binding itself to her burning soles, folding over each stone she steps on
stones crushed by overgrowth
her neck as dispersing fog
O viridissima virga, ave
floriditatem tuam
the weight of the grass fits on the tip of a stone
Saint Jerome won’t come back to see her
Seen by a good man
who also forgets her
Who will love you when death
won’t want you any longer
Then they all came back to the canvas
SNOW FALLS CEASELESSLY ON THE SCREEN
and my darkness fixed to looter’s gold is the rope
it unfurls by the neck of the blessed maker of the enraptured
strained by the vine
on which the blessed climb up
at the annual dance of those sitting
for a photograph of Eden they commissioned
the protocol calls for strict ranks of light
the Quattrocento’s artificial paradise sways
a canvas depicting a wreath of DNA and roses
the kingdom’s crown
a port at quarantine
verdant night by the fields
my darkness like a constrictor on your neck like a tree weighed by snow
has unraveled
TWO
THE RAPTURE
Between the Yea and the Nay the spirits take their flight beyond matter, and the necks detach themselves from their bodies.
—Ibn al-’Arabi (Murcia, summer of 1165)
AGAINST IBN ÀRABI
Here I am all alone, quarreling with the age, both feet kicking the jugs of Being. Night vibrates with a litany of shadowless reflections. From its window the Absolute in profile contemplates its confines: the celestial sounds propagate through the old pond where metal and loam, past and ends, bone and vocable come to slake their thirst. Mud explodes and consciousness sails against the current. In this immense opacity of contemplation where air is the anticipation of darkness, I see the singular rise in multiples from the bottom of the amphora and wait in the cold of the real to be smashed. No need to step into a sea at the edge of which the prophets came to a halt, or crack open the world’s safe, for man to be the knot of creation and keep in his hands the Seal of future treasures. Creative in each one of us, the spark, no longer hoping to unite with the fires of heaven, becomes flame, spark of itself, mother of all ignitions, new lands. A drop flees the ocean, becomes ocean. The universe holds out a hand to the ephemeral.
—Abdul Kader El Janabi
(Baghdad, 1940)
Spanish version translated by Eduardo Gasca from this English version by Pierre Joris.
SERGEANT JOSANNA JEFFREY
(as told to me by a student in my college Spanish class who came back from the front)
Howls in the furnace
is it not Janis Joplin?
these are not concerts for suicidal dolls
save yourself
come over
A year in Iraq is not a long time
my Josanna, my breath, its fragrance of bamboo
I would seize Josanna Jeffrey
for more time in your arms
the narrow wetlands of Mesopotamia
Josanna Jeffrey with her silken legs
luxurious black mittens
a sacred Ibis, she remains
in my sight
My fear of a tattoo’s venom
in the mind of the Stormfront cavalry
lying in wait
Josanna Jeffrey my keeper with glittering braids
more beautiful than Central Park in winter
tattooed with saffron
by Christo
Nineveh’s night under her helmet
you’ll need the nail clippings
you leave on my bed
may the sky of Iraq protect you
the sky of Iraq to spring from your branch
just in time
in friendly fire
an armed Klansman on the Internet
cares for the chamomile of his Aryan scalp
when unnoticed
the gutted dead with dark hair
flee from his account
I sense the venom of her rite burn by low flame
She turns
Leaps
Josanna Jeffrey
You are dark you are a heaven for kings
queen of Baghdad my lover from the Bronx
rustling of reeds eyes flaring as light breaks
Josanna Jeffrey fires first
come over
I love her priceless kidneys
lost
to the Basra experiment
hot days my tongue thrashing between your legs
by a screen saver
frigid
like Mosul’s burn
Bamboo cracked open on the air
your breath of violets of menstruation
Josanna Jeffrey
lost interest in pharmaceuticals
Your kidneys for thirty thousand dollars
your violets
nothing
bound to the screen saver
as in a womb
rests in me
I lick the inked arrow at my heart
I let you suck
all the pornography we have made
to bring all the fragile heavens
to safety
loved flesh now decaying
scattered over the dust of 10,000 archeological sites
violet essence
used just once
to draw
three drops of oil
that animal
set loose in the novice’s book
one of my toes
in your slit of bamboo
how you liked it
she said she’d come back and give birth to a daughter
Nasiriya
the birds never flew back either
to keep you I play
my hand Josanna Jeffrey:
once upon a time the lovers
were lost
to friendly fire in
each other’s war
the survivors the blissful wretched girls
