world as to be decidedly careless about worldly mat-
of the ‘Abassid caliph al-Muqtadir. His best-known ters and appear stupid to others. The term’s best
work is Kitab al-Tawasin (The book of talismans). translation is ‘‘wise fool.’’
5. Muhammad ibn ‘Abdujabbar ibn al-Hassan
al-Niffari (d. 965). Although Al-Niffari is the author The Book of Siege
of Kitab al-Mawaqif (The book of standings), one of 1. Abu Nawwas al-Hassan ibn Hani al-Hakami
the most celebrated and most elliptical of Sufi texts, (756–814) is one of the greatest poets of the Arabic
very little is known about his life except that he language, known for his simple language and rich
lived, taught, and died in Baghdad. It is also re- imagery and wit. Born in Ahwaz to Persian-speaking
ported that his writings were not assembled by him, parents living on the border of Iraq and Iran, Abu
but by his son or grandson. Nawwas served in the court of ‘Abbasid caliph
6. Abul-Tayyib Ahmad ibn Hussein al- Haroon al-Rasheed, where he wrote numerous
Mutannabi (915–965 A.D.), was born in Samawah, poems that celebrate male homosexuality and wine.
Iraq, and is considered the greatest poet of the Ara- Abu Nawwas became a figure of hedonism and
bic langauge. He was associated with several dynas- mirth in the Arab folk tradition, represented by his
tic rulers in the region, such as Saif al-Dawla of several appearances in The Thousand and One
Aleppo and Kafur of Cairo, for whom he wrote sev- Nights.
eral odes of praise. These were followed by scathing 2. Abu Tammam is Habib ibn Aus ibn al-Harith
panegyrics when relations were severed. Though al-Taii (796–843 A.D.), a great poet of the ‘Abbasid.
often written in the form of praise odes, al- He was born in the village of Jassim in the region of
 Notes to Pages 230–51 397

Horan in Syria. He traveled widely through Syria novelist, known mostly for his 1881 three-act vaude-
and Iraq and worked in several occupations before ville Un Voyage d’agrément.
being appointed postmaster of Mosul. His poetry 5. Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767–
was known for its density and cerebral orientation. 1794), a French military leader and revolutionary.
Once asked, ‘‘Why do you write what cannot be un- He served in Robespierre’s Committee of Public
derstood?’’ he replied, ‘‘Why do you not understand Safety and was executed with him for his involve-
what is written?’’ ment in the Reign of Terror. Georges Danton
(1759–1794), a leading figure in the first stages of the
Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter French Revolution. Seen as a moderate among the
1. A transliteration of l, a letter in the Arabic Jacobins during the Reign of Terror, he served on
alphabet considered to be a consonant sound that the Committee of Public Safety and was executed
only Arabic speakers can make and that distin- by the advocates of revolutionary terror.
guishes Arabic from other languages. Hence Arabic 6. Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855), a Romantic
is called the language of Dhawd. French poet, essayist, and translator.
2. Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad 7. Here the poet is referring both to the Littré
al-Ghazzali (1058–1111) born in Tus in the Khorasan French dictionary and to Émile Maximilian Paul
region of Iran (he is also known as Algazel). He is Littré (1801–1881), the French lexicographer who as-
one of the most influential theologians and philoso- sembled Dictionnaire de la langue française.
phers of the Islamic tradition, esteemed by both the 8. Barada, a river that used to run through
Sufi and Sunni orthodox traditions. His best-known Damascus. It has dried up in recent years.
works are Maqasid al-Falasifa (The aims of philoso-
9. Sanaa is the capital of contemporary Yemen.
phers), Tahfutt al-Falasifa (The incoherence of phi-
10. Sheba here refers to the ancient name for Ye-
losophers), and Ihya ‘Ulum al-Deen (The
men, and of a region in contemporary Yemen.
rejuvenation of the sciences of religion).
11. Abu Firas al-Hamdani (932–968) was a poet
3. Jean de la Fontaine (1621–1695) is a re-
best known for poems he wrote during his captivity by
nowned French fabulist and poet. His best-known
the Byzantines, who imprisoned him in 959 and 962.
work is Fables Choisies, which he expanded and
He was a member of a dynasty that ruled an emirate
published several times.
that dominated northern Syria and Iraq during the ‘Ab-
4. Michel Simon (1895–1975) was a renowned
basid era, and he was governor of the region of Manbaj
Swiss-born French theater and film actor. Simon
on the Euphrates River. He died in battle fighting his
had a great affection for animals. His home on the
cousin for the reign of their emirate.
outskirts of Paris was famous for its menagerie, in-
cluding dogs, birds, cats, and five monkeys. Alex- 12. The palace of Ghamdan once stood in Sanaa
andre Bisson (1848–1912), French playwright and and was considered an architectural marvel. It was
398 Notes to Pages 251–87

