Lean Against This Late Hour Read online

but is no match for his own despair

  These white pills

  have left him so colorless

  his shadow must stand up

  to fetch him water

  We ought to accept

  that no soldier

  has ever returned

  from war

  alive

  ■

  Pattern II

  I turn my face away

  and lose half the world.

  Necklace

  Of the moon

  all that’s left is a stain upon the window.

  Of all the waters in the world

  this lone drop on your cheek.

  And the borders have painted over God’s landscapes for so long

  that dried blood

  is just a name for a color.

  Tomorrow morning

  humanity will enter the alley.

  And the trees will hide

  out of terror

  behind the sparrows.

  ■

  Flashback

  No time remains

  Let’s hold each other

  Tomorrow

  either I will murder you

  or you will rinse the knife in water

  These few lines

  The world has come down

  to these

  few

  lines

  Is it better for a human to remain small

  or not to be born?

  Or just

  rewind this movie

  let the leather coat in the display window

  become a leopard

  leaping into distant fields

  let every wooden walking cane

  return to the forest on foot

  And the birds

  soar over the earth once more . . .

  the earth . . .

  No!

  Rewind even further

  Allow God

  to wash his hands again

  to gaze at the mirror

  Perhaps

  this time

  he will come to a different decision

  Pattern III

  A large far sea

  or a small puddle.

  It makes no difference.

  When you are translucent,

  the sky appears in you.

  Fall

  Not soil

  not a circle

  in the child’s sketchbook.

  The Earth

  is a severed head

  rotating in midair.

  We fall

  like suspended thoughts

  like vague lines

  from a poet’s hands

  or like a lengthy silence

  in the stony throat of a cemetery.

  We fall

  yellow upon the autumn.

  What is still green

  finds no place to thrive,

  no matter how deep it roots.

  We fall

  like tea in Naser al-Din Shah’s cup

  like drops of blood in Fin Bathhouse.

  We fall

  minutely

  like snowflakes

  the ice slivers unknown to anyone

  of a cloud’s suicide.

  We fall

  like bombs over the soil

  like soil shoveled over us.

  We fall.

  This apple is yours, my child!

  Think again!

  Newton

  could never find

  what he intended to discover.

  Long Exposure

  Even after letting go

  of the last bird

  I hesitate

  There is something

  in this empty cage

  that never gets released

  Agony’s Rasp

  Then you arrived

  with bits of late hours

  stuck to your slippers.

  You hung the night from the coat tree

  and hid yourself in the bathroom.

  Now the scraping off of incident,

  the sound of washing the past few hours

  into the sink.

  My brother!

  Humans cannot hide the hidden.

  Not when bullets speak in the flesh.

  Even if you polish all the doorknobs,

  your fingerprints will not be wiped from their spirits.

  In the morning

  I woke to the polished walls,

  the polished vases, curtains, windows.

  No one was visible even in the pictures,

  yesterday indistinct from five days ago.

  When I pulled the sheet aside,

  my feet were gone.

  You

  had scrubbed everything till morning.

  ■

  The Rest of the Picture

  You extend your hand

  yet no matter how much I strain to see

  the rest of the picture remains unclear.

  Will we brew tea?

  Or will you pack your bags?

  A blurred dream

  like a leaf in the wind’s invisible hands.

  Unclear

  whether the wind has lifted it

  or released it from a tree.

  What Bridge

  What bridge

  somewhere in the world

  has collapsed

  so that no one gets home?

  Pattern IV

  Staring at the tiny planet

  God calculated again.

  There was no space for a continuous forest

  no space for an infinite sea

  no matter how endless the search.

  And so the invention of your eyes.

  Paper Boat

  A pair of shoes

  some pairs of socks in orange or purple,

  a pair of blue earrings

  a pair of . . .

  This is Noah’s ark

  This luggage that you’re packing!

  Then the sound of the door

  passed through my shirt

  through my chest

  through the wall of my room

  through old neighborhoods

  that distilled my school years.

  The kid stood up,

  launched his paper boat into the water.

  He did not understand the sense of a “pair,”

  so he boarded alone.

  The waters moved toward the future . . .

  I modified the poem here

  and pulled time out

  like a thin thread.

  The beads fell off:

  I . . . you

  . . . childhood

  paper boat . . .

  . . . Noah

  . . . future

  . . .

  I brought you and my childhood

  aboard the paper boat, left the dock.

  Then I paced with Noah,

  waiting for the storm.

  Long Exposure II

  The passengers board

  and the pilots hoist the sails

  but the sea

  woke up even earlier,

  departed

  before all of them

  Meeting

  The rain hovering over the city for days

  finally fell.

  You

  were arriving after years . . .

  I was in the dark

  about your hair color

  about passion, sorrow, fury

  and about all else I had prepared in the drawers.

  In the dark

  about the candles on the table . . .
/>   Repeatedly you and I

  had forgotten about time in cafés and on the streets

  and now time

  is taking its revenge on us.

  You knocked on the door,

  I answered.

  You greeted me

  but had no voice,

  gave me a hug

  but I saw your shadow

  with its hands kept in its pockets.

  We stepped into a room,

  lit the candles

  but nothing in the room was lit.

  The glow conceals the unlit . . .

  While you collapsed on the sofa

  sank into it

  shivered on it

  sweated

  I wrote,

  surreptitiously,

  on my calendar’s margins:

  A whale dying in agony on the beach

  is not there to meet anyone.

  Around Morning

  She does not tuck the sheet of morning neatly,

  leaves it wrinkled

  from last night.

