Incomprehensible Lesson Read online

  and a well-earned rest in the shade.’

  On the river bank some armed and naked men

  Fill wretched men who cower there with fear.

  – There they are! There!

  The sound of an explosion.

  Then dust in a gust - it covers them.

  I recall that scene, and the fugitives

  under glass, as if in a sepia print –

  Eyes quick to follow what alerted them:

  Time marching blindly with swift steps

  reaping his human crops.

  Imagine me without a mouth,

  without even a lung.

  Useless as a witness.

  Rowing away into darkness

  towards the open sea.

  The God of Solitude

  Who will go through

  The poetry I write about you,

  Sort the grain of sand from the speck of gold,

  Unafraid of being accused,

  If he jotted down his certitude?

  No sooner does love smile on a relationship,

  Than hatred leers at it too.

  Whose is the mask,

  And the face behind that mask,

  At this hypocritical party?

  Who is it behind the curtain

  With those unreadable eyes

  And the smile one can only call feline?

  He neither censors nor urges caution;

  And yet he has lost his aura,

  Given over his eternal way

  And taken up a path of blind coincidence.

  If I am a poet of an age

  Free from the ferocity of destiny,

  I’ll not be doomed if I choose to exchange

  this tedious masquerade

  For the reed-beds and their fields.

  Out there at last, I won’t bemoan

  The absence of the flute,

  There where the God of Solitude

  Handles the clay in silence,

  Re-enacting Genesis,

  Knowing I am watching Him.

  Because It Happens Every Day

  Because it happens every day

  Without announcing its time,

  Happens suddenly, just as a comet

  Flashes on the night’s wrinkled skin,

  Or leaves our very moments under threat

  Of collapse beneath the weight of our past,

  Because it comes and goes,

  Because it startles us

  With its sudden drop in pressure,

  The paper sweats as we start writing.

  A sticky tongue

  Has left our underwear damp.

  We are not its victims but

  Its evidence.

  Central Line

  Close to my home in Greenford,

  The carriages roll to a halt. After long moments

  They go on to bisect London.

  The line takes me (questions harass) ‘Where?’

  To streets, buildings, parks marred by repetition,

  So that I prefer my own blurred reflection.

  Then I return by the same red line,

  Musing how, from Waterloo Bridge,

  The scene’s perfection amazed me:

  Seemed an artistic print, framed in an exhibition,

  How the tourists milling there

  Scattered such colours – like a wedding breakfast –

  Was it some performance on TV?

  A lady at a party broke through my precautions.

  I found myself once more in the role of exile.

  The line goes on and on. The years

  Sit across from me. I take out my passport.

  They want to share its pages.

  Faust in Casablanca

  A typically Arabic night

  Peopled by ordeals in the form of ragged clothes,

  Yellow phlegm that’s spluttered out by street lamps over asphalt.

  I descend, through the tunnel of the Hotel de Paris,

  And out of its darkness, emerge…onto Casablanca

  To mess with a restless wave that keeps on catching me.

  ‘If you were as young as me, man,

  You could share my togs,

  Stick out a foot to tackle mine,

  Feint and dodge,

  And run your rings around me.’

  2.

  What’s left me of such joys but outspread wings

  that bear me easily, bear me away…?

  This Arabic eagle spending his summer

  making up for a winter of lost time

  Remains all folded into himself,

  Sees a lowland sunrise without sun,

  Contemplates a sunset which is an ashtray,

  Chooses to avoid the Casablanca shore,

  To serve his time in submarine bars among algae,

  Always with a firebird’s aspiration for the poetry

  that would stream like mint-leaves from his sleeves.

  ‘If you were as young as me, man,

  You could share my togs,

  Stick out a foot to tackle mine,

  Feint and dodge,

  And run your rings around me.’

  A Casablanca woman tastes my tears,

  Sipping drops of dew wrung from my pained poetry,

  And this makes her all the more thirsty.

  She pulls my arm around her waist,

  And braids my gathered mint-leaves into an anklet,

  She dances, till Casablanca

  dins with the applause of all the night-time drinkers:

  A harlot of the night,

  A hunger for the night.

  And so I danced around a woman –

  One who bewitched my verse

  with her hot flesh that would heat no flesh

  so much as it heated mine.

  And so we embraced one another,

  What delicious footprints on the sand:

  Yet didn’t they lead to those nets that screw up fish,

  To a soul lamenting the out-of-date body, the fleetingness

  of it all,

  And to a solo mysticism dreamt up by a mouse?

