GLOSE
And I grew up in patterned tranquility
In the cool nursery of the new century.
And the voice of man was not dear to me,
But the voice of the wind I could understand.
Anna Akhmatova «Willow »
translated by Judith Hemschmeyer
A sibilant wind presaged a latish spring.
Bare birches leaned and whispered over the gravel path.
Only the river ever left. Still, someone would bring
back a new sailor middy to wear in the photograph
of the four of us. Sit still, stop fidgeting.
--Like the still-leafless trees with their facility
for lyric prologue and its gossipy aftermath.
I liked to make up stories. I liked to sing :
I was encouraged to cultivate that ability.
And I grew up in patterned tranquility.
In the single room, with a greasy stain like a scar
from the gas-fire’s fumes, when any guest might be a threat
(and any threat was a guest-- from the past or the future)
at any hour of the night, I would put the tea things out
though there were scrap-leaves of tea, but no sugar,
or a lump or two of sugar but no tea.
Two matches, a hoarded cigarette :
my day’s page ashed on its bier in a bed-sitter.
No godmother had presaged such white nights to me
in the cool nursery of the young century.
The human voice distorted itself in speeches,
a rhetoric that locked locks and ticked off losses.
Our words were bare as that stand of winter birches
while poetasters sugared the party bosses’
edicts (the only sugar they could purchase)
with servile metaphor and simile.
The effects were mortal, however complex the causes.
When they beat their child beyond this thin wall, his screeches,
wails and pleas were the gibberish of history,
and the voice of man was not dear to me.
Men and women, I mean. Those high-pitched voices—
how I wanted them to shut up. They sound too much
like me. Little machines for evading choices,
little animals, selling their minds for touch.
The young widow’s voice is just hers, as she memorizes
the words we read and burn, nights when we read and
burn with the words unsaid, hers and mine, as we watch
and are watched, and the river reflects what spies. Is
the winter trees’ rustling a code to the winter land ?
But the voice of the wind I could understand.
GHAZAL: min al-hobbi ma qatal
For Deema Shehabi
You, old friend, leave, but who releases me from the love that kills?
Can you tell the love that sets you free from the love that kills?
No mail again this morning. The retired diplomat
stifles in the day’s complacency from the love that kills.
What once was home is across what once was a border
which exiles gaze at longingly from the love that kills.
The all-night dancer, the mother of four, the tired young doctor
all contracted HIV from the love that kills.
There is pleasure, too, in writing easy, dishonest verses.
Nothing protects your poetry from the love that kills.
The coloratura keens a triumphant swan-song
as if she sipped an elixir of glee from the love that kills.
We learn the maxim: “So fine the thread,
so sharp the necessity” from the love that kills.
The calligrapher went blind from his precision
and yet he claims he learned to see from the love that kills.
Spare me, she prays, from dreams of the town I grew up in,
from involuntary memory, from the love that kills.
Homesick soldier, do you sweat in the glare of this check-point
to guard the homesick refugee from the love that kills ?
A Braid of Garlic
For Mavis Gallant and in memory of Mahmoud Darwish
Aging women mourn while they go to market,
buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough today to
feed the wolf asleep underneath the table
who wakes from what dream?
What but loss comes round with the changing season?
He is dead whom, daring, I called a brother
with that leftover life perched on his shoulder
cawing departure.
He made one last roll of the dice. He met his
last, best interlocutor days before he
lay down for the surgery that might/might not
extend the gamble.
What they said belongs to them. Now a son writes
elegies, though he has a living father.
One loves sage tea, one gave the world the scent of
his mother’s coffee.
Light has shrunk back to what it was in April,
incrementally will shrink back to winter.
I can’t call my peregrinations “exile,”
but count the mornings.
In a basket hung from the wall, its handle
festooned with cloth flowers from chocolate boxes,
mottled purple shallots, and looped beside it,
a braid of garlic.
I remember, ten days after a birthday
(counterpoint and candlelight in the wine-glass)
how the woman radiologist's fingers
probed, not caressing.
So, reprise (what wasn’t called a “recurrence”)
of a fifteen-years-ago rite of passage:
I arrived, encumbered with excess baggage,
scarred, on the threshold.
Through the mild winter sun in February,
two or three times weekly to Gobelins, the
geriatric hospital where my friend was
getting her nerve back.
At the end of elegant proofs and lyric,
incoherent furious trolls in diapers.
Fragile and ephemeral as all beauty:
the human spirit –
while the former journalist watched, took notes and
shocked, regaled her visitors with dispatches
from the war zone in which she was embedded,
biding her time there.
