Speed of this planet bound to this star,
Speed of my breathing through wind,
Speed of my thinking compared to the absence
Of thought, which alone is dead center,
The motionless point.
Einstein, philosopher poet,
Iambic geometer—
Dreamer of symmetries, perfect
Reflections. Proclaimed that “the world
Must be this way and this.” And the
Universe answered, “Yes.”
Tell me one thing that is true.
50
Einstein, were you surprised
When you found that the hardness of time
Was illusion? Gossamer.
What else did you doubt? Matter and shapes?
Fact of your birth? Lung in your body invisible?
Waking or sleeping, how would you know?
Did you protect the surprise of your mind?
51
This is the cosmos of time and of space,
And of light rays that travel twelve billion years,
And the whale-raptured sprawl of the galaxies.
But is this not also the cosmos of life,
That rare cluster of atoms and forms,
A few grains on the beach of nonlife?
Is it not also the place where I breathe,
Eat Abbas’s lamb and tajine,
Smell saffron and cardamom seeds?
I knock on the door of the cosmos of life
And ask: What is the reason I breathe?
I’m answered: You breathe to make energy.
I ask: What is energy?
I’m answered: The movement and heat of your body.
I ask: What is the measure of movement?
I’m answered: A change of place over time.
I ask: What is the nature of place and of time?
I’m answered: You return to the center.
I ask: What is the nature of thinking?
I’m answered: The spasm of cells in your brain.
I ask: What is the thing that makes spasms?
I’m answered: The movement of positive particles.
I ask: What is the nature of movement?
I’m answered: You return to the center.
One thousand questions, and each gives
An answer, which then forms a question.
The questions and answers will meld with each other
Like colors of light,
Like the light rays that once crossed the space
Of the cosmos
And rest now in the small warmth of a hand.
52
I launch my small skiff in the sea,
Water still cool from the night,
Oarlocks corroded with salt rust.
I row for a jut up the coast,
Quivering ocher in sun.
Then the sea thickens, my oars
Become mired. I stare in the water
And see my own body
Just under the surface and clinging
With arms to my oars. “I’m the end of you,”
Whispers this other me. “I perceive all.”
I try to shake off this dark clinging thing,
But I’m unable. It heaves on my oars,
Trying to wrestle me out of the boat.
“I’m the end of you. I know the day
Of your dying, your silence, your pleasures,
Your sufferings, when the last night
Will swoop down on your world.”
I feel my mind bleeding.
I strike the thing hard,
And again, and again, and at last
It gives up the struggle,
Releases its grip, slowly sinks and submerges,
Pale face that grows dim and is gone.
PART II
Questions without Answers
53
Late afternoon, and I rock
In my chair, breeze
Roughs the stooped olive trees,
Jangles the chimes on the wall.
Little paw brushes my cheek,
Lightest of touches that comes
On the wind, a familiar sensation
That moves to my belly and stays,
Plays like the moan of a sad jazzing horn
In the small hours of morning
When everyone’s gone.
This sensation I know—
Why has it touched me this moment?
I strain to remember, but all I can find
Is this moaning—
It grows as it darkens
And spreads through my body.
It empties me.
Is it the song that my mother once sang?
Or the sound of the car waiting in rain
On that last windy night?
And then it is gone, hushed as it came,
Shapeless, unmeasured, unmeasurable,
Leaving me still in the late afternoon.
54
In the mirror, I gaze at the road
Rushing past and behind,
Hurl myself over the sand
While the desert unfolds like a roll
Of brown paper, air breaks
With the swoop of the bustards.
I want to remember
The small crusty town and the prefect
Who yammered and pinched his bent nose,
Smell of cooked lamb in the dusk,
Reason I went there.
Perhaps I was searching for old comrades,
Or cousins or uncles who knew me
Before all those years disappeared.
But here I am, middle-aged,
Scraggled and roaring the desert
To some other small town—
Or maybe I’m just in my chair,
Musing on fast cars and wine,
Hours of my youth,
Staring at shapes in the sea.
“I’ll tell you a story of old Zafir,”
Floats the voice of Abbas—
What? Have I been napping?
