Fady Joudah

For Ghassan Zaqtan 1 I now release from my blood                the bird of   thirty she wasted that’s how wars                                        crumble us I now tell those                                        who are exhausted from the expense of children the secret                              of   happiness and happiness itself from what is arrived at                          but doesn’t come from the language                                  of   balance defeat                                                        has the taste of    being shrouded                                 with another’s banner while your enemies                                chant your names Some music                                              some shelling will strike our dead                                 who flew off in the early raids have you seen them                                return from their flying? They stayed behind                                 hanging by the thread of their surprise                                       and by their women’s hair We will dance                                           in the wreckage drink the coffee our dead left brewing                             we will open our tombs to windows for the sea                            in order for the sea to remain                               besieged Right here                                                 right here a corpse shook its trunk                         in the earth a corpse snapped God’s ropes                                               houses gathered then hid what’s easy to interpret                          of   people’s speech Which mourners ebbed                         and turned the sea to tombstones for our dead which poem                      was said and revived us? And that huge rose of ours                    our only bewilderment our offense                                                on earth our balcony on the kingdom of   heaven                    the grandfather’s house a hand that gestures                               farewell in the roar of   the massacre                   a white hand like old time a free hand like death                             after death Tell my love                                              space has been plucked tell her to sleep                                        on disaffection’s stone 2 Two raids three raids                             a whole morning a year of   long                                           bombardment over your going Did you forget                                          a newspaper of   palm fronds a time of   white dawn                             some hay from last season’s siege a brief greeting                                        like a mumbling on mornings                                            of   slow advance a suitcase a rug a palm                          with which you touched the evening of shelling                                                 into a meaning for a people                                              kind and assured and silent? Whenever glass shook                           you would shriek kid                                                              I pluck your death’s anemone                           and eat it Each land                                                  has its people each time                                                  has its folks and time for a while now                                        has been standing on our throats As if   we don’t love                                  or hate as if we’ve seen the land only as a bracelet                                    a house a dress a poem left filled with those who were killed                   without war 3 Memory shrinks                                      until it fits in a fist memory shrinks                                      without forgetting a boy in a farm                                         a chicken on a roof a dot on the planet                                  mysterious and intuitive like parents or a tree for a hat                                     with prairies for a dictionary                                         and days like sleeves short in summer                                      cotton in winter they resist when squeezed                     between our knees A not so First World                               rains on a calm boy torn apart                                                  like a tattered tent The lily of words                                      enters his heart takes a wedding by the horns                                              a well-trained bulbul by the scandalous                                    fruit rush of the river His return                                                 will be washed shrouded a field’s first flower                                 guarded by dirt Coffee coffee                                            for the beautiful one whose heart’s                                           a tambourine this morning while war                                                  shouts cold on slopes 4 In the saddles                                          grass grows warmth matures                                     in oleander the river pours                                        in your absence everything                                                will happen I exchanged                                             half of my books to sit near you flung my hand                                         so that it may see you then retrieved it                                      to touch what it saw We slept like sponges                            near the river butterflies descended from the ribs of shadow                        then left behind a mirror pitched                                     like a house of   jinn 5 It’ll be difficult                                          that you go before you choose a grave                      fit for sleep It’ll be difficult                                         that you die before you choose a grave                     fit for running for flood swimming                                for dense reeds by irrigation channels for bird snares                                         for the lettuce garden in the backyard for old dry thatch                                    on mud roofs for jujube shrubs                                     for climbing on trucks and holding on to vegetable boxes                                   for the diffusion of secrets loading and unloading                           in the big market A grave fit for you                                    to see Jericho light up through the windows                              as a neon garden the refugee camps                                    by the marshes touch A grave fit for you                                    to see Jericho’s convent toss grass liquor our way                                fir for some arches where oleander wilts                               near Bedouin tents And their watchdogs                               will dig and dig and dig and dig                                        and you won’t come 6 And the mules                                           in the junkyards does anyone feed                                      their loneliness when they cry? Or has anyone quenched                        their oneness or washed their dead necks                                       or visited them to remember how they blackened                                          in their sleep? The mules the movie                               extras who fold their torsos in the packed air                                       as lineage floats on light                                            an icon of wondrous dust                                     and riddles 7 And our neighbor                                    the one whose voice fenced us with reeds                               all day and all night She would forget                                      her rings in our hands two boys                                                    who used to dance for her

