Lean Against This Late Hour Read online

  keeping an eye on their wristwatches

  as if deaf to how those clock hands

  tick in their cells.

  Sea

  I wish my corpse could float on water

  and I could go on staring

  for hours

  at the wheeling seagulls

  My vacant frame mirrors the waves

  I could turn into a boat

  come to drop off its passenger

  and without a care in the world

  fall asleep on the blue sheet of the sea

  Death wanted to be this beautiful

  but we buried it

  Fog Song

  I rip up my train ticket

  and with the last herd of deer

  return home.

  I am so much a poet

  that my antlers have blossomed

  and my song

  passes across the lake like fog:

  Shooting each bullet is a rage

  released with a shotgun.

  I have prepared the trunk of my body

  for the possibility of your kindness.

  On Power Lines

  So translucent are we today

  that our inner murderers have turned obvious.

  And the sea of our city is so sluggish

  that spiders weave their cobwebs over its waves.

  If only someone would turn these snakes into rods

  If only the one who gnawed at my bones

  did not know my poems by heart.

  We have driven the bees

  to make honey from poisonous flowers

  And the sparrow that perched for years on the power lines

  fears the branches of the trees.

  Tell me how to manage my smile

  when they have planted land mines all around my lips.

  We are the discoverers of dead-end alleys

  We have exhausted many a word

  This time

  send us a prophet who only listens.

  ■

  Insanity

  Behind the curtains I enshroud you

  beneath the skin

  under words

  in mouths

  You appear in the never-clear . . .

  I rest my hand over your eyes

  and conceal you in death . . .

  Closing the casket

  I separate your darkness

  from the dark of the world

  Long Exposure III

  Once the wind blows

  the dust stirs on the chair

  circulates in the room

  lies down beside her

  thinks of the days

  when it had lips

  Forest

  Closed eyes open wider

  and the eyelid is a curtain

  extending the landscape.

  Let the river filter through you

  let its sands deliver sediment into your heavy fatigue

  let yourself be a living part of death

  and let roots trust in your depth.

  Forest,

  you are a single tree

  fleeing the earth

  a thousand ways.

  The Bird of Reconciliation

  A road will not lead to a dream

  nor a dream to a road.

  I return

  to the faded colors of the world

  to my mother’s hair

  before my father braids it

  to the soil

  before you fall asleep in it

  and to that small, poignant book

  with its prophet on a deserted island—

  From each other

  we have fled toward each other

  from the earth

  into the earth.

  And that little bird

  that was my dream and yours

  has a leaf forced into its mouth now

  to keep it silent.

  We have fled from night into night.

  Dip your hands into that dark

  and believe

  whatever you touch.

  One-Way Ticket

  Many a cocoon I’ve seen

  hanging from a tree

  in distant forests

  on the window ledge

  in the gutter.

  Yet no matter how hard I think,

  I can’t recall

  more than a single butterfly.

  How many times are we born

  that we die

  so many times?

  How many crumpled bills

  How many crushed cigarettes

  Oh, all the one-way tickets!

  I haven’t found anything

  more sorrowful than you

  in the pockets of the world.

  —Excuse me, this ticket . . .

  —It won’t be taken back.

  So are all the winds gone?

  Has this tree

  been condemned to an eternal yellow?

  And did the dandelions wither so long

  where the walls meet in the corner

  that they’ve forgotten their news?

  —You pound the windowpanes of this train to no avail.

  In vain you hurl your voice to the other side of the window.

  We

  are the actors in a silent film.

  Bits of Darkness

  In the shade of what is not

  he sits

  turning the pages of what is not.

  He wakes sliver by sliver

  and walks in slivers

  And his many slivers

  have afflicted death.

  His index finger moves across the sky

  asks for permission

  asks him

  What can a sunset cure

  except sorrow?

  That’s all.

  The question which is the answer

  will remain long after us.

  So leave it, let it go!

  Insane is he

  whose speech makes the walls

  look in another direction.

  Insane is he

  who keeps excavating the night

  to conceal the bits of darkness beneath his bed.

  Insane is he

  who said he would leave

  but left

  who said he would stay

  but stayed

  and who said he would laugh

  but laughed . . .

  Insane is he

  who wouldn’t leave or stay or laugh

  and considers excavating the sense of “but.”

  He must be insane

  this man tied by a rope to the sunrise.

  He is insane

  this man who was shot yesterday

  who still plans his escape.

  ■

  Long Exposure IV

  They aren’t my heartbeats

  They are your footsteps

  running in my chest at night.

  If you tire out it is enough.

  Enough if you cease to run.

  Passage

  When I fail to find

  the keys in my pockets

  I’m not bothered.

  When the police place their hands on my chest

  or when I sit behind bars

  I’m not bothered . . .

  Just like

  a riverbed

  cutting through a dam

  unclear

  if it is leaving

  or returning.

  Long Exposure V

  Forget about the machine gun

  about death

  an
d consider the saga of a bee

  humming over minefields

  in pursuit of a flower.

  Ant

  I am dead and

  only you and I know this,

  you who pour the tea into your cup alone.

  Too tired to sit

  I head to the streets,

  shake my friends’ hands

  as though nothing has happened.

  Even if you turned the key in the lock

  your heart would not open.

  I know

  I am dead

  and that

  only you and I know,

  you who no longer read the newspaper aloud.

  You who no longer read at all

  and the silence is so maddening

  that I wish at times

  to become an ant

  to build a house in the throat of a flute

  to ask the wind to blow the notes

  to send them drifting into this window

  or lift me out of the shadows on the flagstones,

  to place me on your white shirt

  where I know

  you will shake me off again

  within the lines of this poem

  within these very days.

