A River Dies of Thirst Read online

  Shyness

  Shyly I look at a beggar’s bowl. Shyly I listen to an old song on a scratched record.

  Shyly I smell the perfume of a rose that is not mine. Shyly I savour the taste of wild mulberries. Shyly I rub one of my limbs. Shyly I use my five senses and obey my sixth. Shyly I live, as if I were the guest of a gypsy who is ready to move on.

  Perfection is the same as imperfection

  Time has flown, and I have not flown with it

  ‘Stop,’ I said, ‘I have not finished dinner yet

  not taken all my medicine

  not written the last line of my will

  not paid any debt to life

  Life has seen me standing hungry by the fence

  and fed me with a fig from its trees

  seen me naked under the sky

  and clothed me in a cloud of its cotton

  seen me sleeping on the pavement

  and housed me in a star on its breast’

  Life said: ‘Learn about me, you will find me waiting for you!’

  I said thank you to life, for it is a gift and a talent

  I learned about life with all the hardship I could

  and it taught me how to forget it to live it

  Death said to me unbidden:

  ‘Don’t forget me, for I am life’s brother’

  I said: ‘Your mother is a vague question of no concern to me’

  and death flew from my words to take care of its business

  ‘Long live life!’ I shouted, when I found it spontaneous

  instinctive, playing and laughing without a care in the world. It loves us and we love it

  It is harsh and gentle, a mistress and a slave-girl

  and weeps for nobody. For it does not have time

  It buries the dead in haste, dances like a courtesan

  falls short, then reaches perfection. Perfection is the same as imperfection

  and memory forgetfulness made visible

  But I played with life as if it was a ball and a game of chance

  I never thought of the riddle: What is life?

  ‘How can I fill it and it fill me?’ I asked when

  I saw death was giving me time to ask

  and I waited for time to pass. I said: ‘Tomorrow I shall look into the question

  of life.’ But I didn’t find the time

  because time double-crossed me and took me by surprise, and has flown.

  Prickly pear

  The prickly pear that borders the ways in to the villages was a faithful guardian of signs. When we were children, just a few moments ago, these plants showed us where the paths were. So we stayed out late with the jackals and the stars. We also hid the little things we stole – dates, dried figs, school notebooks – in their spiky secret rooms, and when we grew older, without realising how and when that had happened, their yellow flowers enticed us to follow girls on the way to the laughing spring, and we boasted to one another about how many thorns we had stuck in our hands. When the blossom died and the fruit swelled, the prickly pear was incapable of repelling the weapons of the killer army, but it remained a faithful guardian of the signs: there, behind the plants are houses buried alive and kingdoms, kingdoms of memory, and life waiting for a poet who does not like stopping at ruins, unless the poem demands it.

  In the empty square

  An empty square. Flies, midday heat and a fig tree keeping nobody company. A dog barks in the distance as I approach the empty square. I wonder what lies beyond it, and behind a poem written by a frustrated poet about the terror of the empty square: ‘I and the words I spoke, and the words I did not speak, arrived in an empty square.’ There dryness resounds like a piece of metal, and your footsteps make a similar sound ‘as if you are someone else’, followed by an echo from the dry air ‘as if I am him.’ When the square is empty, thoughts extend to what went on before: to a life that was here, that came from the narrow alleys to take the sun or have a breath of air or prove what was possible. I did not ask: ‘Where have I come from?’ but: ‘Why have I come to the empty square?’ I was afraid, and tried to retreat into one of the narrow alleyways, but they all changed into snakes. I closed my eyes, rubbed them and opened them again to see my nightmare in front of me. It was not a nightmare. It was a nightmarish reality. But the empty square grew bigger and the fig tree higher, the noonday heat blazed brighter and the flies multiplied. The barking dogs kept me company in the distance, there was life over there. For some vague reason I remembered the words I had not spoken, remembered them and forgot them.

  A short holiday

  I believed I’d died on Saturday

  I said: ‘I must leave something in a will’

  but could find nothing

  and I said: ‘I must call a friend

  to tell him I’ve died’

  but could find no one

  and I said: ‘I must go to my grave

  to fill it’, and couldn’t find the way

  and my grave remained empty of me

  and I said: ‘I have a duty to do my duty:

  to write the last line on the shadows’

  and water ran from them over the letters

  I said: ‘I must accomplish some deed

  here and now’

  but found no action suitable for a dead man

  So I shouted: ‘This death has no meaning

  It’s a joke, it’s anarchy in the senses

  and I won’t believe that I have died completely

  Perhaps I am somewhere in between

  or perhaps I am a retired dead man

  spending a short holiday in life!’