  I sung alone in the port at night,

  And ate alone in the port at noon, in its ear-splitting restaurant.

  I came back drunk to the Hotel de Paris

  And my head was a handful of wind,

  I ripped up the poems, and went hunting for the source of my dismay:

  ‘Am I the majnoon of a she, conjured up from the depths of sleep,

  Or have I been a dead man since birth,

  and this bitch but a garland of mint-leaves

  woven over my tomb?

  If I wreak havoc on the words, and scatter their damaged papers

  All around the cell of this hotel-room,

  Listen to temptation

  And sign my contract with Satan,

  Won’t this enable me to draw the woman to me

  Simply by the power of my mind?’

  …………?

  …………?

  Love but the sweat of fatigue on a forehead;

  A beckoning bough that presages the slowest of dawns.

  20/3/1979

  In Earl’s Court

  A ‘Good morning’ for the girl in the antiques

  As the cat dozed behind the fanlight.

  Same old steps, same old feet,

  Bitterness of one who reaches in his pocket

  only to discover there’s a hole in it.

  My feet, their clumsy wanderlust,

  And me listing my first friendships, my foolish acts,

  quoting the adage: ‘Still waters run deep!’

  I sang along – on the steps of St. Paul`s,

  Aped the ways of lovers from a multitude of lands,

  Effulgent in the eyes of all the tourists:

  ‘Would Miss J. drink tea with me in Yassin’s?’

  I messed my shirt with garish spots

  and declared to the one I loved,

  ‘I’ll never drink your fill a second time!’

 
Later I consoled myself – a poster which I stabbed

  Made such a bloody martyr of the woman.

  In the mighty cities, I felt myself an orphan.

  Ah, initial impulses, companions!

  In Earl’s Court I chance to bump into one

  with whom I used to drink.

  This is suspicious! I think.

  Who would stalk my shadow even unto Earl’s Court?

  One who might feed the flesh of his brothers

  To the savage talons of his homeland,

  Send the defected birds

  back into the darkness of their cage?

  I haven’t got over it yet, that sudden apprehension,

  And when I saw him in Earl’s Court,

  That one with whom I used to drink,

  He hurried to avoid me, as if I were the noxious stink.

  Who is following who? Which is afraid of the other?

  A ‘Good evening’ for the girl in the antiques

  As the rain drizzled down the fanlight.

  Same old steps, same old feet,

  Bitterness of one who has saved

  a dark wisdom garnered in this cave,

  One in retreat from his day,

  Tossed into the folds of blue cold.

  I no longer ask about my country,

  as it may ask no more about my fate,

  Yet I sing whenever I feel like a song,

  ‘My sleeves are filled with musk,

  and my plaits are rich with henna.’

  London, 1979

  The Empty Quarter

  1.

  I landed, thanks to a pair of wings,

  a flask of wine and pack of cigarettes.

  Peculiar state of exiled human, hoping that some girl

  might actually speak Iraqi in Hyde Park –

  My verse without its target butt, my arrow

  careless of its aim.

  I am a somnambulist

  Borne along by passers-by:

  flanneur among their hastening feet…

  But through the glass facade of a Camden shop,

  amid its antique bric-a-brac,

  I spied an oil lamp stained by soot

  that once was so familiar!

  As if through a lens, I

  saw the mud wall of a house

  above that lantern’s copper base.

  The glow from its funnel seemed to breathe

  a dragon made of light that hovered there

  on the bellied ceiling of the mats.

  At some earlier time I teased out stuff

  into a cloud of coloured fluff

  and threw it in the faces that I came across –

  Have been an existentialist; celebrating

  an ambiguous consciousness,

  patching up a mangled dress,

  using the sun’s fine yarn.

  But at the sight of my lamp in Camden Town

  I free myself of the past, that flightless pack

  that weighs my shoulders down.

  It is here, and I am here,

  Fascinated by a girl, her shoulder bare,

  Flying, flying through the air,

  while squirrels fly from branch to branch,

  and she is whispering in my ear:

  ‘hug me, hug me now!

  Hold me, before I disappear.’

  Who wouldn’t flinch from the cities’ blows?

  – cities of the North

  as wet and cold as its forests –

  To find solace in stupefaction

  from the dregs of its dark wine

  in the varnished dark of all its bars?

  And so I have slept on the sidewalks of my maze,

  My verse without its target butt, my arrow

  careless of its aim…

  And to support my pain, I lean now on this walking-stick

  That helps my steps towards exile.

  A feverish wind weaves a song between my ruins:

  ‘Our heritage is exile here, not our better times.