devastated sent back by kings dead a year later
howls in the furnace
you withdraw your head
like a golden turkey
that has yet to be
pricked
Josanna Jeffrey
with neither shame nor glory
you do not come
the last match
is saved for the darkness
THE SAINT, THE HOLY CRUSADE, THE KIDNAPING
Enheduanna, Enheduanna, night with lexapro misses you
huntress of visions you are smitten
open the door, Oriundina que cai di ceu
revisit Diana’s Tree your book of 20 years
when Alejandra infiltrated girls’ speech and her love for them
a concentration camp
when
libraries were full of fire
and schemed to ease your hunger, your need, those minor wars
and the word Chagall brought over from la Coruña had a name:
Blanca Andreú
but it is night in Manhattan
between the Euphrates and Tigris
where Eden stood
the myth rises counting its sand
at zero hour:
counting landscapes one last time
dissolving into oil wells
counting burning towers
the children at home
are glad to count
the serpents the souls
nobody eases our anger
our bread for supper is here
there is no place in the world
where we wouldn’t bite the dust, Enheduanna within walls
at dawn
our throats tighten
the sands are gathering
the sands are coming apart
our dead will welcome our dead
as though you and I
have begun to forget ourselves
BEG
These are thoughts of refugees kept within themselves
prisoners of the satellite’s beam
of narcotic screens
of the trader who kisses me by the frozen lake
and instead of Scheherazade’s sleepless tales
he lists cities real or imagined like
figures from the Pentagon
that will become exact:
not all of us will die tonight
Over there morning
sings like a swan we cannot hear
—No offense,
But nobody understands the kitsch of distant sites
or the jokes
or the gods
Golden birds in smoked vases
dart into night, filling it with broken glass
the beatings of the sirens and do not move
from your post in the trap
with controlled observation
AN ATTACK ON THE CARDAMOM CAFÉ BEFORE WE SETTLE IN LIVERPOOL
exchanging messages between Venezuelan immigrants without a home and the walls begin to lay out their virgins along the shore drowned by fear, drowned by grief
Enheduanna
the verdant girl of time
the woman poet turns up to die at her Chagall
Sounds of couscous and the sizzling mutton
Joplin’s kitsch at home, sounds of
Ismahan and Shakira before dyeing hair, sounds of
your flamenco singers by the bar
you share your Turkish baklava
this shift’s polyglot losing sight
of his passports
the damages of errancy
teaches you to write your name in Arabic
in exchange for a memory of endangered gallinules
purple
tropicordiosos
—No offense
but nobody understands barbarian conflicts
A Venezuelan girl in Liverpool
weeps over the honey of mabrumeh
scattered on the ground
she’d plucked out the mint
the winter
her foreigner’s notebooks and Ávila’s violet shadow
with whom she resides
a vague explanation of her origins
in spring
her trust is of unexplained
quantity
as the grapes from Smyrna
jewels in her saddened mouth
while she writes in her banner:
Please stop
their facts, their no offense
offend me
Exchanging signals this time
the bartering of childhood
an ocean for another
the mysterious blues within the air
described by Da Vinci’s hand
the corrosive wave of silence left by a swan
a blue smear once it stops singing
on the park’s frozen lake
and a date palm at Basra’s end
will be the last thing they remember
by moriche palms where we waded in a dream
of a friend, a poet
who moved to Israel
Meanwhile New York girls in springtime
emerged from the museum’s hiding places with the Leicester codex
where waters were veins in a live, ordered landscape
war machines under a magnifying glass
the design reveals bodies embracing
like the sheltering manner of purple flowers
turning off the news
and their banners confused the enemy
that everyone
keeps at home
MESSAGE FROM TEL AVIV: A VERDANT PRAYER
There are princesses named after battles
there are slaves who are makeup artists
softening the roses
of calligraphy
both chew on pastry wings
of the Nativity
everything they touch
escapes them
as if to mock decrees
MESSAGE FROM LIVERPOOL: A VERDANT PRAYER
Always our garden
leads to its own concentration
camp
and grass duets
and Madonnas as beams in the forest
live just a little
in damsels
who sway in the water of winter
guarding jealously
our Yugoslavian
ashes
VIRUS
The dark caravans make way
as migratory creatures with seasonal forms
of killing
for the benefit of vanguard technology
of insurance companies
and congregations swearing only God tends to lilies in the field
and what’s a lily’s retail price?
