A River Dies of Thirst Read online

  An eagle flying low

  The traveller in the poem said

  to the traveller in the poem:

  ‘How much further do you have to go?’

  ‘All the way’

  ‘So go then, go

  as if you have arrived, and not arrived’

  ‘If there weren’t so many ways to go, my heart would be a hoopoe and I

  would know the

  way’

  ‘If your heart were a hoopoe I would follow it’

  ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

  ‘I have no name on my journey’

  ‘Shall I see you again?’

  ‘Yes. On two mountain tops

  with a loud echo and a chasm between them, I will see you’

  ‘And how shall we jump the chasm

  as we are not birds?’

  ‘We will sing:

  “Who sees us we cannot see

  and who we see cannot see us”’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘We won’t sing’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then you ask me and I ask you:

  “How much further do you have to go?”

  “All the way”

  “Is all the way far enough for the traveller to arrive?”

  “No. But I see a fabulous eagle

  circling above us, flying low!”’

  A personal duty

  They shouted ‘Hero!’ at him, and paraded him in public squares. Young girls’ hearts leapt at the sight of him, and from their balconies they pelted him with rice and lilies. Poets hostile to poetic convention addressed him in the rhetoric required to inflame the language: ‘Our hero! Our hope!’ And he, raised shoulder high like a victory flag, almost lost his name in the flood of epithets. Shy as a bride on her wedding day: ‘I did nothing. I was just doing my duty.’ Next morning he found himself alone, recalling a distant past that waved at him with amputated fingers: ‘Our hero! Our hope!’ He looked around and saw none of yesterday’s enthusiastic audience. He sat in lonely rooms, searching his body for traces of heroism, picking out the splinters and collecting them in a metal dish, feeling no pain. ‘The pain is not here. The pain is elsewhere. But who is listening to their cry for help now?’ He felt hungry. He searched for tins of sardines and brown beans and found they were past their sell-by date. He smiled and muttered: ‘Heroism too has its sell-by date,’ and realised he had done his patriotic duty!

  A common enemy

  It is time for the war to have a siesta. The fighters go to their girlfriends, tired and afraid their words will be misinterpreted: ‘We won because we did not die, and our enemies won because they did not die.’ For defeat is a forlorn expression. But the individual fighter is not a soldier in the presence of the one he loves: ‘If your eyes hadn’t been aimed at my heart the bullet would have penetrated it!’ Or: ‘If I hadn’t been so eager to avoid being killed, I wouldn’t have killed anyone!’ Or: ‘I was afraid for you if I died, so I survived to put your mind at rest.’ Or: ‘Heroism is a word we only use at the graveside.’ Or: ‘In battle I did not think of victory but of being safe, and of the freckles on your back.’ Or: ‘How little difference there is between safety and peace and the room where you sleep.’ Or: ‘When I was thirsty I asked my enemy for water and he didn’t hear me, so I spoke your name and my thirst was quenched.’ Fighters on both sides say similar things in the presence of the ones they love. But the casualties on both sides don’t realise until it’s too late that they have a common enemy: death. So what does that mean?

  The rest of a life

  If someone said to me: ‘You’re going to die here this evening

  so what will you do in the time that remains?’ I would say

  ‘I will look at my watch

  drink a glass of juice

  and crunch on an apple

  and observe at length an ant that has found her day’s supply of food

  Then look at my watch:

  there is still time to shave

  and take a long shower. A thought will occur to me:

  One should look nice to write

  so I’ll wear something blue

  I will sit until noon, alive, at my desk

  not seeing a trace of colour in the words

  white, white, white

  I will prepare my last meal

  pour wine into two glasses: for me

  and an unexpected guest

  then take a nap between two dreams

  but the sound of my snoring will wake me

  Then I will look at my watch:

  there is still time to read

  I will read a canto of Dante and half a mu‘allaqa

  and see how my life goes from me

  into other people, and not wonder who

  will take its place’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I will comb my hair

  and throw the poem, this poem

  in the rubbish bin

  put on the latest shirt from Italy

  say my final farewell to myself with a backing of Spanish violins

  then

  walk

  to the graveyard!’

  The colour yellow

  Yellow flowers make the room lighter. They are looking at me, rather than me looking at them. They are the first messengers of spring. A woman, who is not distracted by war from studying the disfigured nature left to us, gave them to me. I envy her this focus that transports her far away from our fragile life. I envy her the way she embroiders time with a needle and yellow thread broken off from the sun, which hasn’t been occupied. I gaze at the yellow flowers and feel they are lighting me up and dissolving my darkness, and I grow less heavy, finer, and we end up reflecting one another’s translucence. I am seduced by a metaphor: yellow is the colour of the hoarse voice that only the sixth sense can hear. A voice whose tone is neutral, the voice of the sunflower, which does not change its religion and always worships the sun. If there is any point to jealousy – which is supposed to be the same colour as the sunflower – then it is that we view our surroundings with the heroic spirit of one defeated, and learn to focus on correcting our mistakes in honourable contests.