  Our heritage is exile here, not our better times.’

  2.

  But if the dead can give up their tombs

  in the memory of one alive,

  If they can abandon all the cities which enclosed them,

  If they can cross the dangerous road,

  as we did, barefoot, into the haven of exile,

  If they can swathe themselves in the get-up of pirates,

  Inhabit silent ships motionlessly afloat

  in the stagnant water of their sea,

  Then I can choose the limbo most appropriate for me

  In London, under an umbrella,

  Celebrating my isolation, free to hang out in the bar –

  Free, that is, from everything but the nude shoulder

  Of a girl whispering in my ear,

  ‘Hug me, hold me now,

  before I disappear.’

  She leaves me trapped inside a lamp swinging from a cart

  lurching down a bumpy track.

  Is this the way to cross the Empty Quarter?

  But the past, the past is like poetry…

  ‘Poetry, shaven of pate,

  shepherds everything, high on a hill.

  A rural man with a flowing gown.’*

  He is one who remains forever young, who wants not,

  when I want,

  who runs like grass where I walk,

  and opens like a flower when I just put out my palm.

  He lounges on my desk like a book tired by boredom,

  a book with scorched edges.

  And when I stare at the restless bells of night,

  The past appears like a maid in a jet-black scarf,

  sitting in the presence of the Sultan of Lovers,

  and when her cup runs empty,

  the sword-man fills it up.

  3.

  Cities are causing overcrowding inside me, and I’m in a more numerous state than most of Europe’s endroits. My alleys know neither discord nor harmony. Neither poetry, nor music, nor painting can fulfil me as much as could some settlement of my account with history. Autumn is leaning against the fence of my garden, leaving me a bunch of chestnut leaves which has just fallen from its imagination. I know it’s been left for me. Am I not the autumnal man, and doesn’t Autumn know it? No difference between the colour of the leaves and the henna on the breasts of the robins. In London, it is pre-Islamic poetry that takes hold of me and make me thirsty. My lips crack, and therefore I anoint them.

  4.

  I grabbed a girl who said to me

  ‘You’re not much good at flirting.’

  I took her to my youthful room.

  I was so pissed. And she said:

  ‘You’re not much good,

  even with the most basic words

  in The Beginners Guide.’

  I told her I was confused,

  Making the point

  by stabbing at my forehead with a finger.

  I said, ‘Why doesn’t the Disco

  open in the day?

  If it did the sun could ease my paranoia.’

  I feel cold, and orphaned when it’s dark,

  As if the night subjected me to a body search

  In front of the sphinx-like stares of the border police.

  5.

  ‘The seer’s as blind as I am,

  So let us collide in the dark.**

  I said: ‘Back home, your steps

  went stumbling past,

  until they woke me up.

  Oh sheikh, what heavy reason has prompted you to come for me?’

  ‘I didn’t come for you,’ he said.

  ‘You just imagine that I did.

  Inheritor, you’ve taken on the disorder of my soul.

  An atom of dust rubs up against its counterpart

  In some old verse I wrote down in my book.

  Two poets, both accepting

  what their times dictate:

  We are two drops,

  And this one evaporates

>   Just as simply as the other freezes.’

  6.

  ‘The rust on the knocker is old as night,

  And the door is ancient, closed.’***

  So down goes my baggage, dumped on the asphalt,

  Why would the passers-by

  bother to notice

  a tramp out of time with all tourists?

  He stands there, gaunt as a telephone pole,

  hoping, but for what?

  No one sees the huge locked door that looms there,

  right in front of him;

  A weathered door that stops him

  from breaking into the hubbub of London.

  First reaction? Back into the head.

  Time is not counted in seconds here, but in the ripples

  as they pass.

  I strip off and throw myself in,

  And I say to myself, ‘Dear self,

  stay very clear of your loss.’

  And the answer comes back ‘that ‘home’

  is a catwalk between abysses,

  And he who puts out to sea

  Seeking another shore may lose the coast.’†

  But there is that girl again, ever so near:

  ’Hug me, hold me, hold me now,

  before I disappear.’

  7.

  I spoke. ‘The wine that got me pissed

  was that enriched by the sun,

  But now I am the autumnal one

  (how solemnly intoned).

  Heed my boughs, as they divest

  themselves of autumn’s leaves

  To publish each abandoned nest.

  My shadow falls in front of me.

  It is a vast abyss.’

  She smiled. Her smile brought out a smile.

  I said, ‘I’m the father of sons.

  Their roots are in the present.

  Mine prefer the past.

  Mine exist to burrow deep,