Breaking the Jaws of Silence: Sixty American Poets Speak to the World

Ex-Embassy

CAROL MUSKE-DUKES Ex-Embassy Sometimes, near dawn, I think I hear the high sobbing cry of the muezzin hanging in the sky before it’s light—but then, I drop off to sleep again. Behind us is the ex-embassy. Its pool a blue mosaic through our hedge. The old man in his robe and wrapped head no longer comes to mop the tiled edge, his whole morning’s work fragmented by our wall of leaves. No arm in a rolled sleeve, bending, lifting. No flashing sections of aluminum pole fit into a blue mesh scoop to whisk up floating red petals. No closer view, inset in green: a turbaned man sipping tea, eyebrow and striped cup; slice of a woman’s profile— black half-veil, two eyes yoked in kohl moving in a handheld mirror. No sunlight gunning that round of glass. No part of lamb turning on part of a spit. 80 ✦ CAROL MUSKE-DUKES No peacock with its promiscuous fan. No cook hurrying the meat: quick jagged curses. No meat. No god. The medallion frontispiece now defaced officially, the cornices deflagged, but still the scarred remnants of State: crude evidence of our power to invade, theirs to resist. The FOR SALE sign’s text likens it to a house on a cloud, a secular mosque, pure sunrise! There are patterned entry tiles: repeating fronds of wheat or hashish. A porte cochere, nesting rotating motion detectors. Double, triple glass. Once a prying neighbor said she heard grown men cry out, in a frenzy, on a stone floor— to some god she fails to comprehend. No one, she says, (over the hedge on the other side) comprehends that god. Because, like the one in the rubbed lamp, once out, uncramped, he’s not. He’s not anything or anyone you could imagine, beyond the figuration of your own god, the familiar reductive Infinite. CAROL MUSKE-DUKES ✦ 81 For her, this deity is zero, spun from Os of fuel drums, snaking wires. He’s rolled up in a child’s valise, genie of timing devices, threads of plastique . . . I don’t see the nothing she does. Sometimes I glimpse an imagined Allah above the human ruins, head in hand. Then I watch my own fingers, telling each invisible worry bead of each amber hour that we all stay alive. Inside each separate sphere, the lights of patrols slip by, elongating a single night, then the next, the next . . . what I do not know but learn to dread turns over slowly in my bed. 82 ✦ CAROL MUSKE-DUKES ...