TOC
| The Divine wolf |
The star weeps, -
The star's tears are a night.
A star in a long dress
Strolling among the palm trees.
A rose. Its own fragrance is its home
And the breeze its bed.
Is there water anywhere that may quench
The thirst of water.
O, you whose glitter is invisible
O, you pallor that permeates the phases of dusk,
O, you my image
The sky embroiders its own undergarment
With lacework of cloud and wind
And the morn chants its ode to the birds
My image, my image,
A tower of flimsy light
Faltering; the night is the course of its ascent -
My image, my image.
When the truth shines within us,
We speak only in tropes.
The sun
Is but another body for my night.
He was not deluded when he said: the sky
Is a woman, -
He was dreaming of the earth, pourinhis dreams
In her extinct lamps.
The earth once saidto verse: grant me
Now your rhythm so that I can write the
Poem; he was writhing in his despair,
Getting away and delving into his distant sun.
A pagan moon
Shining in a prophet's prayer niche
A language he has fathered
Shuns him,
And a light emanating from him
Rebels against him.
After the rose surrenders to the sun and withers,
The wind is bequeathed with golden dust,
About its ashes the earth says:
This is my own song, brought back to me.
Poesy voluptuous within me, between my eyelids, Poesy/ a body
On my bed.
Alien like the earth
familiar like the earth,
Whilst sex is a garment of light.
Says he: this bush
Is, as used to be, still in its prime,
The paths leading to it are a book
Whereas the fields are images.
The world grows pale, and the words
Are women he reads,
Like death, he seduces them:
What he killeth he reviveth
Of the shroud of history he maketh another bed; in it he is born.
There is no room for them, - they give warmth to
The earth's body, for air they forge
Its keys, -
They have not founded
Houses or genealogies, -
They have recorded them
As the sun records its own history, -
Nowhere…
My beloved Sun hath equated me with trees,
With rivers,
And with the destitute/ Go and ask her
How she could banish me.
She hath scattered me on the roads and strewn me, letter by letter, in alien dialects.
O ask her not,
For I have to her pride submitted my footsteps -
And this banishment I have accepted for my countenance.
Most splendid thou art as thou shakest the skyline
Whilst some take thee for the call,
And others for the reverberation.
Most splendid thou art when thou art proof
For light and proof for dark:
In thee reside the end and the beginning of speech
Whilst some envisage thee as foam,
Others discern thee as a creator.
Most splendid thou art a destination,
A crossroads
For silence and for speech.
I must travel in the garden of ashes
Among the trees concealed in ashes
There are myths, diamonds, and the Golden Fleece.
I must travel through famine, among roses, towards the harvest
I must travel, I must repose
Below the arch of orphaned lips,
For within the orphaned lips, within the wounded shade of those lips,
Resides the ancient alchemy flower.
I shall go and seek shade in the grass among the buds, build an isle,
And link the branch to the waterfronts.
Should the harbors be lost and the lines blacken,
I would wear the wonder captivated
In the butterfly wing
Behind rampart of light and corn ears in the native land of fragility.
I have mixed the fire with the snows-
Neither the flames nor the snows shall understand my forests.
Mysterious and familiar I shall remain:
Dwelling in flowers and in stones,
Vanishing,
Investigating,
Witnessing,
Surging
Like the light between alchemy and the gesture.
In the meadows of despondency, I draw my motley days on the grass,
Breaking the surface of mirrors
Between the afternoon sun and the water in the human mallard.
My years migrate like famine, they collapse in the forest of arches/ ribs.
Years…
I have seen their beaks ensnared, they collapse in the forest of arches/ ribs
Among their eternal nests.
A family of tree leaves
Sit near the stream
Wounding the land of tears
Reading to water the book of fire
My family expected not my coming
They have departed
There is no fire or vestige.
Meet me O morn! And let us go to our desolate field,
The path to our desolate field is lined with parched trees,
Many a time have we promised to remain two beds, two infants
Under their arid shades
O meet me! Have you seen the branches, heard the call of branches,
caused their sap to become speech
Words that attract the eyes
Words that splinter the rocks
Meet me, O meet me…
As though we met, as though we wove and wore darkness
We then came knocked on his door, drew the curtain,
Opened his windows, and retired,
To the trunks' arches.
We sought aid from our own eyelids and poured
The flask of dreams and tears
As though we'd lost our way and remained
In the land of boughs.
So be it,
The sparrows came and a clump of stones joined the stones
So be it,
I wake the streets and the night
And we advance in the procession of the trees
The branches, the green suitcases, and the dream are the pillow
The holiday travels
As the forenoon remains mysterious and a face
Remains sailed on my mysteries.
So be it,
A beam hath guided me and a voice hath called me
From beyond the city walls…
1963
… And when I surrendered in the eyelids island
As guest of seashells and jars,
I could see that the age was a vial,
Containing both water and sparks,
Allowing man to be A myth
And the fire of a myth,
And I was borne on boughs
In an enchanted white forest,
Its day - consecrated to madness -
Is my town, and its night my cabin.
