Calligraphies V

Late fall, near midnight,walking home alone from aloquacious dinner,

I saw, heard, cop cars, sirens,thought: There's a big fire somewhere.

Japanese touristsdescend from buses now, takeattack-site selfies.

Illegal demonstrations.Terrorism: déjà vu.

*

Déjà vu, hard rainafter unseasonableblue bright mornings.

You Google whom you once loved:wedding photo at fifty,

face, body, thickened,shrunk, out of your fantasies.And what would you say

who said so much once overthose neutral restaurant tables?

*

Winter's not neutral:damp infiltrates bronchialpassages. You've coughed

since that Burgundy Christmaspneumonia, twenty years past.

But light's coming back.But a medical studentblew himself up in

a square in Sultanahmetwhere you've been a tourist too.

*

She's been arguing,she's fed up with rhetoric,easy amalgams.

You dip bread in olive oil,then dip it in the za'atar.

Back from Geneva,with comrades at peace talks thataren't going to happen —

You proofread her news-brief, seehow her frayed shirt is ripping.

*

Attention frayingin late afternoon light, soonday will be done, not

the work incumbent on it— whatever that might have been–

Gnarls of an old textin the other alphabet:can I unknot them,

reweave a mirror fabricof the unraveled phrases?

*

A day unravelsthat she, he, they spent waitingin line in rain in

administrative limboor the emergency room.

Are you immigrantsor political exilesor refugees? Words

with different valences insubliminal translation.

*

Liminal space whereexiles with dictionarieslose themselves: barzakh,

Arabic isthmus, the spanfrom death to resurrection

in Farsi: limbo,where Socrates murmurs tounbaptized babies

in contrapuntal cognatesthey hear fardous, paradise.

*

Infantile, senile,when I read out loud I stop,stammer and stutter

then pronounce everything wrong.An illiterate lover

worse than the peasantaccents of emigrants whoreturn years later

to the villages where theirmothers did not learn to read.

*

My mother would readto me- fables, fairy tales—until the day

I said I could read them myself,and I did. I was three.

My mother would readmy notebooks, search desk drawerswhile I was at school.

I had to tear up and flushmy revolts down the toilet.

*

Down the rain-splashed street,try not to keep your eyes downwhile the sky weighs down

on the wrong side of winter.You don't forget you aren't young.

Still, there's arrival—the desposeidos' priestmakes time for welcome,

more liminal narrativesover midnight bacalão.