Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? Read online

  Like the rest of the desert, space is rolled back from time

  A distance sufficient for the poem to explode. Isma’il would

  Descend among us by night, and sing: ‘O stranger,

  I am the stranger and you from me, O stranger!’

  The desert roams in the words and the words ignore the power

  Of things. Return, O Oud… with what is lost and sacrifice me

  On it, from far off to far off

  Hallelujah

  Hallelujah

  All Things will begin anew

  *

  Meaning travels with us… we fly from ledge to

  Marble ledge. And race between two blue chasms.

  It is not our dreams that are awake, nor the guards of this place

  Leave Isma’il’s space. There is no earth there

  And no sky. A common joy touched us before

  The Limbo of two strings. Isma’il… sing

  For us so that everything becomes possible, close to existence

  Hallelujah

  Hallelujah

  All things will begin anew

  *

  In Isma’il’s Oud the Sumerian wedding is raised

  To the extremities of the sword. There is no non-existence there

  And no existence. We have been touched by a lust to create:

  From one string there flows water. From two strings fire is ignited.

  From the three of them flashes forth Woman/Being/

  Revelation. Sing, Isma’il, for meaning a bird hovers

  At dusk over Athena between two dates…

  Sing a funeral on a celebration day

  Hallelujah

  Hallelujah

  All things will begin anew

  *

  Under the poem: the strange horses pass over. The wagons

  Pass over the backs of the prisoners. Under it pass

  Oblivion and the Hyksos. There pass the lords of the time,

  The philosophers, Imru’ al’Qais, grieving for a morrow

  Cast down at Caesar’s gates. They all pass under

  The poem. The contemporary Past, like Timur Lenk,

  Passes under it. The prophets are there, they also pass under

  And hearken to Isma’il’s voice, as he sings: O stranger,

  I am the stranger, I am like you, O stranger to this house,

  Return… O Oud bringing what is lost, and sacrifice me on yourself,

  Vein to vein

  Hallelujah

  Hallelujah

  All things will begin anew

  The Strangers’ Walk

  I know the house from the sage bush. The first of

  The windows leans out towards the butterflies… blue…

  Red. I know the line of clouds, and at which

  Well the village women will wait in summer. I know

  What the dove says as it lays its eggs on the muzzle

  Of the rifle. I know who opens the door to the jasmine

  Which opens our dreams in to the evening’s guests.

  *

  The strangers’ carriage has not yet arrived

  *

  No one has come. So leave me there, just as

  You leave greeting at the door of the house. For me

  Or for another, and pay no attention to who will hear it

  First. And leave me there a word for myself:

  Was I alone ‘alone as the soul in

  A body’? When you said one day: I love you both,

  You and the water. Water gleamed in everything,

  Like a guitar which had given itself to weeping!

  *

  The strangers’ guitar has not yet arrived

  *

  Let us be kind! Take me to the sea at

  Sunset so that I may hear what the sea says to you

  When it returns to itself peacefully, peacefully.

  I shall not change myself. I shall hide myself in a wave

  And say: Take me to the sea again. That is what

  Those who fear do to themselves: they go to

  The sea when they are tormented by a star that has burnt itself in the sky

  *

  The stranger’s song has not yet arrived

  *

  I know the house by the fluttering kerchiefs. The first pigeon

  That laments on my shoulders. And beneath the sky

  Of the Gospels a child is rushing for no reason. The water rushes,

  And the cypress rushes, and the breeze rushes in

  The breeze and the earth rushes in itself. I said:

  Do not hasten to leave the house. There is nothing

  To prevent this place from waiting awhile

  Here, until you put on the day dress and pull on

  The shoes of air

  *

  The strangers’ legend has not yet arrived

  *

  No one has come. So leave me there, as

  You leave the tale in anyone who sees you, and weeps

  And rushes off in himself, of his own happiness:

  How much I love you! How much you are you! and intimidated by his own soul:

  There is no I now, but she is now in me. No she, but I am in her fragility. How I fear

  For my dream, lest it see a dream that is not she at

  The end of this song…

  *

  No one has come

  Perhaps the strangers have missed the way

  To the strangers’ walk!

  Raven’s Ink

  You have a retreat in the solitude of the carob trees,

  O dark-voiced sunset bells! What

  Do they want from you now? You sought

  Adam’s garden, so that the sullen killer might conceal his brother,

  And were locked up in yourself

  When the dead man was opened up at his large

  And you took yourself off to your own affairs: as absence takes itself off

  To its own many preoccupation. So, be

  Awake. Raven, our resurrection will be postponed!

