Incomprehensible Lesson
Page 2
And it’s this cup of wine
that scours the bad luck from our palms.
With that fine fish we made excellent progress to Uruk,
With this barbed wire we slunk off into exile.
‘In Ishtar’s temple
Shamhat turns the pages of her charms for visitors:
Go on, you temple whore,
Strip those breasts of your hair’s allure,
Flirt the naked hillock
behind a cup of wine, and go down now
towards the land of wild beasts.
There you will meet with Enkidu.
We kneaded him from clay bonded with our light.
So Shamhat, the taste of his mouth, a honey made of dates,
is as the taste of your mouth is to him,
His response will have the grip
of a thousand knotted fibres.
Shamhat hennaed her hair
and re-applied her lips with pomegranate peels.
She offered forth her breasts
So that they soared free of their captivity.
Their tips touched savage Enkidu,
and Enkidu soared free as well.
She copied the shape of the cup
From the shape of the place
Where the thighs meet
And she gave him to drink,
and he enjoyed letting her sip in return
Until he buckled and his head slumped down.
She sipped the grace of the Maker from his blood,
leaving no trace,
And at this the gazelles
who had seen him as one of themselves
Suddenly scattered before him.
Enkidu knew that a cord had been cut
Severing words
from the things out of which they were born:
The string – as apart from the song that surpassed it.’
2.
Our two bodies collided.
There was disarray.
We clashed, and went berserk.
Our sweat made a mush of the ground –
As when a wave covers a sandbank
and the sandbank seems to sigh.
Founders of the illusory city,
We who had laid its corner-stone
and walled it,
Then usurped its pride
and scattered all beyond retrieval’s reach.
Promptly enough the pennants of war lay trampled,
Stained and soiled
by blood and mud;
Though these days, from the clotheslines,
can’t you smell the bleach?
I say, Count yourself blessed:
You’re like my brother, in that we both
began in some womb of aloneness.
Blessed that we shared that cup
on the bank of the Tigris.
Didn’t you ensnare me,
Capable hunter, and lead me
To the mirror of your death? Blessed
By love, do tell me now
Why you just won’t answer me?
The sadness of that poetry
that marked your face with its claws,
You know how it enchanted me!
I was trapped in a thicket,
that sprouted there, between your lips.
Rim of a cup covered by moss,
Hands of corroded copper…
Rust has covered everything.
All we were is yellowed now,
powdered by the turmeric of death.
You had been created
just as you would have wished to be,
You triumphed without killing,
winning the girls without rape:
But God took umbrage, stripped you
of all your good intentions,
And therefore you withdraw into yourself,
taking up some corner of The Gardenia,
Bent on overcoming the spirit.
So the strength of your handshake ebbs away.
Yearning weeps in your body.
3.
‘Two boats, bound together, will not sink,’
you told me.
‘Ah, but a single puncture
is sure to scuttle the dinghy!’
I replied.
And now you find yourself drowning!
Death comes to anyone alone,
offers an end that can hardly be denied,
As a friend reveals his secret to a friend.
Death dines alone,
like a wolf with a prodigal lamb,
Or water’s strength overwhelms the drowning man.
But she came out from behind her wall.
She had her eyes on you,
That lady with the blue shawl,
And she was it, you knew,
but could she reassure you?
The grate empty in the winter’s pang,
The door flimsy in the face of the wind,
The nail in the boot nip-nipping with its fang.
You bent beneath the swirl of that blue shawl,
Just as they may genuflect
in their holy niche of prayer,
And to see your sad young face
divided in the mirrors behind your own locked door,
Reiterates the face of the wounded
stumbling through fields of corpses,
Recalls the look of a fugitive seeking out exile,
The shock of the poet detained
(a silencer putting its bead through the temple).
A bandsman leans on his instrument,
in the nightclub’s dark, deserted hall.
It’s that expression one observes queuing up for an exit visa.
Secretly bleeding at the policed border,
Know they have cut out his tongue,
so how can he lick his wounds now?