  In my dreams

  these days contain an image

  that scares me

  an image of a rope hung from the ceiling

  a man hanged by the rope

  with his back to me

  and only I know, I

  who am terrified to turn him around.

  Long Exposure VI

  You brushed my shoulder

  to get off the loneliness.

  What are you hoping for

  brushing snow

  from the shoulder of a snowman?

  Dark Period

  In this line

  or the next one

  there will be a period,

  an end to all the words.

  Within the stark frame of the window,

  tired silhouettes

  and the dark dress

  of a little girl growing distant

  growing distant

  growing distant

  In the stark frame of the window

  a dark period

  grows distant.

  A period

  that is the end to all the words.

  Door Hinge

  Safe aerial gunfire!

  You murdered the sky

  The day labored in

  from below the door

  through the keyholes

  If I were in charge

  I would dismiss the sun

  and pay the night overtime!

  I’d light a cigarette

  and slip out the café’s vent

  with the smoke . . .

  I’d turn into the fog over the street

  at least until

  I could render accidental

  these many losses

  My brother!

  How can I find you

  when I don’t remember

  how I lost you?

  How severe these words are

  How the darkness seeps in

  How often words switch places in the dark

  I stare

  at things in the room

  that are not really things

  and console myself

  with the chirp of the bird

  stuck in the door hinge

  ■

  Bricks

  Lies are a wall

  whose bricks you lay every morning,

  my distracted bricklayer,

  you have forgotten about the door!

  The water has risen to my neck

  The bricks have risen to my neck

  The water passing my lips now

  The water rising and rising . . .

  But I will not die

  I will become a fish.

  The Mad Corner of the Room

  The depth of final words

  frightens me

  like standing at the rim of a valley

  And the tiny stone

  spiraling

  down

  into the deep

  has taken everything with it

  You saw the story, small

  as a needle you could drive into my cornea

  And only now do I realize

  how the red vein of yarn

  left for days on the table

  has unraveled from my neck.

  Your absence

  has altered the map of this house

  and no matter how much I search

  I can’t find

  that mad corner of the room

  I can feel

  how the person who isn’t

  overwhelms

  the person who is

  Pattern VII

  Under the overcast sky

  the sunflower

  thinks about the sense of its name

  Injured Poem on the Table

  Even the new dawn has set

  Staring at me from the table

  an injured poem

  has accepted its last lines

  The wind blows

  without brushing a single strand

  of my hair

  It blows out a flame within me

  and departs

  If this statue had legs

  I know

  it would leave me as well

  Seclusion

  is a wound larger than the body

  and this door

  even if it opens onto hell

  will bring me joy

  Game

  You change the game

  and hang yourself from the rope

  you swung on

  years ago.

  We are the repetitions

  of the pieces

  of each other

  like you, my son, on this swing

  as I who swing you

  to forget the rope.

  Sealed Doors

  The sun won’t conform to the dark

  nor will I

  to the black fortune of this cup.

  The sun won’t conform to the dark

  nor will I

  to the bleached walls of this room.

  What revives me

  is the sealed door

  tomorrow’s return

  not yesterday’s arrival

  your absence

  not this embrace

  What revives me

  are the sealed doors

  Fog over the forest

  not trees on a warm afternoon

  death’s opacity

  not birth’s luminosity

  For you, the sealed rooms,

  the remaining lines—

  not the poem you’ve already read—

  may revive you.

  Just listen:

  Long Exposure VII

  It is a strange music

  death

  You stand up

  and dance so smoothly and softly

  that nobody can see you

  any longer

  Acknowledgments

  Sincerest thanks to the following journals and outlets in which several of these poems have appeared or are forthcoming, some in slightly different form:

  The Arkansas International: “Border,” “Pattern,” “Poem for Stillness,” and “On Power Lines”

  The New Republic: “I Need to Acknowledge” (originally “We Need to Acknowledge”)

  Adroit Journal: “Long Poem of Loneliness,” “Meeting,” and “One-Way Ticket”
/>   Guernica: “Doubts and a Hesitation”

  The Literary Review: “Necklace”

  Two Lines: “Long Exposure,” “The Cluttered Table,” “Fog Song,” and “Long Exposure VII”

  Poetry Daily: “Acquiescence” and “The Bird of Sorrow”

  Jewish Currents: “The Bird of Sorrow”

  The Slowdown: “Characters”

  Circumference: “Infrared Camera” and “Sealed Doors”

  The New York Times Magazine: “Dark Period”

  About the Author

  © 2014 Kari Jantzen

  Garous Abdolmalekian, born in 1980, is an acclaimed Iranian poet and the author of seven books of poetry: The Hidden Bird (2002), The Faded Colors of the World (2005), Lines Change Places in the Dark (2008), Hollows (2011), Nothing Is as Fresh as Death (2012), Acceptance (2015), and The Middle East Trilogy: War, Love, Loneliness (2019). He is the recipient of the Karnameh Poetry Book of the Year Award (2003) and the Iranian Youth Poetry Book Prize (2006). His poems have been translated into French, German, Arabic, Swedish, Kurdish, Turkish, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. Abdolmalekian is currently the editor of the poetry section at Cheshmeh Publications in Tehran.

  About the Translators

  Ahmad Nadalizadeh is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Oregon. He is currently completing his dissertation, which examines the role of repetition in the aesthetic remediation of monumental traumas in twentieth-century Iran.

  Idra Novey is the author of Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize that was named a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen media outlets, including NPR, Esquire, BBC, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Kirkus Reviews. Her first novel, Ways to Disappear, won the 2016 Sami Rohr Prize and a Brooklyn Public Library prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her most recent poetry collection, Exit, Civilian, was selected for the 2011 National Poetry Series by Patricia Smith. For her poetry and translations, Novey has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Translation Fund, and the Poetry Foundation. She teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

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