Incomprehensible Lesson Page 5

kohl on her eyes,

  Lips made red by a pomegranate’s peel,

  Palm pollen powdered on her cheeks,

  An apricot for each of her nipples.

  Barefoot, she was, with opened palms,

  as if for her fortune to be read…

  Dumbstruck, was I, who had never dwelt in my reflection.

  Yes, but now this dumbness obliged me to reside

  there in the hall of all her mirrors.

  She irrigated passion seductively with wine,

  And so I kept pace as she staggered off the pavement.

  And as I feared she would, she smashed me like a pitcher.

  Though I tried to piece myself together,

  I saw in this shattering an amulet for exile.

  I could hide myself in this.

  This is what love is! So I fooled myself,

  So I gave up history for myth.

  As for my love, she became

  fragments of a mirror, nothing more.

  I stared into these, and at my shattered visage,

  Trying to grasp the whole from the splinter.

  What can you tell from a crack?

  In the Dark We Listen

  Two bodies in the dark

  Listen to Ravel’s Bolero.

  Fingers drum

  On each other

  That repeating rhythm,

  Hoping to succumb

  To one another.

  By the dim glimmer of a pane,

  I may make out the shadow of a smile,

  A smile that I return,

  Sensing the pulse of desire

  Through that parted robe.

  I am what seems wanted,

  but as if unseeing,

  I pursue my stumbling stick instead.

  I just chucked my words

  Into a well with no echo,

  Let my fingers rest

  From chasing the rhythm.

  Here an arm flung out, from me

  Towards that hint of a body.

  Lover hugging lover,

  Bottomless as wells

  Too deep to quench each other.

  Dialogue with Waves

  ‘You were just a pebble, and now you’ve gathered moss!’

  The wave says to me, as I lie on the beach.

  Then in my turn I say to the pebble next to me:

  ‘Hey there, have you gathered moss?’

  And it answers ‘Yes, I’ve gathered moss,

  But time’s lumbering turtle,

  Rummages still through all my souvenirs.’

  ‘Rummages through the sea,’ I say,

  ‘Since out-of-date time survives there.’

  Today, as I enter my thousandth year,

  I consider how each is a friend of the waves.

  Their deep blue iris watches over us,

  Coating one and all with velvet moss,

  Observing, sending us messages,

  Snails, shells and squid keep us company.

  Fish are taught to cleanse the pores.

  We are the sea’s green pebbles, and our eyes

  Never lose sight of the sand of history

  Rising in its storms over dunes and skulls.

  How curious it feels!

  Washed up on the shore, the rain

  Laving our foreheads, the wind blindly

  Fumbling us. Our lively debate with the waves

  Remaining a constant within us!

  The Patrolman

  You are dogging my steps! You, Patrolman,

  Entrusted with the dreams of sleepers.

  The plod of your step nudges an echo

  Out of the dirt of the night, and darkness

  Wobbles like a wagon’s lantern on a uneven road.

  How much longer must my body take

  The lurching of this journey I’m embarked upon?

  I feel your possession of me – even in my clothes.

  What flutters between my legs is fear,

  Fear like the wings of a dove

  Eager to fly but incapable of flight.

  I feel you in the refuse and rubbish of my years.

  And you’ve spread to my lungs, so that I cough

  And you hear me cough! I sense your presence too

  At the stealthy moment of my break-out.

  Your eyes, your eyes are like holes in a sack,

  With the goods simply trickling away.

  All my own barbed barriers

  Vibrate to the blasts of your whistle,

  Fracturing the night’s metallic shell.

  Even the wintry moon

  Grinds her teeth in panic-stricken jaws!

  Our guardian, keeper of the dark…

  Incomprehensible Lesson

  At the hour of sunset, autumn clouds

  are scattered sheep drifting towards the distance.

  The six stalks of our feet dangle over the lip

  of the clay oven.

  We hang around like that, eat warm bread,

  while counting the sheep of the days we have left:

  Happy days that remain before we’re packed off to school.