You manage to leave,
While I’m staying on to lament you.
4.
I have dwelt since I was born in my death unknowingly!
My writing has followed my footprints,
All the way through this banished life I’ve lived.
And yet I have learnt that I was, in my heedless way,
Marking the footsteps of others.
The sandbanks that we sought
are no more the pride of the Tigris,
And the poet’s loot, brought back
from imagination’s journey,
Resembles that promise of an end,
grinding in its monotony,
That Shahrazad would interrupt at dawn
For Shahriyar, the impatient one,
in The Thousand Nights and a Night.
Losing all hope has taught me
to substitute Death for hope,
Accepting him as my hirsute pal:
The goalie of those restless strikes into my own goal.
When I wake up, I sip his wine.
He drains my cup when I can’t,
while I doze off to the side.
I dwell in those footsteps of mine,
And the weight of my hope has the weight of straw.
And now their end is so near,
I will never return in joy to that lost water-hole,
Sump of putrid dregs today,
While in the past it was the place
where I guess my roots went down…
Now uprooted.
2006
NOTES
Uruk: the city sacred to the Goddess Ishtar – ‘town of the sacred courtesans’.
The Gardenia: a well-known café and meeting place of intellectuals in Baghdad.
2
The Empty Quarter
‘No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.’
WILFRED THESIGER
On the Highest Peak
On the highes
t peak,
The deer edge towards my retreat,
Soliciting a blessing
From the cradle of my newborn pain.
The deer kneel then turn away.
The eagle will not risk a restless wind.
Empty are the clouds that frequent my retreat,
Presenting fronts darkened by anxiety.
Passing through the clouds I peer down on the city.
Its roofs are stacked with the nests of storks
While its palms are fans for its siesta,
Lending it shade and a breeze for the streets.
There are boats unmoored on its timeless rivers,
But ages of sand drift across well-known features,
And now it’s clear that the city looks more like a corpse
Hovered over by wings which end in claws.
Ice forms on my coat and freezes me to my seat.
Paradise of Fools
‘Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.’
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
There’s little point in wading against
The current of these tiresome days,
Keen to re-negotiate the swamp of our estrangement.
Little reason for the tide to be concerned
About the bones of drowning men,
Or for the sun to rise yet again on a ruin.
It makes no sense for prisoners of war
To barricade their dreams,
And though one returns from a battle-field
One knows it is only a matter of time.
And so, I do not dispute
That roaming is a fools’ paradise,
That ‘home’ is a catwalk between abysses,
And he who puts out to sea
Seeking another shore may lose the coast.
Waiting for the End
Moment of waiting for the end:
Shadow, you share a dangerous game
Here in my bed, be bold now.
Siphon off all that you can from the head,
Steal the web woven by the dream
And utilise the probe of imagination’s insect.
Take from the heart the shed skins of its loves,
And don’t neglect to glean from slips of the tongue
What every letter sent has sought to mask.
I am in your hands, for until I can be rid
Of the saddle’s weight, the bit and the tug of the rein,
I have nothing to go on but hoof-prints,
Like thoughts that sully the still of the night.
Lowfield Road Quartet
1.
And now in al Andalus Square,
As the bird preens, does the light of dawn
Quench this thirst or not?
The dancers turn heavily as millstones
In the orbit of their fear, fear of waking.
The glass turns, the head turns,
and the waiter hovers, attentive:
‘Another shot of araq?’
A woman slips a foot between my feet:
‘You want to dance?’
I change into a ball of eagerness in her hands.
She bounces this on the ground and it never comes to rest.
There are loudspeakers fixed to the wall,
And banners where the fates proclaim their warnings.
There’s no respite for the dancer,
No respite anywhere but in his fear, fear of waking.
The glass turns and the head turns,
And over me the trees bend.
I keep the withered secrets of their leaves to myself…
And this taut string:
‘When will you get back to me?’
