Incomprehensible Lesson Page 4
delving into what has ceased to be.
All my enigmas are personal now.
They’re puzzles only to me.’
Her finger smuggled its secret into my palm.
That very night, her lips were mine;
My head soothed by the pink fan of delight.
8.
There is another inside me.
He gets invited into my Empty Quarter;
Suffers its bleak stretches
in the middle of the night.
Dune, wind and mirage…
This is my Empty Quarter.
But then there’s this tree, my neighbour’s,
Laden with its oranges – Sevilles.
Laden, says my memory,
With juice nurtured by the sleep of winter.
How can I harvest these here,
Where all is spoilt by the stench of tar?
Through the window of my silent home I see
Windfalls coated in smoke.
Barbed wire trammels my moments
As insects are caught in a web.
9.
‘Slumber now, my weary eyes,
Be as the wings of butterflies
Folded – let the eyelids close.
Oh World, you offer scant repose.
I leave thee now, renounce thee, quit
The trauma of the outcast, flit,
But Oh, to where?’‡
To where? – I let the track repeat,
Closed the book at last,
Drank what was left in the glass,
Gazed at my reflected face
that offered little peace.
‘Millstone of exile, granting no leave
to return…’∫
So went the verse, as was its wont.
Christmas, however, had churned out its tidings
Unto a myriad races
crammed into the morning’s market shed.
‘Lights out!’ I declared in haste
and fled upstairs, to bed.
20/10/2012
NOTES
* verse from Plague Lands.
** verse by Abo Alaa Almaarri.
*** from the poem ‘abd al Amir Alhosairi’.
† from ‘Paradise of Fools’.
‡ Aria from Bach’s cantata BWV82.
∫ From the poem ‘Necosia’.
3
Incomprehensible Lesson
The Forgotten City
Late afternoon. The houses shaded.
No, it’s pencil strokes of rain.
The birds have flown, their nests abandoned.
The wind applies its whips,
While the tongue freezes amid
Rags and tatters of newsprint.
The birds have flown, their nests abandoned.
And you too, you out-of-place Tuareg,
You’ve left nothing but footprints.
Come to the waves too late,
you’ve stared at them too long.
Echoes of footfalls… leaves in a whirl…
Once a scorcher burnt the wrist of this metropolis.
Now it has cooled to a bracelet of silver
Worn just the once, an age ago, by some forgetful girl.
Wall
I close the door – and the rain lashes my face –
I make for the nearest bar.
Free as any stranger ever is in any city.
I have no kin to get under my skin.
I am a brick in a wall,
Which other walls will soon abut
And then – like that – a fort.
Inside me, muffled by my hat,
I calm the cries of a woman.
The rain must douse her too. The tongue is silenced.
Two glasses, garçon.
Yes, one is for me.
My friend is… on her way.
You’ll know her by her woollen coat.
The waiter, familiar with the type,
Plumbs the obsessive mindset to its heart.
Another will not tolerate delay,
He nods therefore – then scoots away.
The Scavengers
These scavengers for wood beside the Thames:
I take in their glutinous, tar-like stink.
In the sieve of their thick, matted hair,
They trap all the dirt and the darkness of London.
Their exile nourishes their silence.
I too am a scavenger,
I too am an exile,
Shouldn’t I join them,
Born again,
A scavenger for words beside the Thames?
Their exile seems a good deal worse than mine.
I see their make-shift shelters from the rain –
Boxes, slumped against concrete –
In which they huddle, the deadbeat,
Alcoholic spirits,
Weighted down by numbness.
For warmth, I wait in a phone booth, staring out.
A frozen sparrow lands nearby. A woman
Breathes a promise on a pane. My palm
Throbs between my cheek and what it is I rest against.
That odour plugs my nostrils like a comforter.
I sense the alluvial sludge of each year’s residue.
A train on some nearby platform sighs.
The suitcase cannot move.
Seeing and Pleading
My father, now in white, undergoes his agonies,
And the god I have always denied enters the house.