  If only the young were trees

  The tree is sister to the tree, or its good neighbour. The big one is kind to the little one, giving it the shade it needs. The tall one is kind to the short one, sending it a bird to keep it company at night. No tree attacks the fruit of another tree, and if one tree is barren the other does not make fun of it. A tree does not attack another tree and does not imitate a woodcutter. When a tree becomes a boat it learns to swim. When it becomes a door it continues to keep secrets. When it becomes a chair it does not forget the sky that was once above it. When it becomes a table it teaches the poet not to be a woodcutter. The tree is forgiveness and vigilance. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but is entrusted with the secrets of dreamers, standing guard night and day, showing respect to passers-by and to the heavens. The tree is a standing prayer, directing its devotions upwards. When it bends a little in the storm, it bends majestically, like a nun, looking upwards all the time. In the past the poet said: ‘If only the young were stones.’ He should have said: ‘If only the young were trees!’

  We arrived too late

  At a light-hearted stage of life we call maturity we are neither optimistic nor pessimistic. We have renounced passion and longing, and calling things by their opposites because we were so confused between form and essence, and we have practised thinking calmly before expressing ourselves. Wisdom has procedures similar to those of a doctor examining a wound. As we look behind us to see where we stand in relation to ourselves and reality, we ask: ‘How many mistakes have we made? Have we come to wisdom too late?’ We are unsure which way the wind is blowing, for what is the use of achieving anything too late, even if there is someone waiting for us on the mountainside, inviting us to offer up a prayer of thanksgiving because we ha
ve arrived safe and sound, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but too late?

  Two strangers

  He looks upwards

  and sees a star

  looking at him

  He looks into the valley

  and sees his grave

  looking at him

  He looks at a woman

  who torments and delights him

  and she does not look at him

  He looks in the mirror

  and sees a stranger like him

  looking at him.

  What’s it all for?

  Walking on his own, he passes the time by holding a brief conversation with himself. Meaningless words, which are not meant to mean anything: ‘What’s it all for?’ He hadn’t intended to grumble or ask questions, or rub one phrase against another to ignite a rhythm to help him walk at a young man’s pace. But that’s what happened. Every time he repeated ‘What’s it all for?’ he felt a friend was keeping him company on his walk. Passers-by regarded him indifferently. Nobody thought he was mad. They thought he was a dreamy, absent-minded poet receiving sudden inspiration from a demon. Nor did he consider he was doing anything wrong. He doesn’t know why he thought of Genghis Khan. Perhaps because he saw a horse without a saddle floating in the air above a ruined building in the valley basin. He continued walking to the same rhythm: ‘What’s it all for?’ Before he reached the end of the road he walks every evening, he saw an old man go over to a eucalyptus tree, lean his stick against its trunk, undo his fly with a trembling hand and say, as he peed, ‘What’s it all for?’ And the girls climbing up from the valley, not content with laughing at the old man, threw hard, fresh pistachios at him.

  A talent for hope

  When he thought about hope he felt weary and bored, and constructed a mirage and said: ‘How shall I evaluate my mirage?’ He searched in his desk drawers for the person he was before asking this question, but found no notes containing thoughtless or destructive urges. Nor did he find a document confirming he had stood in the rain for no reason. When he thought about hope, the gap widened between a body that was no longer agile and a heart that had acquired wisdom. He did not repeat the question ‘Who am I?’ because he was so upset by the smell of lilies and the neighbours’ loud music. He opened the window on what remained of a horizon and saw two cats playing with a puppy in the narrow street, and a dove building a nest in a chimney, and he said: ‘Hope is not the opposite of despair. Perhaps it is the faith that springs from divine indifference which has left us dependent on our own special talents to make sense of the fog surrounding us.’ He said: ‘Hope is neither something tangible nor an idea. It is a talent.’ He took a beta blocker, putting the question of hope aside, and for some obscure reason felt quite happy.

  I am only him

  Far away, behind his footsteps

  wolves bite moonbeams

  Far away, ahead of his footsteps

  stars light up the treetops

  Close to him

  blood flows from the veins of stones

  Therefore he walks and walks and walks

  until he melts away

  and the shadows swallow him up at the end of this journey

  I am only him

  and he is only me

  in different images.