I try to stand, staring
At shapes in the sea,
Head lolls in afternoon heat,
Humid air rolls through a window—
“Zafir once lost all of his money,
Gambling in Tripoli …”
55
Restless sleep, musical shadows
Slip sidelong across my bed—
Is it mirage in the night, light
Of the infinite hallway, sand serpent,
The place of locked rooms? I knock
On door after door, and I listen for footsteps,
But I am alone.
In the darkness, the silence, faint drumbeats
Sweep under the doors, tabl and tympani,
Kettles so slight that they
Might be imagined, now here and now gone—
Tap disha tap—
Where are my olive groves,
Puyas and poppies,
My primrose and red bougainvillea?
I peer down the hallway.
A gauzy light oozes
From under the doors. I touch each
Of them—intricate carvings
Like faces explored by my hands.
Unease flows through me,
The darkness, the waiting, the unending
Hall of locked doors.
56
I know the masses of manganese, gold—
But why is there gold at all?
Planets and flesh?
I listen, but all I can hear
Are the faint rolls of drums.
I call out to Newton, al-Haytham,
And Darwin. I call out to Uncle Zafir.
But I am alone.
I wait at the doors—and I notice:
A finch flies to the window,
Alights for no reason. The bird begins chirping
In weak syncopation
To sounds of the drums.
Sings and then quickly is gone.
Was it a finch or a
warbler,
Or no bird at all?
Clouds drift through space, mask the sun,
The light darkens, the light blossoms again.
Time passes. Where am I?
There on the tiles of the floor, something,
A paper scrap crumpled.
I bend down to read it,
Some writing that’s smeared—
Nonsensical scribble, or message, or prayer?
57
Is this the cosmos of answerless questions? A cosmos of good
who do evil
And evil who do good—
And the question of Hamlet
While ranting his tower for days
As I rant in my silence
And wander the rooms of this house—
Is this the world of the ghosts of our fathers?
Where is the knife that can cut?
Here, let my psyche be my temple,
My breathing my candle.
My sacraments stories and songs,
Tympani, cloud shapes and paintings,
Some whisperings, letters that wait
To be written, and words
Of philosophers, romance and illness,
My own death approaching.
And still I am blind.
This is a world not of action reaction—
But each action questioned forever,
Where lust defeats virtue,
Where motives recede
In a bog of uncertainty—
Things and their opposites both can be true.
Was that not the thought of Lao-Tzu?
Can I give up myself
To this desert beyond the night’s eye?
Witness again what I’ve done
And not done?
58
I knock on the doors of the universe,
Asking: What makes the swirl
Of ghazali love songs?
And the parallel singing of loss?
And the choice to live life alone?
I surrender my calipers, rulers, and clocks,
Microscopes, diodes, transistors,
Glass flasks. For how can I measure
The stroke of a passion? Or dissect a grief
With the digits of pi?
Thus, I stand naked, with nothing
Except a fierce hunger to fathom this world,
To embark on this road
Without length without breadth.
59
Morning—my calipers cracked
On the walkway,
I sit on my terrace, drink tea
From a porcelain cup,
Watch a sun rise from the sea,
Fire created by water.
And I dream of one thousand suns
Caught in one thousand seas,
Slowly dripping their way to full blaze
In some galaxies flung through the wasteland of space.
A thousand new dawns for what purpose?
The stars and the comets, the masses and forces,
The gold drops of tea in my cup—
Is it all unintended? One blithered yawn?
Does the universe know of its spinnings
And forms? Divide flesh from the fleshless?
As I sit on my terrace, I wonder
If something can see me, some
Vast lidless eye. Or perhaps hear me,
My murmurs and breaths.
Softly I utter from Omar Khayyam: “Into this universe,
Why never knowing, nor whence,
Like the water, willy-nilly flowing.”
60
I whisper the name Mother gave me,
A private note passed in the dark,
Here, off the curved hallway,
This sitting room swimming in light,
Primroses outside the window,
The orange trees beyond, that’s where
She said it—then to her piano,
And I to my school books, my sea glass
And bottles—still here, in the room
With the arched praying windows,
The chipped russet tiles, rotting damp smell,
Textbooks still here,
Pieces of glass that I picked years ago,
Rage of the blossoming sea, and I
In my boyhood, unknowing of wine
Slightly sipped in the Christian cafes,
Of the women who look men in the eye,
Teeming sad nights, and my own crashing winds,
Flung to the north, and the booming years—
Lost, all of it, leaving only this broken
And empty house, Abbas here taking his nap,
Ghosts of a family.