My mother, sisters, brother, in a half-circle there,
Haven’t noticed, haven’t raised their eyes.
I am the only one to have seen him coming in.
And I’m the only one who is trying not to look at him.
The god is crying, this god I have always denied,
For isn’t he full of his always infinite pity?
The shadow of death hangs over the family.
Soon there’ll be nothing but darkness.
An emptiness will engulf my father’s body.
There is a listening though.
Our sole right is to plead.
We cannot ask the question which is always on our lips,
Aching to be spoken.
From frustration such as this bitterness must flow.
But here is the god, hunched over, blasted by time,
A ruined place, sole refuge now
For refugees from who knows where.
He slips away, so quietly,
But, doggedly, unseen, I follow after,
Both of us lost, in the way some stars get lost,
Through desert dust, and mirages
Of water which recede from us forever
Like travellers who went before…
Their bones repeat the moaning of the wind
Across these wind-lashed spaces, the wolves not far behind.
There is a listening though.
Our sole right is to plead.
We cannot ask the question which is always on our lips,
Aching to be spoken.
From frustration such as ours bitterness must flow.
The Painting
Gloom steeps the memory.
Light though filters through
Onto a wooden table top: a joint of beef,
A match perhaps, some scattered cigarettes,
A glass or two.
It’s dinner time for me and you.
Our foreheads bend towards each other,
Yellowing like ivory.
Caught in that shaft of light,
We weave together threads of the silence between us,
Taking up such as may snag in its web,
And making sure we never ever touch.
The Goal-Keeper
Louis! Ah,
What a Wonderful World,
Your voice, rough as the bark of a tree,
Threads through this lobby like hope.
Phosphorescent at your words,
I glow above this book I thumb,
Beside the stove that keeps me war
m.
How strange life’s been to me –
One minute full, the next mere dregs,
Eyes a-brim with tears – or glee.
I am a goalkeeper.
Strikers with no ball make me wary,
Seeing a void blue infinity
Between some clatter of legs.
Black Ink
The darkness of this night is greater
Than the power of a sultan.
Ink from my books, shelf upon shelf of them,
Pours down the curtains.
Every book is an overturned inkwell.
Patience, I say. Day will dawn,
And the colours will spill everywhere.
Snatching up the brush,
I try to paint the walls green,
The curtains rosy pink,
But now the waves come washing in:
Blue – with light’s sporadic wink.
The Tale
There was a bunch of violets I let fall
Into the depths of a well.
The sun still gleamed on them, but they soon
Lost their colour, then they lost their smell.
And so I played with time, not realising
That the violets would not be amused.
And today, I know this story has to do with my boyhood
And days which speak to me sadly, knowingly too.
Each petal seems like some word that’s especially tender,
And what was I doing? Just having fun with its innocence,
Letting it fall, letting it fall into a well of meaning
Only to grow confused.
The word becomes like an instrument
Probing a wound on the mend simply to breach it again.
And then I see in the well a widow’s tears.
How is it all this appears – out of a word?
With its garden in sight, I can’t help but become
A coat beaten back by the rain.
It’s the shadow of the unseen in the arbour,
Isolation’s patron, always stooping over what I write.
The Night Drives Its Nails
Winter strips the tree to one solitary nest.
Rain drips through its mesh of twigs.
And then the snow embalms it in a cotton shroud.
That nest is as heavy now
As the silence gluing up my ears
Or the smoke weighing down my lungs.
It penetrates my dreams, where night is driving on –
Driving on and driving in its nails.
Winter of God
In the summer, Lord, we laze,
Dreaming through our birthright.
Spring and autumn, at your behest,
Get reserved for planting and for harvest
With respect to winter, your especial favourite.
Summer we recall
For the friend who comes out of his shell,
For the neighbour’s daughter
Who scampers nude beneath the tossing palm,
For the angel with a mother’s name,
And for a father who has lasted well.
All pretty futile, compared to your winter!
That is when you teach us… to revise.
The day of celebration is for sure our day of doom.