  *

  There is no night sufficient for us to dream twice. There is one

  Gate to our heaven. Whence comes our end?

  We are the offspring of the beginning. We see only

  The beginning, so unite with the weather-side of your night, as a diviner

  Preaches void what the human void leaves behind it:

  The eternal echo around you…

  You stand accused of what is in us. This is the first

  Blood of our race before you. Leave

  Cabel’s new house.

  As the mirage leaves

  The ink of your feathers, O Raven

  *

  For me there is a retreat in the night of your voice… for me an absence

  Rushing between the shadow that binds me.

  So I bind the bull’s horn. The unseen drives me, I drive it

  It raises me and I raise it to the ghost that hangs like

  A ripe aubergine. Are you then? And what

  Do they want now from us after they have stolen my words from

  Your words, then slept upright in my dream

  On spears. I was not a ghost that they should walk

  In my footsteps. Be my second brother:

  I am Abel, the dust returns me

  To you as a carob tree, so that you may perch on my branch, O Raven

  *

  I am you in words. One book unites us.

  The ashes that lie on you are mine,

  In the shadow we were merely two witnesses, two victims

  Two poems

  Two poems

  About Nature, while desolation concludes its feast

  *

  The Qur’an shall enlighten you:

  ‘Then God sent a raven who scratched the ground.

  To show him how to hide the shame of his brother.

  “Woe is me!” said he; “Was I not even able to be as this raven?”’

  The Qur’an shall enlighten you,


  So search about for our resurrection, and hover, O Raven!

  The Tatars’ Swallow

  My steed is commensurate with the sky. I have dreamt

  what will happen in the afternoon. The Tatars used

  to ride beneath me and beneath the sky: dreaming of nothing

  beyond the tents they would erect. Knowing nothing

  of the destinies of our goats in the coming blasts of winter.

  My steed is commensurate with the evening. The Tatars used

  to insert their names in the roofs of villages, like swallows,

  and would slumber safely in our cornfields;

  they would not dream of what would happen in the afternoon, when

  the sky returns, slowly, slowly,

  to its own people in the evening

  *

  We have one dream: that the air flow

  as a friend, diffusing the aroma of Arab coffee

  over the hills that enclose summer and strangers…

  *

  I am my own dream. When the earth has grown narrow, I have made it wide

  With a swallow’s wing, and grown larger. I am my own dream…

  In crowds I am filled with the reflection of myself and my questions

  About stars which walk on the two feet of one whom I love

  And in my exile there are ways for pilgrims to Jerusalem –

  The words plucked out like feathers over the stones,

  How many prophets does the city want so as to preserve the name

  Of its father and regret: ‘It was not in war that I fell’?

  How much sky does it change, in every people,

  So that its red shawl might amaze it? O my dream…

  Gaze not at us so!

  Do not be the last of the martyrs!

  *

  I fear for my dream from the clarity of the butterfly

  And from the mulberry stains over the whinnying of the horse

  I fear for it from the father and the son and those crossing

  Over the Mediterranean coast in search of the gods

  And the gold of those who went before,

  I fear for my dream from my hands

  And from a star which stands

  At my shoulder waiting to sing

  *

  To us, the people of ancient nights, we have our customs

  In climbing to the Moon of rhyme

  We accept our dreams as true, and give the lie to our days,

  Our days have not all been with us since the Tatars came,

  And now here they are, getting ready to move on

  Forgetting our days, behind them. Soon we will go down

  To our life in the fields. We will make flags

  From white bed sheets, if we must have

  A flag, let it be blank,

  Without fussy symbols… let us be peaceful

  Lest we fly our dreams after the strangers’ caravan

  *

  We have one dream: to find

  A dream carrying us

  As the star carries the dead!

  The Train Went by

  The train went swiftly by.

  I was waiting

  On the platform for a train that had gone,

  And the passengers departed to get on with

  Their days… And I

  Was still waiting

  *

  Violins lament in the distance,

  A cloud carries me

  Away, and breaks up

  *

  Longing for things obscure

  Would recede and approach,

  There was no forgetting that would draw me away,

  No remembering that would draw me close

  To a woman

  Who, if the moon touched her,

  Would cry out: ‘I am the moon’

  *

  The train went swiftly by,

  My time was not with me

  On the platform,

  The time was different,

  What is the time now?