destroyed by the caliph Othman ibn ’Afan, whose 4. Jareer Abu Harza Jareer ibn ‘Attiya al-Yarbou‘i
rule extended from 643 to 655 A.D. al-Tamimi (d. 729 A.D.) was one of the best-known
13. Ikleel al-Hamdani (Hamdani’s laurel crown), poets of early Islam, famed both for his odes of
a book on Yemeni history and the genealogy of its praise and his scathing panegyrics. Al-Akhtal is the
tribes that outlines early Arab and Islamic history. poet Ghayath ibn Ghouth ibn al-Salt ibn Tariqa al-
Though its publication date is unknown, it is be- Taghlabi al-Wa’ili (b. 640 A.D.). He was also a poet
lieved to have existed for several centuries. of the Ummayad age and served as the principal
14. Belquis is the Arabic name for the biblical court poet during the reign of ‘Abdulmalik ibn Mar-
queen of Sheba. wan. He composed numerous poems attacking the
Ummayads’ enemies and all who challenged their
Celebrating Vague-Clear Things right to the caliphate. A contemporary of Jareer and
al-Farazdaq, Al-Akhtal, who was a Christian, was en-
1. See pages 396–97.
gaged in several exchanges of panegyrics with the
2. Barada is a river in Damascus, now dried up.
two. Al-Farazdaq is Hammam ibn Ghalib ibn Sa‘sa‘
3. Pronounced ‘‘wawu.’’ al-Darimi (658–728). He is one of the best poets of
4. See note about al-Ma‘ari, page 395. his age, widely known for his panegyric exchanges
with Jareer that lasted for over half a century. He
Another Alphabet wrote praises of the Ummayad caliphs but leaned
1. In the Damascus dialect, Al-shaddad is the toward granting the caliphate to the offspring of the
name for a hair removal gel made with melted prophet Muhammad.
sugar, water, and lemon juice. Dhil Rimma is Ghailan ibn ‘Uqba ibn Nahees
ibn Mas‘ud al-‘Adawi al-Rababi al-Tamimi (696–
2. Al-Ghota, also known as Ghotat Dimashq, is an
735), a poet of the Ummayad age, less renowned
area of orchards and farms on the east and south of
than the three above.
Damascus long celebrated for its beauty and fertility.
5. Ibn Taymiya is Ahmad ibn ‘Abdulhalim ibn
3. Wadah of Yemen is the poet ‘Abdulrahman
‘Abdulsalam ibn ‘Abdullah Taqialdin Abul‘abbas
ibn Ismail al-Kholani (d. 708 A.D.), who hailed
(1263–1328), one of the major scholars of Islam and
from Yemen. He joined the court of the Ummayad
whose influence is still felt. Living in Damascus
caliph al-Walid ibn ‘Abdulmalik. Wadah, who was
during the Mongol invasion, he became a member
known as one of the most handsome men of his
of the school founded by the great Imam Ibn
time, had developed an amorous relationship with
Hanbal (one of the four principal imams of Sunni
the caliph’s wife, Um al-Baneen. When informed
Islam) and sought the return of Islam to its sources
that Wadah was in Um al-Baneen’s chambers and
in the Quran and in the traditions of the prophet
that she had hidden him in a storage box or a trous-
Muhammad. Ibn Taymiya’s teachings remain a ma-
seau, the caliph ordered that the box be buried.
 Notes to Pages 287–322 399

jor inspiration for the Wahhabi movement and ide- 2. This image of the heifers alludes to the bibli-
ology and its followers in Saudi Arabia and else- cal and Quranic stories of Joseph. Joseph is released
where. from jail after correctly interpreting one of the Phar-
6. Qassiyun, a mountain overlooking aoh’s dreams, in which he sees seven emaciated
Damascus. heifers devour seven fat, healthy ones.
7. [Excellence in the Science of Farming] by Ab- 3. Jacques Berque (1910–1995) was a French Is-
dulghani ibn Isma‘il al-Nabulsi (1640–1731). lamic scholar and sociologist.

Prophesy, O Blind One

1. Jim Morrison (1943–1971) was the lead singer
and lyricist for the rock band the Doors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Regarded as the most important poet writing in Arabic today, Ali Ahmad Said Esber,
known to readers as Adonis, was born in a rural village in Syria in 1930. He was unable to
afford formal schooling for most of his childhood, so his early education consisted of
learning the Quran in the local kuttab (mosque-affiliated school) and memorizing
classical Arabic poetry. He graduated with a degree in philosophy from Damascus
University and went on to earn a doctoral degree in Arabic literature from St. Joseph
University in Beirut.
Adonis’s publications include twenty volumes of poetry and thirteen volumes of
criticism. His dozen books of translation to Arabic include the poetry of Saint-John Perse
and Yves Bonnefoy, and the first complete Arabic translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
(2002). His multi-volume anthology of Arabic poetry, Diwan al-sh‘ir al-‘arabi, covering
almost two millennia of verse, has been in print since its publication in 1964. Adonis’s
many awards include the International Poetry Forum Award (Pittsburgh, 1971), National
Poetry Prize (Lebanon, 1974), Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de la Poésie
(Belgium, 1986), Prix de Poésie Jean Malrieu Étranger (France, 1991), Prix de la Méditer-
ranée (France, 1994), Nazim Hikmet Prize (Turkey, 1994), Lerici-Pea Prize (Italy, 2000),
Oweiss Cultural Prize (uae, 2004), and the Bjørnson Prize (Norway, 2007). In 1997 the
French government named him Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.