For even as we seize
The chance to reap experience,
You hasten to desert us:
As if the proffered fruit had failed to please.
Our dreams grow so green beneath your magnifying sky.
And the stars gleam – oh so rosily –
Nipples of your virgins in the hour of their fertility.
Lord, once again, we take shelter in prayer,
Asking for a respite from memory,
Asking for the autumn depths to store up our desire,
And for the spring to offer its dark promise of fertility.
Yet nothing can be deeper than your winter and its treachery.
The Muse
An empty glass of wine in the palm of my right hand,
While the scented corner of the veil
Worn by my inspiration
Gets rubbed between thumb and finger.
The foothills killed off by winter will again be covered in grass;
And the streams will begin to burble to each other.
The crickets will keep the birds awake,
And I will lay my cushion down
By the bank of the Tigris
Once more, as before, just before sunset.
The glass will get replenished with some red
Into which the evening’s dark will seep;
The silver of the moon will coat its face
And the waist of the one who returns
At last to my cushion
Will rest against my other palm,
Her fine robe utterly undone.
For the Thousandth Time
1.
For the thousandth time, I’m in transit,
I dump my suitcase down in some modest room,
Open for the thousandth time a window,
And there I am across the street, lugging along my suitcase.
2.
Now I feel listless. I am at the airport.
The flight has been called, and I enter the bottleneck,
Hemmed in by strange languages.
3.
And when poetry assails me I’m extinguished,
Grandiloquent day is unable to counter its night,
Meanings tar the reader too.
This fruit is bad for the birds.
4.
Of course I love the clouds that sail by ever more swiftly,
The wind that bends the palms,
And the fire of the sunset that glows above the chimneys,
But then there are barbs to my queries:
Why put faith in any of these images?
5.
Say the need for a nap descends on me,
And the dreamy bird of desire rises from its nest,
What am I but a blind man somewhere
Wrapped in his coat as if inside a womb?
I can cope like this, I really can.
But the bird in my dream retreats to its nest at dawn.
6.
I see my country starving,
All the pollen floating away in the wind.
There, the palm trees might as well be gravestones
For those who cling on,
While those who migrate.
Are skeletons swinging on the line.
7.
Did I say goodbye and turn away, or was it the country
That turned and left me to starve?
8.
My fear is of keeping going, crawling along
the tunnel with the rest.
There has to be light at the end, yes, but what does it show?
The bullets, the bullets I’ve faced,
The bullets they’ve faced, who continue crawling along it.
9.
I will write about our brothers:
How they’ve been snatched up by talons,
Taken by a hawk. I’ll write about the silence –
That adhesive smeared across the lips –
About the words that weave webs
And the words that are words no more.
And I will write about wisdom repeating itself
As often as the sand in an hour-glass;
About the corpses that vanish into the bowels of our past.
10.
And I have a date up ahead, with the backstreets
of my childhood;
With the low houses, the windows, the telegraph poles,
the palm trees,
The scattered mud and the tar
filming the stagnant water there;
All of it wrapped in moonlight’s foil.
And the sand throws one soft veil
Around me, as if I were naked,
although there is no sound,
No sound to the wind. The tho
rny tumbleweed
rolls on its way up ahead.
There’s no one here but me. But here, here is nowhere.
There’s just the pulse of an alarm whose time
has not yet come.
11.
Tigris, are you listening,
as I am, to the singers on the bridge?
They leave one side of the city for the other!
They are getting from there to here, and their songs
Get from their lungs into mine,
along with their tobacco smoke.
Do you hear the sound coming from that well?
Yes, it’s the muezzein.
Oh, I remember this well.
It was a minaret once upon a time,
But then turned upside down.
12.
Every building here, opera house, museum,
Underground tunnel, even my home
Conspires to remind me how far away I am.
Following a thread through the maze
No longer gets me anywhere.
Only you, my woman made of jasmine and desire
Have the power to slow the rush of time
And stop the infernal humming from the wire.
The Crack
She appeared to me naked,