Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

The Poet Visits Egypt and Israel

M A X I N E K U M I N The Poet Visits Egypt and Israel Sand, sand. In the university the halls, seats, table tops, sills, are gritty with it. Birds fly in and out at the open windows. During the lecture an elderly porter splendid in turban and djebbeleah, shuffles in, opens a cabinet on the apron, plugs in a microphone, spits into it twice, and plumps it down on the lectern. She continues to speak, amplified, on American women poets since World War One to an audience familiar with Dickinson, Poe, and at a safe remove, Walt Whitman. Afterward, thick coffee in thimbles. Sticky cakes with the faculty. In this polite fortress a floating unease causes her hands to shake although nothing is said that could trespass on her status as guest from another, unveiled, life. She is a goddess, rich, white, American, and a Jew. It says so in some of her poems. There are no visible Jews in the American Embassy, nor at the Cultural Center, and none turns up in Cairo or Alexandria although an itinerant rabbi is rumored to cross from the other side once a fortnight and serve the remaining congregants. The one synagogue, a beige stucco Parthenon, 106 ❚ The 1980s sleeps in the Sabbath sun, shuttered tight and guarded by languid soldiers with bayonets. All that she cannot say aloud she holds hostage in her head: the congruities of bayonets and whips; starved donkeys and skeletal horses pulling impossible loads; the small, indomitable Egyptian flies that perch on lips, settle around the eyes and will not be waved away. Like traffic in Cairo, they persist, closing the margin between life and death to a line so thin as to become imperceptible. Transported between lectures, she is tuned to the rich variety of auto horns, each one shriller, more cacophonous, peremptory than its abutter. The decibel level means everyone drives with windows closed, tapedeck on full, airconditioning at maximum. Thus conveyed, fender nudging fender, she comes to ancient Heliopolis where the Sheraton sits apart in an oasis. Gaudier than Las Vegas, she thinks, checking in. Behind her in the lobby, two BMWs, several sheiks, exotic birds in cages, and plumbing fixtures of alabaster ornament this nouveau riche heaven. Backlighted to enhance their translucency, the toilet tank and bidet bowl are radiant, the kind of kitsch she wishes she didn’t notice. Outdoors in the sports enclave, pool attendants in monogrammed turtlenecks, like prep-school athletes, carry iced salvers from bar to umbrellaed table, The 1980s ❚ 107 proffer thick towels, reposition chaises longues for the oiled, bikinied, all-but-naked bodies of salesmen’s wives and hostesses on holdover. What do they think about, the poet wonders, as they glide among the infidels, these men whose own wives wrap up head to toe in public, whose cousins creep from day to day in a state of chronic lowgrade emergency. Anonymous again in transit, the poet leaves for Tel Aviv at night. She watches a pride of pregnant tabbies stalk cockroaches in the threadbare airport lounge for protein enough to give a litter suck. Always the Saving Remnant learns to scrounge to stay alive. Could she now name the ten plagues God sent? Uneasy truce exists between these two antagonists. El Al’s flight, a frail umbilicus that loops three times a week to the Holy Land, is never posted on the Departures Board. Security’s intense. Shepherded by an Israeli packing two guns, she’s bused with a poor handful to the tarmac. The takeoff’s dodgy, as if in fear of flak, as if God might turn aside and harden Pharoah’s heart, again fill up the sea. Once down, she knows the desert by its gardens, the beachfront by its senior citizens assembled for calisthenics on the sand. An hour later in the Old City she sees a dozen small white donkeys, descendants of the one that Jesus straddled, trot docilely beside Volkswagen Beetles, 108 ❚ The 1980s Mercedes cabs, tour buses full of young camera-strapped, light-metered Japanese. She peers into archaeological digs that reach down through limestone to the days of Babylon, pridefully down to the first tribes of Jahweh sacrificing scapegoats on a stone. Down through the rubble of bones and matter —Constantinian, Herodian, Hasmonean— that holds up the contemporary clutter. At the Western Wall, Sephardic Jews, their genders separated...