‘I will be waiting at whatever gate
your exile cares to choose.
And I will seduce you, or loneliness will make a man of you,
Or panic may take over
for a while, but don’t, don’t give up hope…’
A curtain falls between me and my vision of home.
2.
These mirrors turn the horses again
Towards a too bright sun, while the horizon
arcs across the portholes.
I see strange cities – on so many first time visits!
Each paradise is set before me while Satan whispers
but actually my caravan crosses a desert of salt.
Blood on the reins, and such a crushing silence!
What do I really see?
There is a wind that makes no sound
and therefore leaves no echo.
But what a strength there is to this wind!
I can’t raise my hand against it, even to adjust my robe.
‘Just take my hand and hold on!’
said Sammer, my son.
I found no corporeal substance behind those hands of his;
Just the dawn, the dew,
the Jasmine’s shivering branches
and there is the youngster, beckoning
‘Father, take off your clothes!
Be naked. Enter the current with me.’
‘Not a chance!’ I say.
3.
Damp fringes to the carpet that reaches the horizon
and Sammer is a water-bird and sports a sandy form.
I watch how the windows overflow with fishes flying,
butterflies extravagant as the feast of Nowruz.
Sammer seems worried about me, ‘Come on, come back in!’
Re-explore the floating bush.
And the wife remonstrates: ‘Please, put your dreams away,
and come, dear, to my balmy bed.
You never endeavour to turn a blind eye
to anything ever sighed for.
I worry that my butterflies may get mixed with yours,
my love with your memories.’
But light is all that ever nets that long remembered butterfly.
Ablaze between the ruins of old days,
it brings me back to the brothel
To crane over screens and peek at Ishtar
doing a strip in the draught of a ceiling fan.
A dead bird gets chucked out at the audience.
‘Come on! Leave your dreams alone
and enter my warm bed.’
But I remained foolishly dressed
And wearing that mask of contemplation
Which let my irresponsible mouth
go flapping on like a jacket folded over an arm.
And so I surrendered to the bird of my time,
Aiming my days at what exactly?
Well..about that they could never be sure.
And as his doubts may strip the poet of clothes
and throw him naked into the den of his secrets,
So the tempest strips the willow and the lime
in Lowfield Road.
Among these flying leaves,
I see my elderly neighbour collecting dew from the grass
in her old straw hat,
And she helps her knees by supporting herself with a hand
As a wing flutters and then disappears.
The snow will come, and I will see your footsteps
In my back garden and will follow them
as shadows fill the empty prints of shoes.
Washing, plastic flowers, beads and strips in the mud…
while snow overwhelms the house of my elderly neighbour…
Pain
At dawn, when disturbed by the tramp of their boots,
The full-throated bellow of their songs
and the swing of their marching arms…
When with due caution, I curl within myself,
Prickly as some hedgehog…
When the dark of a very long night
gets smeared like mud on the windows…
When the forefinger of the impossible
Starts to pester me from behind the curtains,
When it strokes me, rubs me out,
scatters my ashes all over the bed…
That’s when I won’t look back at my memories,
Fearful they will change to salt.
More and more abscesses form on my flesh
but I can’t ask for help…
At dawn, when disturbed by the tramp of their boots…
Heading for the Sea
I have prepared my boat, fish-hook and bait,
Taking with me the cloak of the night
with its slow stars.
I steal out, torch in hand,
To the sloping bank of the river.
I am alone.
My father also went out alone in his boat.
Will I get any closer to him now,
before he reaches the open sea?
Will I come alongside him, and under his sail?
I see the silence floating
with a fine lightness, cork-like.
The lamps are too weak to soften the darkness.
And we used to say: ‘The palm shade for us
after our loads are removed.’
On the river’s bank, there’s a death-squad
– ten strong, ten they have killed –
And someone is weeping there.
I know the water only
by the reflection of each star.
I hope to reach the sea as did my father,
to scatter proof of how we were.
And we used to sing: ‘The sweet ripe dates for us