A River Dies of Thirst (8 page)

and the river runs south, south, and carries our dead

sleepless to the palm trees’ kin

Iraq, Iraq is open graveyards like schools

Open to all, from the Armenian to the Turcoman

and Arab. We are equal in the study of the science

of the Last Day. There should be a poet asking:

‘Baghdad, how many times will you betray the legends? How many times

construct statues for the future? How many times

demand marriage with the impossible?’

Iraq, Iraq, here the prophets stand

powerless to pronounce the name of heaven. For who

is killing who now in Iraq? Victims are fragments

on roads and in words. Their names are tufts

of letters disfigured like their bodies. Here

the prophets stand together powerless to pronounce the name

of heaven, and the fallen

Iraq, Iraq, who are you when suicide is all around?

I am not I in Iraq and you are not you, and what

is he except another? The deity has abandoned the helpless

So who are we? Who are we? No more than an item

in this poem: Iraq’s night is very long!

Cordoba’s wooden doors do not invite me in to give a greeting from Damascus to a fountain and a jasmine bush. I walk in the narrow alleys on a gentle, sunny spring day. I tread lightly as if I am a guest of myself and my memories, not an archaeological fragment passed around by tourists. I do not tap on the shoulder of my past with melancholy joy, as expected of me by a poem I’ve postponed writing, and I am not afraid of nostalgia since I shut my suitcase on it, but I fear the future running ahead of me at an automated pace. Whenever I intrude on it, it reproaches me, saying: ‘Explore the present.’ But there are many poets in Cordoba, foreigners and Andalusians, talking about the past of the Arabs and the future of poetry. In a modest park with few trees I see a sculpture of the hands of Ibn Zaydun and Wallada, and ask one of my favourite poets, Derek Walcott, if he knows anything about Arab poetry. With no apology, he says: ‘No, nothing at all.’ All the same, we stayed together for three days, continuously making fun of poetry and poets, who he described as metaphor thieves. ‘How many metaphors have you stolen?’ he asked me, and I was unable to answer. We competed with one another flirting with the Cordoban women. ‘If you liked a woman, would you approach her?’ he asked me. ‘The more beautiful she is, the more daring I am,’ I said. ‘What about you?’ ‘If I like a woman, she comes to me,’ he said. ‘Because you are a king and a son of a . . . I don’t know what,’ I said. His third wife was laughing. In Cordoba I stood before a wooden front door and searched in my pocket for the keys to
my old house, as Nizar Qabbani once did. I shed no tears, because the new wound covers the scar of the old. But Derek Walcott surprised me with a hurtful question: ‘Who does Jerusalem belong to? You or them?’

Sun and light rain, an uncertain spring. The trees in the garden of the student residence are high and ancient. The paths are covered in gravel, which makes walking on them more like a comic attempt to practise flamenco, and an unsteady light filters through the shadows. From this hilltop we look down on Madrid, big and low like a green pool. We sit on a wooden bench – the Canadian-American poet Mark Strand and I – to have our photos taken with the students and sign Spanish translations of our books, competing to hide the unexpected joy a poet feels when he comes face to face with an anonymous reader and realises that his poetry, written in a closed room, has made the journey to this garden. An elegant woman approaches me. She says: ‘I’m Lorca’s granddaughter.’ I embrace her, trying to catch a whiff of him. ‘What do you remember of him?’ I ask. She was born after his execution, she replies. Do you know how much we love him? Everyone says that, and I feel proud. He’s an icon. The director of the student residence reminds me that this place is a Madrid landmark. You miss something if you don’t do a poetry reading here. Lorca, Alberti, Jimenez and Salvador Dali all lived here. At the end of our joint session I am obliged to put a question to Mark Strand. I ask him: What are the obvious dividing lines between poetry and prose? He hesitates, as true poets do when faced with a hard definition. Then he says – and he writes prose poetry: ‘The rhythm, the rhythm. Poetry is defined by its rhythm.’ When we go out into the garden to walk on the
gravel paths we don’t talk much, so as not to disturb the rhythm of night above the high trees. For some reason I remember Nietzsche’s perceptive remark: ‘Wisdom is meaning deprived of song.’

He walks on clouds in his dreams, and sees

the unseen. He thinks the clouds are dry land

High is the mountain

higher and further. Nothing reminds him

of nowhere, so he walks with his misgivings

Walks, and does not arrive

as if he is he, or one of the attributes of ‘I’

that the two opposites, hope and despair

have divided between themselves

The mist was thick in his poem

He was rising up from my dream, so I said to him:

‘High is the mountain.’

I see what I see

without noticing

and since I don’t see what I see

I get in a mess

and live

as if I am me

or somebody else

and don’t notice!

He liked a word

He opened the dictionary

He couldn’t find it

or an imprecise meaning for it

but it haunted him at night

musical, harmonious

with a mysterious nature

He said: ‘It needs a poet

and some metaphor so that it turns green and red

on the surface of dark nights’

What is it?

He found the meaning

and the word was lost to him.

In the echo
is a well

In the well
is an echo

and the space

seems
grey, neutral

as if war has not happened

or happened yesterday

and might come tomorrow

In the echo
is a well

In the well
is an echo

and I search the space between them

for the source of the sound

in vain.