  I did not dream

  Noticing how many of my dreams are lost, I stop myself demanding too much water from the mirage. I confess I have grown tired of long dreams that take me back to the point where they begin and I end, without us ever meeting in the morning. I will make my dreams from my daily bread to avoid disappointment. For dreaming is not seeing the unseen, in the form of an object of desire, but not knowing you are dreaming. However, you have to know how to wake up. Waking up is when the real arises from the imaginary in a revised version, when poetry returns safely from the heavenly realms of elevated language to an earth that doesn’t resemble its poetic image. Can I choose my dreams, so that I do not dream of the unattainable, so that I become a different person who dreams that he can tell the difference between a live man who thinks he is dead and a dead man who thinks he is alive? I am alive, and when I’m not dreaming I say: ‘I didn’t dream, and it did me no harm.’

  The pretty girls’ neighbour

  He walks along the same road, at the same time of day, content with the chance the evening offers him to savour the air at leisure. He is sad when he notices the growing decline in the number of olive trees, while the buildings grow bigger, like our sufferings, and the amount of space diminishes. But the young girls grow more numerous, older, more mature, and do not fear time lying in wait for them at the end of the road that descends into the valley. He looks at them without desire and they look curiously back at him and say: ‘Good evening, Uncle!’ He loves them without a lump the size of a quince constricting his breathing, celebrates the beauty of their freshness, and the freshness of their hopes, as he would music, a watercolour, a blue-tailed bird. They want time to move fast so they can paint their nails a provocative red and wear high heels that crack walnuts and make people jump. He wants time to slow down so he can prolong the enjoyment of walking among them, of being next to this self-contained beauty. It doesn’t matter that he remembers that when he was younger he would envy himself as he walked, on other roads, with a beautiful girl, and say: ‘Is this really all mine?’ Then he continues along the street alone. He counts the remaining olive trees on his fingers and delights in the gazelles leaping around him unconcernedly, and envies nobody, least of all himself.

  How far is far?

  How far is far?

  How many ways to get there?

  We walk

  and walk towards meaning

  and don’t arrive

  It is a mirage

  guide of the confused

  to distant water

  futile and heroic

  We walk, and in the desert

  we grow wiser

  and don’t say: ‘Because the wilderness is perfection’

  But our wisdom needs a song

  with a lively tempo

  so that hope doesn’t flag

  How far is far?

  How many ways to get there?

  He sees himself as absent

  I’ve been here for ten years. This evening I sit in the small garden on my plastic chair and look at the place, intoxicated by the red stone. I count the steps leading up to my room on the second floor. Eleven steps. To the right is a large fig tree overshadowing some small peach trees, to the left a Lutheran church, and beside the stone steps an abandoned well and a rusty bucket and unwatered flowers soaking up little drops of the night’s first milky dew. I’m here with forty other people to see a play with little dialogue about the curfew, whose forgotten protagonists are dotted about the garden and on the steps and the large balcony. An improvised play, or a work in progress, like our life. I steal a glance at my open window and say to myself: ‘Am I up there?’ I enjoy rolling the question down the steps and integrating it into the elements of the play. In the last act everything will remain unchanged. The fig tree in the garden. The Lutheran church facing it. Sunday in its usual place on the calendar, and the abandoned well and the rusty bucket. But I will be neither in my room nor in the garden. This is what the text demands: someone has to be absent to lighten the burden of the place.

  He said: ‘I’m afraid’

  He was afraid. He said in a loud voice: ‘I’m afraid.’ The windows were firmly closed, and the echo rose and spread: ‘I’m afraid.’ He was silent, but the walls repeated: ‘I’m afraid.’ The door, chairs, tables, curtains, rugs, candles, pens and pictures all said: ‘I’m afraid.’ Fear was afraid and shouted: ‘Enough!’ But the echo did not reply: ‘Enough!’ He was afraid to stay in the house and went out into the street. He saw a mangled poplar tree and was afraid to look at it for some unknown reason. A military vehicle drove by at speed and he was afraid to walk along the street. He was afraid to go back into the house but had no choice. He was afraid he had left the key in
side, and when he found it in his pocket he was reassured. He was afraid the electricity had been cut off. He pressed the switch in the passage leading to the stairs and the light came on, so he was reassured. He was afraid he would slip on the stairs and break his pelvis, but it didn’t happen so he was reassured. He put the key in the lock and was afraid the door wouldn’t open, but it did, so he was reassured. He went inside and was afraid he had left himself sitting on the chair, afraid. When he was sure that he was the one who had entered the house, and not somebody else, he stood in front of the mirror, and when he recognised his face in the mirror, he was reassured. He listened to the silence, and did not hear anything saying: ‘I’m afraid,’ and was reassured. For some obscure reason, he was no longer afraid.