Now in our own leftover lives, we toast our
memories and continence. I have scars where
breasts were, her gnarled fingers, these days, can hardly
hold the pen steady.
Thousands mourn him, while in the hush and hum of
life-support for multiple organ failure,
utter solitude, poise of scarlet wings that
flutter, and vanish.
The Bus Driver
by Hédi Kaddour
translated by Marilyn Hacker
What has gotten into the bus driver
Who has left his bus, who has sat down
On a curb on the Place de l’Opéra
Where he slips into the ease of being
Nothing more than his own tears? The passers-by
Who bend over such a shared and
Presentable sorrow would like him
To tell them that the wind used to know
How to come out of the woods towards a woman’s dress,
Or that one day his brother said to him
Even your shadow wants nothing to do with you.
His feet in a puddle, the bus driver
Can only repeat This work is hard
And people aren’t kind.
from Treason, Yale University Press 2010
July 12, 2006
by Venus Khoury-Ghata
translated by Marilyn Hacker
The flock of broom-bushes grazing on cold grass belongs to no one.
The shepherd and the pear tree struck down by apathy scrutinize the bad slope of the
 hill
the first one to turn away will catch fire and set summer ablaze
and it’s not the rags of paupered clouds that will put out the flames
nor the tears of the man who made an appointment with a wolf
to have a man-to-man talk
and break him like a twig across his knee.
***
It sometimes happens that the solitary house follows a muddy path
and needs a horse and its fleshiness to dig out its walls
unable to get up
the expected guest makes a detour around the tree to reach the doorstep
he enters right foot first
waves a greeting with his left hand
strikes a match
draws a fire in the hearth
you are my flame he says to the first flame
you are my daughters he says to the sparks
and he dives into the lamp to get to the opposite side of the light
and find the inhabitants hanging like bits of grit in the air.
***
They navigate the underside of the air
towards dry rains and affluent Octobers
rifles wait for them at the continent’s crossroad where the earth is black with sleep
keys in the men’s pockets open kitchens as deep as catacombs
where quails marinate in tears
and women in their juices till the hunters rend them apart on the tables
beneath the gaze of copper pots gleaming like a gathering storm
this evening
when the dishes are put away
the brown petals of the maids’ bellies will smell like plucked fowl.
***
Warda’s heavy water laps between her knees at the sight of the well
what thread can mend the rips in her skirt and the cracks in her feet
she turns on her heels at the sight of the sun come to meet her
its shadow on her fig tree will end up on her hearth
bundled into twigs its rays will cook the marrow-bone of a long-legged bulrush
dead of thirst from having kissed a bee on the lips.
***
Village without walls without windows
grudging aloe grows in the air’s fissures
the men who tamped the earth down with their boots have turned into mist on the
furrows
they fly away at the plowshare’s approach before falling back down on their
shadows when dusk turns the cemetery into a stone parenthesis between the fields
You can’t catch up with the boat on a donkey says the widow
and she throws her shoe at the river so she can live her life between its mouth and its
locks
***
The bridge they burned this morning led to the widow
The humbled village doesn’t know it yet
single women are to be ridden says the soldier leaning against the river
they sleep standing up like bulrushes
their fingers stiffened by waiting knead their children like modeling clay
until they see black tears staining their aprons
War had put the house to bed earlier than usual
its roof paces the air looking for a wall on which to put children and seagulls
they used to play war before the war
their exasperated mothers put an end to the hostilities
the odor of rice with cinnamon signed the armistice
For some unkown reason, war has stepped over the hedge
bombs fly into children’s eyes with the first snowflakes
in the school that stayed on the other slope
children conjugate the verb « to die » in the present tense
the imperfect is heavy with consequences, incompatible with snow,
not congruent with the season’s geometry
and it’s not the schoolmaster buried under the rubble who will contradict it
***
what’s not tied down will be torn out says the proverb
the woman whose wealth is three walls binds the shutters for fear they’ll follow the
children to school
three walls with an inside view since she chased the cold out with a broom
a sullen willow and a fire-spitting maple have replaced the fourth one
and when sleep turns her bed into a storm-tossed boat
and the dormer window into a darkened lighthouse, she asks herself if God has a
streetlight facing his home
***
arduous tasks are left to the wind hard at work beween walls and gravel
the musician pretends to play
the armfuls of notes that he throws to the hills are snatched up by the birds and
mothers’ calls between the clothesline and the stream are addressed to coyotes
astride the underside of the road
not a single tree in kilometers of silence
the shadow that led the man passing by into error and disturbed the rectitude of space
has been banished
the cemetery grass has turned blue with holding back its tears
and the children, grown stony, play jacks
originaly published in PN Review |