  Which day was it, that

  Divided yesterday from tomorrow,

  When the gypsies departed?

  *

  Here I was born and not born

  My stubborn birth shall be completed then

  By this train

  And the trees shall walk around me

  *

  I am here and not here

  In this train I shall find out

  my soul, filled

  By both banks of a river which had died between them

  As youth dies

  ‘Wish that youth were stone…’

  *

  The train went swiftly by

  Past me, I am

  Like the station, not knowing

  Whether to bid farewell or greet the people:

  Welcome to my platforms

  Cafes,

  Offices,

  Flowers,

  Telephone,

  Newspapers,

  Sandwiches,

  Music,

  And a rhyme,

  By another poet who comes and waits

  *

  The train went swiftly by

  Past me, and I

  Am still waiting.

  III.

  Chaos at the Entrance

  of Judgment Day

  The Well

  I choose a cloudy day to go past the old well.

  Perhaps it is full of sky. Perhaps it has gone beyond meaning

  and beyond the shepherd’s sayings. I shall drink of its water with cupped hands

  and say to the dead around it: Greetings, ye who remain

  around the well in the water of the butterfly! I shall pick up the inula

  from a stone: Greetings, O little stone! Perhaps we were

  the wings of a bird that causes us pain. Greetings,

  O moon that hovers around its image; which it will

  never meet! And I shall say to the cypress: Beware of what

  the dust is telling you. Perhaps we were here two strings of a violin

  at the banquet of the guardians of lapis lazuli. Perhaps we were

  the arms of a lover…

  I had been walking side by side with myself: Be strong,

  Comrade, raise up the past like the horns of a goat

  with your hands, and sit down near your well. Perhaps the harts

  of the watercourse will notice you… The voice cries out –

  Your voice is a voice of stone for the broken present…

  I have not yet completed my brief visit to oblivion…

  I did not take with me all the tools of my heart:

  My bell in the pine tree’s breeze

  My stairway near the sky

  My stars around the roofs

  My hoarseness from the bite of old salt…

  And I said to memory: Greetings, O spontaneous words of grandmother,

  It takes us back to our white days beneath her drowsiness…

  And my name rings like an old pound coin of gold at

  The gate of the well. I hear the desolation of forefathers

  Between the distant meem and waw, like an uncultivated watercourse

  And I hide my friendly tiredness. I know that I

  Shall come back alive, after a few hours, from the well into which

  I have not thrown Joseph or his brothers’ fear

  Of echoes. Beware! Your mother put you here,

  Near the gate of the well: and went off to a talisman… .

  So do with yourself what you want. I did by myself what

  I want. I grew up by night in the tale between the sides

  Of the triangle: Egypt, Syria, and Babylon. Here,

  By myself I grew up without the goddesses of agriculture. (They were

  Washing the pebbles in the olive grove. They were wet

  With dew)… and I saw that I had fallen

  On me from the departure of the caravans near a snake.

  I found none to complete but my ghost. Th
e earth

  Threw me out of its earth, and my name rings on my steps,

  Like a horseshoe; Draw near… so that I may come back from this

  Emptiness to you O eternal Gilgamesh in your name!…

  Be my brother! And go with me to shout into the old well…

  Perhaps it is filled, like a woman, with the sky,

  And perhaps it has over meaning and what

  Is going to happen as my birth from my first well is awaited!

  We shall drink of its water with cupped hands,

  We shall say to the dead around it, Greetings,

  Ye who live in the water of the butterfly,

  O ye dead, greetings!

  Like the ‘Nūn; in Surrat ‘al-Rahman’

  In the olive grove, east

  Of the springs, my grandfather has withdrawn into

  His deserted shadow. On his shadow: there has grown no

  Legendary grass, no cloud of lilac has flowed inside the shrine

  *

  The earth is like a robe embroidered

  With a needle of sumac in his broken

  Dreams… grandfather has awoken

  To collect the weeds from his vineyard

  Underground, beneath the black street…

  *

  He taught me the Qur’an under the great basil tree

  East of the well,

  From Adam we came and from Eve

  In the garden of oblivion.

  Grandfather! I am the last of the living

  In the desert, so let us rise!

  *

  The sea and the desert around his name,