Ghassan Zaqtan - 33 poems

chief among them
Buddha's lilac statue

or the photograph of a house owner in his furnished living room
staring at us out of his conservative classical death

the father's hermetic contemplation
a complicity of sorts with the daughter
as he expires beneath the oxygen apparatus

a woman's voice as she conceals her infidelity
through the phone's ten thick layers

it would have been possible to document his death or to remember
other scattered things in another context, like his dead weight
or the white of his eyes resembling a final resurrection
before the sirens were lit

if only he did not stand a bit crooked from the world, as happened with Cavafy
whose poetry he did not concern himself with as he did other poets

I have a suspicious heart, brother
and my stance is whole
there is no one who can guess the whirling in my head
and I no longer trust those night travelers!

&&&

I have a suspicious heart and my admirers are obstinate
and in the wadis
if you look closely are birds and hunters
who wear in the dark longing's smell
and its form

hunters who have other motives in the light
other labyrinths
and paths that make a hyena pant
and the signifier and the signified are lost

among them:
wind-instrument blowers

wily attars in the markets

barefoot narrators behind the slaves

and pretentious mockers standing on their bank
where we were born
white from black fathers

there are among them more than enough to make me superfluous…

my guests are blind and dervishes
as aforementioned
I describe them as they appeared
in secret
as blessed and guarded narrators born
with absent minds
but if absently
they died they'd notice

in meaning they have a jinn's rank
and its language
and in structure a paranoid's body
and levity

…and for some reason I can't quite recall now
he moved a little away, turned his back to me and stared at the river
and said: I have nothing left to give you except this:
and pointed to the water
then wiped my face with his hands

I became alert and imagined I was in a garden in Baghdad whose fence
I had passed by when I was a kid…
and there was in the dark a fishing boat
a soft paddle transmitting the scent of sparks from across the river
quiet sounds coming from the brothel,
and all this seemed to me like breathing…
what I don't see as it has gathered

I rose and looked around
and there I was alone and the river before me,
with two maidens in it, one black, the other white
and whenever I slept or was distracted he would come, sit before me,
talk to me and I would listen, then he'd wipe his hands
with my face and I'd awaken, transported from one land to another land
one time to another time…

until I reached the Tigris bank that night where the two maidens were
and I realized the state I had been in, and longed for those I'd left behind

so I composed these lines for the occasion:

I raise your secret to all expose mine to man and jinn
I light a fire of jasmine and chase a dream of fleeing mirth
I gather behind you the crowd's shadow a salaam of vanishing to the vanished
and in pleasure I am alluring and in sleep I see the invisible
as if I were your radiance and you my whirling spell
I played and spun the soul of life as one seeks a plaything
and let loose prophetic horses and rode drunker than a drunk
so here I am before you a triumph brought to the victor
you're all I have as I'm paraded the pleased around his benefactor

I elevated him higher in my prayers and embellished his favours then remembered
what he had told me as he was bidding me farewell:

‘as for that which you did not ask me about
it's your secret, no one else's
and it doesn't concern me
I neither help you with it
nor release you from it'

and I had asked him about all things but this!

he had tutored me
when I was a kid,
I would repeat whatever he said
three times
before the rooster crowed,
I would listen
then repeat what he had said twice
and by the third time
I'd add to it my own.

The one you accidentally found in the mirror

in its dark corner to be exact
was there alone thinking of you

befriending your solitude
The one, because you are in need of company no more,

you called out of his darkness and fed

with your hands
You used to call him and he'd come

point to him and he'd jump to his feet
and as soon as you'd turn your back he'd unload on you

his hyena stare before returning to his corner
Now you recall all this

since you must pass a long time here

staring at the mirror

at its dark corner to be exact
as he sits in your chair

feeds you with his own hands

and passes you some water

calls to you

and you come

By morning travelers knocked on her door
but she didn't wake
By noon a bird stirred her
from a book but she didn't wake
And at night a girl came from the orchard
her hair was short
her sleeves filthy
her load of quince
She called out to her dead kin
for seven nights
and seven days
full in count
The girl who knocked on the door at night
was there
with short hair
filthy sleeves
and a crow's sound
The caw awakened
a woman in her thirties
from her death
who said to the little girl:
I gave birth to you in a dream,
you aren't real for us
to love you like other girls,
leave for twenty years
so we can love you
and wait for you,
but don't grow older in the fog
lest we die.

The slain enemy
Think of me without mercy in their eternal sleep
Ghosts ascend the stairways of the house, rounding the corners
The ghosts I picked up from the roads
Collecting them from the sins around other people's necks.

The sin hangs at the throat like a burden
It is there I nurture my ghosts and feed them
The ghosts that float like black horses in my dreams.

With the vigor of the dead the latest Blues song rises
While I reflect on jealousy
The door is warped open, breath seeps through the cracks
The breath of the river
The breath of drunkards, the breath
Of the woman who awakes to her past in a public park.

When I sleep
I see a horse grazing the grass
When I fall asleep,
The horse watches over my dreams

On my table in Ramallah
There are unfinished letters
And pictures of old friends
The manuscript of a young poet from Gaza
An hourglass
And opening lines that flap in my head like wingsِ