Calligraphies II

Self-referential,a text that explains itself.Al-Mutanabbi

known by pen, night, desert, sword.My horse and my notebook think

what I am thinkingthrough an orgy of cadence.I loved one woman

whose heart gave out when she readmy letter, that I'd return.

________

He could not return:price on his head, defector.His mother, with whom

he talked about books on Skypethrough bomb-shattered nights in her

once-tranquil suburb,was going, not back to themountains, not Beirut:

road of the insurrectionin her cells. Could not return.

________

Obsessive returnto the site of departureor abandonment:

checkpoint south of Reyhanli,a bar in the rue Charlot—

something changed for good.She got up and walked away.A guard waved them through.

And the next day and the nextwere going to be different.

________

It is differentwaking in the city thatused to be your home.

You are what you are knowingyou are not that anymore,

as old as your friendwhen he wrote his late pagessparring with Bashô

while his sorrel-haired muse fixedhis lunch, pining for cities.

________

The question of lunch,whether a parenthesisof conversation

in a cheerful public place(Tah Marbutah, Hamra Street),

exiles and expatseating maqdous and kibbehin three languages,

or standing near the fridge withlabneh, two verbs, and a spoon.

________

At least two verbs fordeparture, five for desire,come swiftly to mind

from her schoolgirl lexicon.And all the horses, learned when

she was younger, hopedto ride away on this newalphabet, across

deserts of habit and wastethrough the six-vocabled dawn.

________

Rainy-fingered dawnprods the grimy scaffoldingoutside the window.

Wet slate roofs, blurry slate skyswell the list of erasures

you count down, waking.A sea north of the morning,a wind from elsewhere—

idea of departure, andan overstayed welcome.

________

She has overstayedher transit visa more thansix weeks now. She was

refused a work permit, butshe goes daily to her class,

translates as-Sayyab'srainsong with them to English,not their first language.

No news from the Ministryof Labor. War news from home.

________

A long walk home downthe mango-and-sari street,then the boulevard's

cheap phone cards to Sénégal,small real estate agents who

upscale old buildingspricing the immigrants out.I'd rather live here.

I'd rather live anywherethan in my worn-out old skin.

________

Under bruise-red skin,the Pakistani mango'ssweet wet orange flesh,

mix it with labneh in ablue-purple bowl from Konya—

where your Kurdish friendsaid he'd first heard Rumiin his mother tongue.

All of you sharing treasuresthat no one bequeathed to you.

________

He's inheritedanother histrionicrefugee. Curses,

silently, his friend, lavishwith others' time and ideas.

Thinks of his uncle'strek from Lodz to Liverpoolthanks to a letter,

and calls a man who knows aman in the right ministry.

________

Give the right answerin the right tone of voice tothe right person who

ate the right thing for lunch anddrank the right dose of caffeine:

you may walk out withthe right papers to claim youridentity card,

your day relentlessly, youmight say, self-referential.