At a desk made of glass, In a glass walled-room With red airport carpet, An officer asked My father for fingerprints, And my father refused, So another offered him tea And he sipped it. The teacup Template for fingerprints. My father says, it was just Hot water with a bag. My father says, in his country, Because the earth knows The scent of history, It gave the people sage. I like my tea with sage From my mother’s garden, Next to the snapdragons She calls fishmouths Coming out for air. A remedy For stomach pains she keeps In the kitchen where She always sings. First, she is Hagar Boiling water Where tea is loosened. Then she drops In it a pinch of sage And lets it sit a while. She tells a story: The groom arrives late To his wedding Wearing only one shoe. The bride asks him About the shoe. He tells her He lost it while jumping Over a house-wall. Breaking away from soldiers. She asks: Tea with sage Or tea with mint? With sage, he says, Sweet scent, bitter tongue. She makes it, he drinks.

Between what should and what should not be Everything is liable to explode. Many times I was told who has no land has no sea. My father Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story Of a sycamore tree he used to climb When he was young to watch the rain. Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red. My brother believed bad dreams could kill A man in his sleep, he insisted We wake my father from his muffled screams On the night of the day he took us to see his village. No longer his village he found his tree amputated. Between one falling and the next There’s a weightless state. There was a woman Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand. When she left. I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew Could turn anyone into one-half reptile. I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being The only one left. When we woke my father He was running away from soldiers. Now He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king And tried not to stop. He flew But mother woke him and held him for an hour, Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward. Maybe if I had just said it. Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe I don’t know much about dreams But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead Know about the dying and sometimes Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree My father used to climb When he was young to watch the rain stream, And he would gently swing.

The rice field birds are too clever for scarecrows, They know what they love, milk in the grain. When it happens, there will be no time to look for anyone. Husband, children, nine brothers and sisters. You will drop your sugarcane-stick-beating of plastic bucket, Stop shouting at birds and run. They will load you in trucks and herd you for a hundred miles. Old men will teach you trade with soldiers at checkpoints. You will give them your spoon, blanket and beans, They’ll let you keep your life. And if you jump off the truck, The army jeep trailing it will run you over. Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land. Later, you will stand in distribution lines and won’t receive enough to eat. Your mother will weave you new underwear from flour sacks. And they’ll give you plastic tents, cooking pots, Vaccine cards, white pills, and wool blankets. And you will keep your cool. Standing with eyes shut tight like you’ve got soap in them. Arms stretched wide like you’re catching rain.

1. It wasn’t over a woman that war began, but it’s better To see it this way, my myth professor loved to say, a man From the South rumored to extort the bodies of college girls Into higher grades. My girlfriend of the time told me so — He was a creep, she Got an A in the class and liked his joke about religion As self-mutilation, it was Ramadan then and, O Helen, I was fasting. I lie awake in a desert night east Of the Atlantic on the verge of rain, the catapulted grains Of sand on hot zinc roof, the rustle of leaves, the flap Of peeling bark on trees whose names I do not know, and where Would I find a botany guide here. Water flowed Like a river from the Jabal once. There were elephant pools, alligator Streams, and a pond for the devil to speak in human tongues. All desiccant names now after an earthquake Shuffled the ground decades ago. It will rain soon, I’m assured, since nothing has stopped The birds from migration. All the look-alikes Are already here: the stork, the heron. The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one That aesthetizes you more.

The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty is symmetry so rare it’s a mystery. My left eye is smaller than my right, my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly aligned like Muslims in prayer. My lips an accordion. Each sneeze a facial thumbprint. One corner of my mouth hangs downward when I want to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell’s palsy perhaps or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting, that a doctor’s unable to look upon the blush in a young beauty’s face without thinking it could be a fever, a malar rash, a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie facedown now as cadavers posed on first anatomy lesson? I didn’t know mine was a woman until three weeks later we turned her over. Out of reverence there was to be no untimely exposure of donors, our patrons who were covered in patches of scrubs-green dish towels, and by semester’s end we were sick of all that, tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts into lab air and caught them. My body was Margaret. That’s what the death certificate said when it was released before finals. The cause of her death? Nothing memorable, frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit were there skull cracks to condemn the house of death, no shattered glass in the brain, only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely. He had the most beautiful muscles of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged, zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred. Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling had cloth over their eyes as if they’d just been executed. Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance, he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war. I had come across that which will end me, ex- tend me, at least once, without knowing it.

