A cloud
fell beside my heart. So, what will happen
after all this massacre? Two clouds fell. No problem.
More dead people are on the battlefront. Let them queue up then,
so that I decorate them with some oblivion. Cities fell.
Cities will I build. The desert battalion occupied more
strongholds. I will barricade myself in the remaining bastions. The anthem.
The anthem. Make way for the blind’s band.
Let the death wagon cross my mornings, let Hulagu’s armies pass
to the battlefront, let Nero go to Rome.
These are my friends.

In the nest of my heart
women drew close to each other.
No jealousy disturbs their sleep. They agreed
at last to share the same space
the same pain
and the same
void.

So,
losses are having fun
in the hall of my heart again.

Good
I will lock up my heart
and drown them in cigarette smoke
and glasses of pain.

I will stop
the beating in my heart
so that they turn like this
with no home, and no land.
I will uproot
my heart so as to uproot
all the anguish in my breast

Let
then
the death wagon head alone to the battlefront.
I will not follow Khalil Hawi,
for on my table
is a glass I did not drink, around it
friends entertain themselves, the late night chat,
stories of great friendliness. Behind me is the void
before me the mornings, on my shoulders the wind.

I will not
tie my days to the steps of Van Gogh
for it takes me an hour to swim in the River Seine, a day
to climb Mount Hermon, a year to reach the outskirts
of Beirut, two years to cross the towers of China.

It takes
Life, the whole of life
for things to sweep through my hands

– the night with its intense darkness, the sun with its ferocity, waves
with their bafflement, the earth with its vastness, clouds with their lividness,
the desert with its nomadism, the river with its forlornness.

It should,
then, show me more sympathy.
Its water should cover me
a little.

Life
Life. I will tie it to my steps
like this, exactly as death ties my youth to itself.

 

Poem translated by the author

with Norddine Zouitni

 

I.

Am just shorter than Niagara falls

So I can’t quite touch the sun

 

If it weren’t so

I would have seized hold

Hurled it far away

So far that it passes August

To where the autumn looms

Then loosed it from my fingers

To play with the seasons

So that rain falls hard on the Nevada desert

Or so that I can sunbathe in Alaska

 

The hand

That grasped the sun

Wasn’t my hand

 

My dreams are more modest than that

Thus I didn’t notice life slip by to old age

Or the boy who was never young

Or the angels that follow in my tracks

I was bound for hell

Didn’t see life leap to my shoulders

I fraternize with the dead

Didn’t notice the blind who light my way

To heaven

I lost the way

 

My dreams were always vague

As if I were the heroes

Who jump secretly from my sleep to weave other lives. They build nests and fill them
with offspring. They march in demonstrations with workers. They bear leaders on
their shoulders and place bets on horses. They chant the national anthem. Some of
them go to jail and some of them toss the revolution out of the window. Some of them
go to heaven and others, hell.

 

When

I wake

They demand self-rule

Other heroes jump from their sleep

With other dreams

Unclear

And very dense

Like Karl Marx’s beard.

 

 

There
In solitude. Near the river. Beside the tree.
In the dimness of the house. Down in the house. Under the stairs.
On the thresholds. On the boat. On the port pier.
Beside the brook. In the hall of the house. In the vast café.
In the middle of the yard.

No
lover withdrew with his beloved.
No friend played the love chord.
No hand stretched to touch a woman’s hair.
No woman dreamt of her charming prince.
No one danced for the night.

And the sky,
the sky did nothing
but anticipate my steps
to lead me to the graves of the void.

The sky assassinated no one,
but weaved a country of hell
out of my childhood.

The sky
pulled to itself the country’s clouds
to fill my heart with desolation.

No problem.
I’ll win the next round. I’ll enter
the battle-front determined. I’ll pull the void
to the pulse of my heart. I’ll ambush the sky.
I’ll fill my chest with its night. I’ll rob it
of all these stars. I’ll hide them behind
my door. In the grape nursery. There,
where the hymn is dizziness in the head
and the echo
the home
of poets.

I’ll say
to the night
O companion, we’ll spend this day together.
We’ll open up wells of darkness for the sun, and domes of dust
for the earth.

I’ll say
to death
O my friend! we’ll set a thousand
ambushes for life.

I’ll say
to dust
I have no homeland between whose moons to hang my heart.
No sky hides my sorrows. No sea for me
at whose shores to stop. I own
much of the mirage of the earth
much of the desert of love
much of the harshness of the heart.

OK.
The war will come to an end, will not come to an end.
Love will be used up, will not be used up. Moons will fade, will not fade.

I slowly
cull the rose.
The world might perish to eternity. Leila
might leave her tower. Her voice might desert my heart.

Let’s divide
the world then.

To Leila
its breast. To me its dejection. To her its warmth. To me its nakedness.
To her its grass. To me its desolation. To her its roses. To me its losses.
To her its land. To me its sea.
To her the world.
To her its orphanhood.

 

  

 

Set metaphor aside

Don’t let figuration become

Our small house

 

I will not wander

Behind the night

 

We will not time our steps

To an older poetry

 

Rambo couldn’t have had it any other way

And the Sufi sheikh could only wear simple cotton

 

It wasn’t a

Question of doing something

We couldn’t be anywhere

But at this crossroads

The child I once was. The old man I will be

My excuses seem hollow

My silence exhausted you

Words. Words.

 

What brings us together?

Our separation brings enthrallment. Our fascination with what could not be

Effete romance. We keep trying to rise

A festival of love. The angels come home

Mornings. Mornings.

 

I

Thus

Always

I befriend the dead

As you celebrate life

 

I continue to carry the night

As you stretch out with the dawn

 

I revel in

The cold. As you lie under the August sun

 

I grasp at

The drowned. When they flood me with drought

 

I declare wars

So that I can be a hero       

 

I invent other wars in which to be a martyr

 

Life, I don’t think about it much

Didn’t stay in touch with the boy I was

I memorized the book of God

Only to forget it in my twenties

 

I read The Book of Sand

And forgot to read the traces of death on my palm

 

I visited Aden, the Atlas, the desert, earth’s many caves

Where I was not to be found

 

The road to you is

Thorny

What did you do to the night

To make me so luminous, to the dawn,

To make it dark, to yourself,

To make you frank,

Like April Fools?

 

Let things rest as they are

Your desire to talk next to my silence. Your maturity by my chaos

The prophets outside heaven. The dead here.

On my balcony, emptiness

 

We don’t need to live forever

For you to spend the rest of the evening

Reading stories to your grandchildren

For me to become

An old rocking chair

Next to the fading stove

Let us not become

Meeker than we must

 

We just need

A morsel of night

To stand vigil around the table of love

Me

You

And April

 

Pay attention

To the difference between being here and being there

To the distance between love on the tapes of Edith Piaf

And our surprise under clouds of forgetting

Pay attention to the wind.  To the sky,

A sky always strange to me

To history. To lipstick.

To the Oslo peace accords

To the wars on the fronts of striptease

To language

 

Love

That I be your first sweetheart

After

The hundred.