voicing their anger in the public’s ear
“Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to
the teeth?
Why did you come all the way to distant Basra
where fish used to swim by our doorsteps?”
Saadi Youssef (translated by Khaled Mattawa)
cited the Jew, in Arabic, in his Carribean notebook
—in reality, the handsome Yaakob Jacobito,
lover of a Venezuelan student
equally versed in basic Galician and Japanese
as they wash dishes
he thought of her
more succulent than black avocados
caretakers of the southern species of kukurto poems
and she thought he would go well in a kukurtiño poem
invincible manga figurines
they are both drawing:
boys remaining
from all over
thanks to the ancient fatalities of ancient abductions,
jump lines from abductors’ to the army
rank
right here, where dying is to be called a fortunate hero
and brings better dividends for the mothers of the little ones
than working for an entire life, living
without fortune
They listen, very still, to
diatribes manifestos sermons
and burn
with the whole library
THE GENIUS
All his life that Renaissance genius thought there was water
on the moon
where we once believed in the myth of the landing
gentlemen, there is no water on the moon
it is brimming with the bones of Africa
the bright eyes
of the dry moon
an Oriental sage from the city
loudspeakers in a protest:
Unplug shut down
Silence the Open Source
Those astronauts never left the desert
of Arizona
Gentlemen, there were no men on the moon
in the sixties
Men and women and aliens, listen:
keep away from areas designated for the protest, let’s go down another street
presidents, vice presidents, dictators from the left, dictators from the right
have already endorsed the contracts
Baghdad’s partitioned and its main wells
they find no time
to see superproductions revolutions
tasteless funerals
on TV
us either
AND SCHEHERAZADE TELLS OF A ROSE’S SMILE —TRUNCATED MESSAGE—
Death arrived
and found me busy
with your lips
found you drawn with henna on your skin
where we would be
death and myself
chasing ourselves blindly through the forest
until you drew me
the eye of a gazelle
and her
a lion of the desert
and in the palm of your hand
the name of Allah
an arrow to the heart’s tissue
BASRAN TREASURES FOUND AT THE MET WHILE MIRBAD IS BEING LOOTED
The heart’s anatomy
is a serialized tattoo by Da Vinci’s hand
set between the Tigris
and your eyes
Enheduanna in hymns
volcanic Innana, limpid Alawana
Sarasa
lonesome spirits
The Quattrocento is a study of robes
the cold shell of an insect
a reactor in a field
where the silk of the body is threaded
and its semblance of Madonna
unfurls
and it takes flight
like a refugee from Basra
in love with a young boy
etched by a heaven of henna
They had yet to erase the beautiful accident of birds
because a commoner’s flesh
is of less value
and the sheltering beauty of a woman
a transient prey
left hanging in portraits
Enheduanna
Her glance toward Florence
is master of a bird which takes flight
and how in an ambush of light
the white angel of a bombardier lies in wait
And deliver us from mystifications
Enheduanna Enheduanna Enheduanna
THREE
AT DORMITION’S SITE
Seeds not only benefit from being dispersed, but also from inactivity. Many of them are incapable of germinating after being released by the plant and, therefore, remain dormant for some time. This state, which precedes germination, is called dormition and functions as a timer that allows a plant to sprout once conditions are favorable for the process of germination and survival, although, on occasion, a plant may remain dormant even if conditions for germination are favorable. This period functions as a link between one generation and the next and may last one week to 2,000 years as with the lotus.
Colaterales/Collateral Page 5