  My mother comes to shepherd us from time to time.

  I listen to the birds,

  and to what they want me to report to her

  as they pass in their migratory convoys.

  The message is for anybody waiting,

  waiting like her, while the birds are here

  for a little while, and then they’re off on their way again.

  It is as if this is teaching me some incomprehensible lesson.

  Already I’m a poet in my prime.

  It is thus that a hidden sigh

  lifts me above my brothers,

  Higher than the palm tree,

  And then I’m back, cold from the heights,

  Back within their captivating warm.

  All too soon, the sharp-clawed hawk will snatch me,

  The hawk that hovers over my life,

  A life, which in its vigilance

  resembles a city under siege.

  And only in the negligence of time

  can the hawk stoop, drop onto me

  The present moment, heavy as a millstone.

  And here I am, ground round and round as it turns,

  grinding no flour whatsoever.

  I can’t help counting the days that are left

  And what the days have in store

  Before I have to revise that incomprehensible lesson.

  The Balloon

  A cloud on the horizon extends its moistened tongue

  like a dog licking my forehead.

  I rise with a blaze glowing here inside me,

  Bright as ever was my first delight.

  My face reflects the sun.

  The swirling air supports me, I answer to its whim.

  And even if the compass is a quandary

  Or the air burns my lungs, or the fire beneath me dies,

  I will continue as this empty circle

  Heat alone encourages to rise,

  until I burst like Icarus into flame.

  The Flame

  I cannot look away.

  Whispering in a corner,

  Removed from passers-by.

  I see a woman in shock:

  ‘You didn’t get to me, when the heater

  set fire to our home.

  You weren’t nearly as whole as the man you seemed.

  You looked shorter than you were

  because you were crushed by fear.

  Your blood had dried up within you.

  You saw me quite close up, when the fabric caught alight,

  And you turned the page on that vision

  as if it were only a thing in a book.

  But I am what you will read, wherever your eyes may look:

  On the earth seen from the window of a plane,

  On memory’s page, tale of indelible scars,

  On the wall which is the legacy of previous city walls.

  You will never be able to put it down, this
book

  You’ll continue to hover before

  Until you reach that decisive moment

  In your own rotation towards fire.

  I see a woman in shock,

  Removed from passers-by,

  Whispering in a corner.

  I cannot look away.

  No One Comes to Join Me

  No one comes to join me in this tavern

  Situated somewhere

  so desolate.

  A wooden chair, well worn,

  With a view of the deep,

  Contemplates a sea-gulled horizon…

  A blind man supporting some timid little cripple…

  The fisherman leaves his nets,

  Only to be trammeled in the mesh of marsh fever.

  The sea claws him back, drags him by the scruff

  Back to where a pirate is waiting.

  I have travelled by train through a dream,

  Tunnel after tunnel,

  Shows me through its windows

  the irritable nerve inside its ebony –

  As many scenes as seconds to the journey:

  Light reveals these many-coloured masks:

  The hedgehog with barbed-wire for spines.

  The books on the shelves

  bleeding from their wounds,

  And here is a mouth with claws.

  It was as if I had seen you undress,

  seen you hang your clothes

  On the back of that wooden chair, well worn,

  With a view of the deep

  and its sea-gulled horizon.

  I was that boyhood, that boyish voyeur

  Watching from the tavern…

  How long will it take the poet

  to gain for himself the confidence of pain?

  And will the lover inside him,

  with his wrinkled mouth-wisdom,

  Ever earn the right to call your name?

  I may not cheat the worn-out robes,

  Dare not disappear on wings

  that would carry me away from you.

  When you emerge

  from the tunnel of my skeptical surmise,

  I will say to you:

  You know I kid myself that some fine day,

  which is not to be attributed to London,

  I’ll come across the shadow of a girl writing poetry,

  A poetry that trips on the shadow of its pain,

  and nearly lose my own footing.

  Love’s a fine thing, yet it fills me with shame.