  She stands at the window,

  allows death

  to slip down her throat

  to circulate in the hall of her chest

  to leave open the blood faucets

  then to forget them all . . .

  She allows the wind

  to enter

  to put on the shirt left on the chair,

  then to exit.

  She stands before the window,

  strokes her hair, says:

  Flying requires no wings,

  only the heart, its chambers.

  Pattern V

  In the dark

  a burglar

  stares at the painting

  Acquiescence

  And pain

  which arrived this time prior to the wound

  remained so long in our home

  it became my sister.

  We succumbed

  to the dirt of the draperies,

  to the furrows on the wall’s forehead.

  We succumbed

  to the ticking hands of

  the clock

  as it dismembered us.

  So was that all life could be?

  An index finger pointing toward the faraway?

  Snow falling for years

  yet failing to take shape into piles?

  And life

  which enters from a hidden door every night

  with a dull knife.

  The moon is witness to

  this darkness

  and the moon is

  the mouth of a lover

  who consummates words

  in fourteen nights

  and the little black fish

  moving through the capillaries of my fingers

  is now orbiting my temples.

  Within me

  come the cries of a tree

  tired of repeating the same fruit.

  I am a fish tired of water!

  I succumb to you,

  sad birdcage veil

  I succumb

  to the giant question mark

  stuck in my mouth.

  So were our days only that long?

  And life grew so narrow

  that we fell

  finally

  into the same pit

  we leapt over

  many times

  before.

  The Bird of Sorrow

  A bullet passes through my neck

  my blood

  begins to speak through my feathers

  The hunter doesn’t know

  the dinner his children are eating

  will upset everyone

  The hunter doesn’t know

  my children are hungry right now

  and I will continue flying

  in a foolish direction

  The hunter doesn’t know

  I’ll be flying in their stomachs for years

  and his children

  will turn slowly

  into cages

  Pattern VI

  Flying

  was no longer the bird’s wish

  It plucked its feathers out

  one by one,

  in order to lie bald upon this pillow,

  in order to slip into a different dream

  Characters

  There are characters in me

  who do not talk to each other

  who fill each other with grief

  who have never dined at the same table

  In me there are characters

  who write their own poetry with my hands

  who flip through stacks of bills with my hands

  who make fists of my hands

  who place my hands on the sofa edge

  and while one sits down

  the other stands up, leaves

  In me there are characters

  who melt in the snow

  who drift with the rivers

  and years later

  rain into me

  In me there are characters

  who sit on a corner

  and like death talk to no one

  There are characters in me

  who arrive too late

  who are settling

  and another one sitting

  facing this sunset

  sipping tea

  In me there are characters

  who stab each other

  assassinate each other

  bury each other

  in the cemetery of my psyche

  but I

  with all of my characters

  go on caring for you

  ■

  The Cluttered Table

  This cluttered table

  is the corpse of the party.

  You and I were alone,

  so where have all these

  cigarette butts on the floor come from,

  these cold cups of tea

  these crumpled papers,

  ruined in a collision with acuity?

  You left years ago

  and my inert bodies

  are occupied with something

  in every corner of this house.

  ■

  Federico García Lorca

  When I hiked in your words

  I realized

  why the blood passing through my heart

  was the same as the blood

  running through the veins of my legs.

  And why five o’clock in the afternoon

  would often remain in my room

  long into the evening.

  I think the bullet shot toward you

  was a glass of water

  poured on a forest in flames.

  And burning in the blaze that you’ve lit

  is a delight

  like igniting a cigarette with the sun.

  Stain on a Soldier’s Uniform

  We scrambled aboard,

  unaware that the train

  would stop at a different station,

  not knowing another hand had loaded our guns,

  hands that had loaded guns for them, too.

  The dust on these boots

  is a mixture of men and women

  who, like children,

  named this ending our fate.

  The dust was the sum

  of all that was said

  and the red only a marker

  in a child’s hand

  after blushing the garden’s apples.

  We aimed at our targets

  but war

  shed its bullets in the dark />
  now and then you shoot your enemy

  now and then your daughter.

  We scrambled aboard,

  unaware.

  But this time

  I will transform the world—

  the weapons on the child’s lap

  are only toys, make-believe.

  I sit down to eat with my enemies.

  Take a cigar

  then take a picture

  to hang on

  a wall within the universe.

  ■

  Station and Soldiers

  I still had hands

  to embrace you

  still had lips

  to ask you something more

  still had legs

  and this goddamn line of poetry

  stepped back

  and climbed the stairs of great despair

  Something was incinerating in our dreams

  and the steam kept rising from the train

  ■

  Now,

  I’m back, Mother!

  Now,

  I’m your torment, Mother!

  I’m hell!

  You have to change your hell’s diapers

  And nothing is more agonizing

  than having

  to embrace your hell

  to kiss it

  ■

  Infrared Camera

  The train terrifies me

  when it departs

  and splits this many people

  from that many.

  Now it’s the wind’s turn

  to arrive,

  to heave and carry off

  some damp, wrinkled handkerchiefs,

  a top hat left behind at the station.

  Then night slips in,

  wearing the hat the wind’s taken away.

  The rest of the station grows dark . . .

  From here on,

  peer through the infrared camera:

  Several men, a woman,

  who departed on the train,

  have not departed at all . . .

  The handkerchief carried by the wind

  hasn’t been carried off.

  A few meters away

  the railroad ends

  and this rusted train

  seems to have stopped

  for years.

  Its passengers chat,

  sip coffee,

  laugh