I would have been chemist or poet.
61
Ghosts of a family. There she is middle aged,
Age of me now, sewing a shawl in her room.
I have returned. Mother, please sing to me.
Yes, and her voice is the voice I recall,
Fragile, a flight of small birds,
But she won’t speak the name
That she gave me in childhood, our secret.
She touches my scars with stiff hands,
Fingers that once touched the keys,
Holds me, but she will not say the name.
Years turn to years, Father long dead, I in my room,
Mother in hers. She grows dimmer and dimmer
Until she is gone.
62
Dusk on my terrace—a man wanders by,
Plucking his oud, wearing billowy bisht
And a fez with a red-colored tassel,
With music that dances the air.
Says he’d been walking eight months,
Town to town up the coast,
Seeking the wife who disdained him
And wanting her back. Says
That in each pair of strings is a sadness
And joy. He seems glad of his torture.
All of it sung to me playing his oud,
With its pear shape and bowl.
And I offer him olives and eggplant,
But he will take none.
Then darkness—
He drifts away.
All I can see is his teal sash,
Swaying and small,
But his oud can be heard through the night.
63
Haze drifts from the shore,
Softness of air, and a veil drapes the horizon.
I open my window and gaze at the sea,
Imagine boats sailing far beyond seeing,
The cabins of sailors, the islands,
The cities, whole continents submerged
In the mist. And I wonder what parts
Of my body lie outside my self:
Lungs and the liver, performing
In secrecy, kidneys and spleen
And their intricate passageways,
Miniature battles engaged
By my cells in their silence—
The chemical messages
Sent in the dark, thousands
Of impulses launched every second,
Dispatched and received
In unconsciousness.
Throbbings of worlds in my body, unseen
By me, unaware—What thing am I?
Many or one?
Where is the nub of me?
Is it my spongy gray fold of a brain,
Nerve endings,
Skin, lopsided cavities?
Which is the piece that picked glass from the sea?
Which is the piece that conceded to love?
And the piece that spent love for this home
That is homeless, spent blood flesh
For bloodlessness? How did it happen?
From where comes this feeling of wholeness
When so much is scattered, invisible, mute?
64
Lao-Tzu, Rembrandt, and Omar Khayyam—
Be my companions on this dizzy journey,
This twisting and thrashing to nowhere,
R
eversals and formlessness,
Numberlessness, pageant of nothingness,
Strivings and nonstrivings,
Ends from beginnings,
Beginnings from ends
And the unsmiling smile
And the swing of the clock
That has never kept time and the moon
Whitened and shale,
Cities that wither to dust,
Heart that both loves and disdains,
Guilt of the guiltless and guilty.
Must I surrender the line and the rule?
Reason and number have failed in their triumph
And triumphed in failure—
But how can I know, for there’s nothing
I know. And yet here I am searching, I vibrate,
I shudder with life, roar and balloon
In this evening of primrose and morning world.
65
Footsteps and thump, Abbas is back
From the market with sugar and coffee,
Black pepper and caraway, garam masala—
His face blotched from sneezing.
Smiles at me, chewing some seeds.
“I’ll cook a tajine,” he says, wiping his nose—
Chickpeas and lamb, sun-dried tomatoes,
Fresh cheeses and eggs, onions, saffron—
“That wild boy on the hill won’t pay for our olives.”
“Let him have a few barrels,” I say.
Abbas laughs. “You’re not like your father.
Have you seen our accounts?”
Shrugs. “No matter to me, I’m an old man.”
Then quoting Khayyam:
“Thou art but what thou shalt be—
Nothing—thou shalt not be less.”
Laughs again.
Goes to the sink for his wazu,
Washes his face, ears, and mouth,
Nostrils and hands, arms to the elbows, muttering prayers.
“At least let us be clean.”
66
How does it start? Where does
One find the beginning? Not now
With these wakings, but then, years ago,
When she spoke while anointing the rose.
Who could imagine all this: cities and towns,
Fruit stalls, the bowls carved from trees,
Gowns of the brides,
Words that she spoke as her lips