  Fame

  Fame is the humiliation of a person deprived of secrets. It makes him vary the speed of his walk to reassure the onlookers, as they demand, that the ground is solid beneath his feet. The top of the head must not be held too high, so the sky can remain a general reference point. The frame must be slightly bowed for greeting passers-by, and any birds who may be hovering close above. The left hand, wearing a watch, gold or diamond according to who you believe, is thrust into the pocket of trousers of a neutral shade of grey, while the right hand regulates its movement by clutching a book or newspaper. The overcoat is navy blue, because any other colour would stir up rumours. Fame, as it is a person being stripped naked, requires some protection under the clothes from hidden cameras full of pictures ready to be taken. Fame tempts slander to aspire to the level of crime by committing acts of spiritual assassination that go unpunished by law. Fame is punishment where no wrong has been committed, imposing a mask of contentment on the person so he smiles on demand, dictating that he stand at length with strangers even if he resents it, obliging him to utter stock phrases devoid of sense or meaning. Fame is the enemy of instinct and spontaneity, the difference between what is said and what ought to be said, and the transformation of one person into two, having a conversation in a room with closed windows: which one of us deceived the other, me or you? Fame is the scourge of the impulsive, and a many-windowed prison, well-lit and under tight surveillance.

  If I were a hunter

  If I were a hunter

  I would give the gazelle a chance

  and a second

  and a third

  and a tenth

  to fall asleep

  and I would be satisfied with my share of her:

  peace of mind as she slumbers

  I am able but I abstain

  I am pure

  like the water in the spring near her covert

  If I were a hunter

  I would be a brother to the gazelle:

  ‘Don’t be afraid of the gun

  my poor little sister’

  And we would listen, safe and sound, to

  the howling of wolves in distant fields.

  Nightmare

  When I wake up at dawn my day is sick. Nightmares do not come back to me from the night, but from a depraved dawn, as if a metaphysical sorrow is dragging me into a dark blue forest: here there are mask
ed gunmen and a camera. They tie me to the trunk of a grieving Iraqi palm tree, next to another palm where an Arab horse is tethered. They ask me for my full name and I give my father’s and grandfather’s names wrongly because of this pressure at dawn. I cannot see their sarcasm under their masks, but I hear them whispering to one another: ‘We won’t execute him now, all at once, as we’re still in the first chapter of the novel. We’ll kill him gradually, in instalments, and make do with executing the horse now.’ As they loosen my bonds, they stuff a videotape in my pocket and say: ‘This is a torture training video’, then take me back home. I don’t rejoice that I am alive as I watch the tape. I am sad because the horse is looking at me with a mixture of pity and reproach.

  Iraq’s night is long

  for Sa’di Yusuf

  Iraq, Iraq is blood that the sun does not dry

  and the sun is God’s widow over Iraq. The murdered Iraqi

  says to the people standing on the bridge: ‘Good morning

  to you, for I am still alive.’ They say: ‘You are still

  a dead man looking for his grave where the doves cry’

  Iraq, Iraq, Iraq’s night is long

  Dawn only breaks for the dead to pray half a prayer

  and they never complete a salutation to anyone, for the Mongols

  are coming from the gate of the Caliph’s palace on the bend of the river

  and the river runs south, south, and carries our dead

  sleepless to the palm trees’ kin

  Iraq, Iraq is open graveyards like schools

  Open to all, from the Armenian to the Turcoman

  and Arab. We are equal in the study of the science

  of the Last Day. There should be a poet asking:

  ‘Baghdad, how many times will you betray the legends? How many times

  construct statues for the future? How many times

  demand marriage with the impossible?’

  Iraq, Iraq, here the prophets stand

  powerless to pronounce the name of heaven. For who

  is killing who now in Iraq? Victims are fragments

  on roads and in words. Their names are tufts

  of letters disfigured like their bodies. Here

  the prophets stand together powerless to pronounce the name

  of heaven, and the fallen

  Iraq, Iraq, who are you when suicide is all around?

  I am not I in Iraq and you are not you, and what

  is he except another? The deity has abandoned the helpless

  So who are we? Who are we? No more than an item

  in this poem: Iraq’s night is very long!

  In Cordoba

  Cordoba’s wooden doors do not invite me in to give a greeting from Damascus to a fountain and a jasmine bush. I walk in the narrow alleys on a gentle, sunny spring day. I tread lightly as if I am a guest of myself and my memories, not an archaeological fragment passed around by tourists. I do not tap on the shoulder of my past with melancholy joy, as expected of me by a poem I’ve postponed writing, and I am not afraid of nostalgia since I shut my suitcase on it, but I fear the future running ahead of me at an automated pace. Whenever I intrude on it, it reproaches me, saying: ‘Explore the present.’ But there are many poets in Cordoba, foreigners and Andalusians, talking about the past of the Arabs and the future of poetry. In a modest park with few trees I see a sculpture of the hands of Ibn Zaydun and Wallada, and ask one of my favourite poets, Derek Walcott, if he knows anything about Arab poetry. With no apology, he says: ‘No, nothing at all.’ All the same, we stayed together for three days, continuously making fun of poetry and poets, who he described as metaphor thieves. ‘How many metaphors have you stolen?’ he asked me, and I was unable to answer. We competed with one another flirting with the Cordoban women. ‘If you liked a woman, would you approach her?’ he asked me. ‘The more beautiful she is, the more daring I am,’ I said. ‘What about you?’ ‘If I like a woman, she comes to me,’ he said. ‘Because you are a king and a son of a . . . I don’t know what,’ I said. His third wife was laughing. In Cordoba I stood before a wooden front door and searched in my pocket for the keys to my old house, as Nizar Qabbani once did. I shed no tears, because the new wound covers the scar of the old. But Derek Walcott surprised me with a hurtful question: ‘Who does Jerusalem belong to? You or them?’