The olive tree does not cry or laugh. Modest mistress of the hillsides, she covers her trunk with her shadow and does not divest herself of her leaves in the face of a storm. She stands as if sitting, and sits as if standing. She lives as sister to a friendly eternity and neighbour to time that entrusts her to store luminous oil and forget the names of invaders, with the exception of the Romans, who were her contemporaries and borrowed some of her branches to plait garlands. They did not treat her like a prisoner of war, but rather a respected grandmother whose superior dignity was mightier than the sword. In her restrained silvery greenness is a colour too shy to declare itself openly, a glance towards something beyond description, for she is neither green nor silver. She is the colour of peace, if peace needs a colour to distinguish it. Nobody says to her: ‘How beautiful you are!’ but they do say: ‘How venerable and sublime you are!’ It is she who trains soldiers to lay down their weapons, and drills them in homesickness and humility: ‘Return to your homes, and use my oil to light your lamps.’ But these soldiers, these new soldiers, surround her with bulldozers and uproot her. They crush our grandmother, so that now her branches are in the earth and her roots in the air. She did not weep or shout, but one of her grandsons, who witnessed the execution, threw a stone at a soldier and was martyred alongside her. When the soldiers left triumphantly, we buried him there, in the deep hole, our grandmother’s cradle. For some reason we were convinced that after a while he would become an olive tree, spiky and – green!

A willow tree where two paths intersect: have

the northerners come? Or the southerners gone?

No war there, and no peace, and the sky

is clean and light above the place

He said to me, tucking under his arm the notebook in which he wrote his poems:

‘This, stranger, is my identity’

Meddling in the alphabet. Every letter is a hill

and a garden. He, not I, when it comes to letters

is his own master. He chooses his imaginary world

away from nature. Perhaps I have corrected

mistakes on the map. Perhaps I have alleviated the ravages

of life’s slow poison on my brothers.

And he says to me: ‘I am present in all things

absent from all things, between yesterday

and my present is a willow tree

a willow tree where two times intersect’

I say: ‘So who are you?’

He says to me, tucking his notebook under his arm

entangled in his poetic way of talking:

‘This is all that’s left of the wreckage of my identity.’

If God has punished Adam by driving him out of eternal life into time, then the earth is exile and history a tragedy. It began with a family quarrel between Cain and Abel, then developed into civil wars, regional wars and global wars, which are continuing until history’s descendants have wiped out history. So what’s next? What comes after history? It seems that the right of return to paradise is encompassed by nothingness and divine mysteries. The only smooth road is the road to the abyss, until further notice . . . until the issuing of a divine pardon.

It is not as Adam thought!

If it were not for sin

if it were not for the descent to earth

the discovery of misery

and the temptation of Eve

if it were not for the longing for a lost paradise

there would be no poetry

nor memory

and eternity would be no consolation.

A song which needs Italian words. What an autumn . . . what an autumn. The sky is not blue or white or grey, because the colours are points of view agreeing and disagreeing. The small clouds are towels drying the drizzle off the mountain tops, and the mountains grow higher as the sky comes to meet them. The trees are females, who have just come out of a bath of clouds to dress in birds that are not emigrating today, because autumn does not signal a faded, sad time, but is a festive fashion show put on to derive colour from no colour. It excites a longing for what is beyond description and precedes the frenzied rattle of amber in lovers’ beds. Autumn is the smooth whiteness of marble when the senses are awakened to the call of honeyed juices. I am here on the outskirts of L’Aquila in Italy, sitting on a wide glass-fronted balcony that looks on to a scene of welcome calm: in the valley eternity gives a passing nod to its visitors, who are climbing to the lower slopes of mountains where history has carved out fortresses as a protection against barbarians, then descended to the valley, wrinkled, head bowed. Nothing frightens the deer and rabbits, and I wish for nothing as I follow the leaves descending gradually from a tree to the ground, like a woman slowly undressing in her lover’s imagination. Here I am a leaf, being carried by the breeze to a wintry sleep from which I will awake in blossom. Here, beside this genial eternity that is indifferent to the history of the mountain forts, a visitor like me can discover one of the meanings of clouds and say: ‘Thanks be to lightness!’

I see love five metres away, sitting in the departure lounge full of passengers travelling to permanent addresses. The airport is crowded. The French boy and the Japanese girl are detached from the crowd. Wrapped up, it appears to me, in a single blue cloud. They doze fitfully and pay no attention to their surroundings. He puts his head on her shoulder and she looks at him with a glance as soft as silk, which she is careful not to make too direct, as if she doesn’t want him to see her seeing him, as if they are at the beginning of love and she is shy of him knowing how much she is going to love him. Then the shyness switches from her to him. He looks at her when she puts her head on his shoulder with the look of someone who is afraid of breaking a fragile crystal ornament, and when their eyes meet, passionately and transparently, the girl gets up to buy a bottle of water. The girl feeds the water to the boy as if she were suckling him, and he feeds it to her as if he were kissing her. I close the novel I was reading on the journey to watch this image of love from a distance. I tremble, invigorated by an indefinable perfume drifting over me from a Japanese girl and a French boy as delicate together as male and female gazelles. He says nothing to her, and she says nothing to him. They are content with interludes of silence, like in Japanese music. Perhaps they are not old enough to talk about how they are no longer two separate beings. Had she said something to him, it would have been: ‘The river we are going to cross at the end of this journey passes close to our home.’ And had he said something to her, it would have been: ‘The river we are going to cross at the end of this journey is our home!’

It is love, like a wave

Recurrence of our bliss, old, new

quick, slow

innocent as a gazelle racing a bicycle

and obscene, like a rooster

Reckless like someone in need

moody and vicious

calm as imagination arranging its phrases

Dark, gloomy, and bursting into light

Empty and full of its contradictions

It is animal/angel

with the power of a thousand horses, and the lightness of a ghost

equivocal, petulant, peaceable

Whenever it flees, it returns

It treats us well, and badly

it takes us by surprise when we forget our emotions

and arrives without warning

It’s an anarchist/an egoist/

master/one and only/multiple

We believe sometimes, and sometimes have no faith

but it is indifferent to us

When it hunts us down one by one