  Usual Story

  And my friend

  Was immersed in Sufi texts

  And he liked to maintain that the world

  Meant less to him than a goat’s fart.

  And my friend was intrigued by the bar

  and his bar-room mates,

  Weren’t they the key to some expansive vision?

  But the world sharpens more than one sword:

  The Other is a sword,

  and the Word is a sword,

  And the Homeland held a sword above each head,

  And the Leader held up the swordsmen.

  And so my friend withdrew

  into aloneness.

  Didn’t trust anyone but his own shadow,

  And one day, which was filled with Iraqi night,

  His shadow wife hid a wire beneath the bed,

  Took off all her clothes, and flirtatiously

  Begged him to vilify the state.

  And my friend

  Is now a prisoner

  Wrapped in the national flag,

  Learning how to love the Leader’s photo.

  The Absent

  Our grandchildren, then. It’s up to them.

  They will inherit our features. And they will tell

  Our stories, share each exploit,

  Fertilise thus our rank remains perhaps.

  We each may earn a tombstone, and poets get a call

  To etch what we inspired on it. Or perhaps

  The mirrors that have recorded what we did

  Will simply be interred. The Kalifa brigade

  Will see to it the site has no visitors.

  The body of our work will be flayed,

  Or enslaved to some justified ruler perhaps.

  Will we engender pilots in the seas of night

  Or muggers in urban jungles?

  Perhaps we’ll leave no trace at all

  Beyond that of a rat

  Glued inside the damp trap of nothingness.

  To the Reader

  You will read my poetry

  And it will be your dwelling for a while,

  The air infused by the burning of a matchstick,

  And you will wince, confused.

  From what rupture is this smoke coming from?

  From what hot repository of torment?

  You will read my poetry,

  And sense that the words may fly like birds

  Beautiful and healthy,

  Yet when they fly they leave their meanings

  On the lines, so they excrete their dark,

  And they are exposed forever in their flight.

  Whereas with closure, you can escape the book.

  The Isle of the Dead

  After Arnold Böcklin and Rachmaninoff

  Just as the flywheel of time grows rusty in the clock,

  Or the scream freezes on the face of the fearful

  fixed in a photo on some page,

  So the water calms around that isle.

  A blessed isle of silence and sad light,

  Where clumps of dismal cypress hug each other.

  Gulls may encircle it, fruit may frame it, however

  It remains a cage which is a citadel.

  There is a boatman and there is a boat,

  And there is the spectre, upright though afloat,

  Approaching there that rocky island mass.

  And as the indifferent sun descends,

  The new arrival steps down

  carefully onto the rocks.

  And the boatman quietly turns his boat

  Back towards the shore of life

  Where another figure waits to cross.

  Over Hastily

  Over hastily he picks up his bag

  in a field of flowers.

  In a rush, he gets out

  a ticket for a train.

  Confused in his seat, he waits

  For the train to stop at a minefield.

  The war has only just started.

  He drops down into its new-dug trench,

  Among the slaughtered soldiers.

  He takes a mine as a pillow and he sleeps.

  About the Authors

  Poems by FAWZI KARIM

  in versions by ANTHONY HOWELL

  after translations made by the author

  BORN IN BAGHDAD in 1945 and now living in London, Fawzi Karim is rapidly establishing a reputation as a major figure in contemporary poetry. Plague Lands, his first book of poems in translation, was a Poetry Book Society recommendation for 2011.

  ANTHONY HOWELL’S first collection Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. His most recent book of poems is From Inside, The High Window Press, 2017.

  Copyright

  Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ.

  This new eBook edition first published in 2019.

  Cover © ‘Man and Woman’, Fawzi Karim.

  Text copyright © Fawzi Karim & Anthony Howell 2019. The right of Fawzi Karim and Anthony Howell to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in a
ny way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 978 1 78410 429 0

  Mobi ISBN 978 1 78410 430 6

  PDF ISBN 978 1 78410 431 3

  The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.