Friday, April 22, 2011

Farewell




At a certain point I lost track of you.
They make a desolation and call it peace.
When you left even the stones were buried:
The defenseless would have no weapons.

When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks, who collects
its fallen fleece from the slopes?

O weaver whose seams perfectly vanished, who weighs the
hairs on the jeweler’s balance?

They make a desolation and call it peace.

Who is the guardian tonight of the gates of paradise?

My memory is again in the way of your history.
Army convoys all night like desert caravans:

In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved-all
winter-its crushed fennel.

We can’t ask them: are you done with the world?

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked
In each other’s reflections.

Have you soaked to pour on them when they are
Found like this centuries later in this country
I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with doors in our arms.

Children run out with windows in their arms.

You drag it behind you in lit corridors.

If the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.


At a certain point I lost track of you.

You needed me. You needed to perfect me:

In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.

Your history gets in the way of my memory.

I am everything you lost. You can’t forgive me.

I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.

Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

I am being rowed through paradise on a river of hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.

The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves:

It is still night. The paddle is a lotus:

I am rowed-as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.

If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn’t
Have happened in this world?

I am everything you lost. You won’t forgive me.

My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.

There is nothing to forgive. You won’t forgive me.

I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to
myself.

There is everything to forgive. You can’t forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine,

What would not have been possible in the world?


STATIONERY

The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
write to me.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

IN THE MOUNTAINS

   Somewhere
without me
my life begins

He who lives it
counts on a cold rosary
God's ninety-nine Names in Arabic

The unknown hundredth he finds in glaciers
then descends into wet saffron fields
where I wait to hold him



but wrapped in ice
he by-passes me
in his phantom cart



He lets go of the hundredth Name
which rises in calligraphy from his palm
Fog washes the sudden skeletons of maples

Farther into the year by a broken fireplace
I clutch the shiver of a last flame
and forget every Name of God

And there in the Mountains
the Koran frozen into the year
he waits for news of my death

A WRONG TURN

In my dream I'm always
in a massacred town, its name
erased from maps,
no road signs to it.
Only a wrong turn brings me here

where only the noon sun lives.
I'm alone, walking among the atrocities,
guillotines blood-scorched,
gods stabbed at their altars,
dry wells piled up with bones,
a curfew on ghosts.


Who were these people?
And who finished them to the last?
If dust had an alphabet, I would learn.

I thrust my hand
into the cobwebbed booth
of the town's ghost station,
the platform a snake-scaled rock,
rusted tracks waiting for a lost train,
my ticket a dead spider
hard as stone.