  In Madrid

  Sun and light rain, an uncertain spring. The trees in the garden of the student residence are high and ancient. The paths are covered in gravel, which makes walking on them more like a comic attempt to practise flamenco, and an unsteady light filters through the shadows. From this hilltop we look down on Madrid, big and low like a green pool. We sit on a wooden bench – the Canadian-American poet Mark Strand and I – to have our photos taken with the students and sign Spanish translations of our books, competing to hide the unexpected joy a poet feels when he comes face to face with an anonymous reader and realises that his poetry, written in a closed room, has made the journey to this garden. An elegant woman approaches me. She says: ‘I’m Lorca’s granddaughter.’ I embrace her, trying to catch a whiff of him. ‘What do you remember of him?’ I ask. She was born after his execution, she replies. Do you know how much we love him? Everyone says that, and I feel proud. He’s an icon. The director of the student residence reminds me that this place is a Madrid landmark. You miss something if you don’t do a poetry reading here. Lorca, Alberti, Jimenez and Salvador Dali all lived here. At the end of our joint session I am obliged to put a question to Mark Strand. I ask him: What are the obvious dividing lines between poetry and prose? He hesitates, as true poets do when faced with a hard definition. Then he says – and he writes prose poetry: ‘The rhythm, the rhythm. Poetry is defined by its rhythm.’ When we go out into the garden to walk on the gravel paths we don’t talk much, so as not to disturb the rhythm of night above the high trees. For some reason I remember Nietzsche’s perceptive remark: ‘Wisdom is meaning deprived of song.’

  High is the mountain

  He walks on clouds in his dreams, and sees

  the unseen. He thinks the clouds are dry land

  High is the mountain

  higher and further. Nothing reminds him

  of nowhere, so he walks with his misgivings

  Walks, and does not arrive

  as if he is he, or one of the attributes of ‘I’

  that the two opposites, hope and despair

  have divided between themselves

  The mist was thick in his poem

  He was rising up from my dream, so I said to him:

  ‘High is the mountain.’

  I don’t notice

  I see what I see

  without noticing

  and since I don’t see what I see

  I get in a mess

  and live

  as if I am me

  or somebody else

  and don’t notice!

  That word

  He liked a word

  He opened the dictionary

  He couldn’t find it

  or an imprecise meaning for it

  but it haunted him at night

  musical, harmonious

  with a mysterious nature

  He said: ‘It needs a poet

  and some metaphor so that it turns green and red

  on the surface of dark nights’

  What is it?

  He found the meaning

  and the word was lost to him.

  Echo

  In the echois a well

  In the wellis an echo

  and the space

  seemsgrey, neutral

  as if war has not happened

  or happened yesterday

  and might come tomorrow

  In the echois a well

  In the wellis an echo

  and I search the space between them

  for the source of the sound

  in vain.

  The second olive tree

  The olive tree does not cry or laugh. Modest mistr
ess of the hillsides, she covers her trunk with her shadow and does not divest herself of her leaves in the face of a storm. She stands as if sitting, and sits as if standing. She lives as sister to a friendly eternity and neighbour to time that entrusts her to store luminous oil and forget the names of invaders, with the exception of the Romans, who were her contemporaries and borrowed some of her branches to plait garlands. They did not treat her like a prisoner of war, but rather a respected grandmother whose superior dignity was mightier than the sword. In her restrained silvery greenness is a colour too shy to declare itself openly, a glance towards something beyond description, for she is neither green nor silver. She is the colour of peace, if peace needs a colour to distinguish it. Nobody says to her: ‘How beautiful you are!’ but they do say: ‘How venerable and sublime you are!’ It is she who trains soldiers to lay down their weapons, and drills them in homesickness and humility: ‘Return to your homes, and use my oil to light your lamps.’ But these soldiers, these new soldiers, surround her with bulldozers and uproot her. They crush our grandmother, so that now her branches are in the earth and her roots in the air. She did not weep or shout, but one of her grandsons, who witnessed the execution, threw a stone at a soldier and was martyred alongside her. When the soldiers left triumphantly, we buried him there, in the deep hole, our grandmother’s cradle. For some reason we were convinced that after a while he would become an olive tree, spiky and – green!

  Willow tree

  A willow tree where two paths intersect: have