You’re right about the praise I dish your way jail’s the comeuppance of a liar poet My only want is your content and if I hold another want may I never be granted it Each full moon is born of a crescent yet what’s a full moon got Vitiligo and the morning sees me with eyes of dew a fever that breaks out on your integument On your skin exanthem is a pasture of anemones Because you’re one of them I love my enemies

No shards where one is bound to no place in the first place all shards we were clear on that from the beginning Absence is always sudden to hear your voice once more more echo than shrapnel qualia of the forbidden transforms itself into wounds regenerates a hydra or lizard tail touch me I’m alive again there isn’t enough time or proximity for your essence or mine          to vanish we’ll remain fire and ice who turn to glass that doesn’t shatter mercury if it shatters

We saw a lot more of them dead than alive the living diffident by the side of the road as the far-off mountains flanked and intoxicated the speedometer into saunter The dead were interspersed on the asphalt their poor vision uncorrected by their auditory keenness like a blind spot in a poet and their fender-mangled corpses were occasionally ripped in two before vultures reached them In our rental van we left no mother bereft and orphaned no piglets Turkey buzzards and American vultures were the javelinas’ gift to us red and black scavengers that perched on ranchland fences the full span of highway they’d circle above in diminishing downward spirals or flinch at each other’s puffs and swells or away from incoming vehicles Still they shared the dead among them as we sometimes share our dead when we love our dead Javelina the Arabic word for mountain in its root and then the mountain coming closer to an ear became a spear

1. Here, shooting stars linger They give out A sparkling trail like a cauterized incision Silver, or amber If the moon is low and rising red 2. And the rain melts the roads And the roads Can rupture a spleen Or oust a kidney stone As for the heart It needs a beginning The narrative Burden of events 3. “Mize, zey eat mize” The Frenchman exclaimed with a smile “Rraized and shipped from za States” We raise rats! I thought That’s a lot of protein! “Maize maize!” it was, after our chickens Have had their fill 4. She was the only nurse in town before the war She spoke seven languages and died suddenly He was a merchant He’s a doorman now and buys us cigarettes 5. Here we are with love pouring out of every orifice Here they are dancing Around the funeral pyre, the corpse in absentia 6. One of the drivers ran over the neighbor’s ducks The neighbor demanded compensation For the post-traumatic stress disorder he accurately anticipates Do you know what it’s like To drive on roads occupied By animal farms: you cannot tell Who killed who or how Many ducks were there to begin with 7. In the morning, elephant grass moves the way Mist is visible in the breeze but doesn’t dampen the skin 8. Today, I yelled at three old women Who wouldn’t stop bargaining for pills they didn’t need One wanted extra For her grandson who came along for the ride 9. Like lip sores The asphalt blisters in the rain And the boys Fill the holes with dirt and gravel And broken green branches Then wait: No windex. No flowers or newspapers And gratuity is appreciated 10. “I have ants in my leg” And “My leg went to sleep” Are not the same thing! The French argue There is no sleep in a tingling numbness The symptom of sluggish blood: I agree. Me too my leg has been anted And we are learning to reconcile The dark with the electric 11. Four days the river runs to the border Nine days to learn it wasn’t the shape Of your nose that gave you away And debts are paid off in a-shelter-for-a-day A pile of wood plus change in your pocket Is a sack of potatoes and change in another’s 12. No more running long or short distance The old women Snicker at me when I pass them by 13. She was comatose post-partum And the beekeeper Bathed her in love everyday When she recovered I gave up What he’d promised me for the woman Who took up nursing their newborn Since as coincidence would have it Her name was Om Assel— Mother of Honey 14. The translation of a medical interview Is not a poem to be written Come recite a verse from childhood with me I see you’re unable to weep, does love Have no command over you? The sea’s like the desert Neither quenches the thirst 15. Here, dry grass burns the moon Here, a clearing of grass is a clearing of snakes 16. And the rain has already been cleansed from the sky The clinic is empty, soon The earth will unseal like a jar Harvest is the season that fills the belly 17. Here, I ride my bicycle invisible Except for a crescent shadow and the Milky Way Is already past 18. And a mirror gives the moon back to the moon Home is an epilogue: Which came first Memory or words?