Leaves proceed, repose in the pit of writing,
Carrying the flower of grief.
Before it became
Rust,
Speech generates in the crust of darkness
Touring leaves frequent the land mystery
Moving from one forest to another,
Carrying the flower of grief…
Icarus was here
He pitched his tent under the pallid leaves; he smelt the fire
Burning in the chambers of greenery in the meek buds,
And shook,
Shook the trunk; he appealed for aid,
And coiled like a reel;
He then grew ecstatic and flew away…
Icarus was not burnt - he has not yet returned.
1963
1965
I saw your profile
Drawn on the trunk of a palm tree,
And I saw the sun dark in your hands;
I then promptly saddled my yearning and rode to the palm trees; I carried
the night in a basket and carried the town;
And I was strewn around your eyes. I sought to look at my face -
I saw your face starving like a child;
I encompassed it with spells
And over it I strew its own jasmines.
1965
I have dwelt in the face of a woman
That dwells in a wave
The ebb casts on a shore
That has lost its harbour in its shells.
I have dwelt in the face of a woman
That murders me, one that loves to inhere
As an unlit lighthouse in my blood that keeps sailing
to the extremity of madness.
1973-75
The night strips naked its own concubines
It becomes a Sufi becomes at one with its own smallest parts.
Do tell the sky to change its name,
Do tell the earth to assume my figure.
My face is a glimpse in the eyes of an arid lake
My body has the taste of the shroud
Ergo
The thunder of labyrinths seizes me
Ergo
The world becomes a window that cannot accommodate my eyelashes.
I do know the oyster,
the jellyfish,
the thigh of the night, the blade of the moon,
the tongue of the carnation,
I do know the face and the nape
And there is a surface whereon I stretch, but I am ignorant of its
extension and of its colours
The body to which I have surrendered my body I have not seen,
The body who said to me: "read me" I have written its other,
The one who said to me: "inscribe me" I have read its other
Ergo
I keep recurring as sound without speech within a boundless theatre
Ergo
I hear words without sound:
Aurora's hand has touched you once only
And then disappeared.
Adorn yourself, O meadows, with the candles of a darkening history.
The grass is closing its cabinets,
Spring is breaking its early keys,
And there is someone who lacerates and then acts like a fly
sticking to the wound.
And here I am -
Descending from the second horizon of birth:
Another infinite distance is open to me.
O yearning that on the walls of time is engraved,
Wake and let loose your monsters!
O Babylonian ink,
Recover your intoxication and then intoxicate me!
My age is a shrinking garment whilst desire is a growing body.
As I obliterate you, O desire,
I discover you ?
I hear the pelvis neigh like horses
I see the navel extend like peneplains
A muscle turns
Another touches me
Another sets some of my parts agaiothers
I touch the cranium and I touch the heart,
I touch the bone pulse
And tothe husky sound in the arteries.
Your face is brimming with my blood,
I avail myself again and again, and I hallucinate,
And the skyline has the fragrance of sperm.
Do allow my body to abide as a path
on the leaves, allow your arbor-like footsteps
to be a landscape, allow your body that is actor and narrator
to be a shadow, allow your body that is gestures and motions
to be a surface, allow your body that is the depth
to be letters, and allow your body to become the writing.
And do stroll
In a shroud that you weave thread by thread,
Tell the needles to dawdle,
And take your time.
And O you love's labyrinths,
I have looked upon you, my eyes have taken you,
I have chilled you and I have frozen you,
I have drenched myself in you and bridged you.
And here I am breathing you as you are breathing me;
And inside you I shake my body.
1973-1975
Inscription from an esoteric history of death ?
He borroweth and inventeth tales whose ankles he woundeth
And he followeth the blood streak he watcheth time break in his hands,
Watcheth space gird itself with its own wreckage
He turneth around
Monuments and statues with inscriptions
O R P H E U S
A D O N I S
He maketh sure that these are his own homologues and names
From
Alchemy
And from the Orient.
Time is between the origin of the body and the vent of action space is between
a rock that gets intoxicated and waves that prepare the hour
O ye swift fire, slow, slow down!
I am the road and I am the passer-by, the seer and the seen
And I cannot myself attain.
And ye (I mean my prime time) are the violets
Gradating between the blue of death and the blue of Qassabeen
You dream and dream evermore
You turn eternally in the vortex of the third eye
The nymphomania of the moon and the ravenousness of the dove
Out of tobacco leaves, you weave a carpet on which the night curls and stays up late
On the terrace
You sleep between breasts twine
A withered rose, and a rose about to wither…
Allow the earth to lie in your hands and wake Qassabeen
Wherefrom will arise a light that will wake the feet and tease the forehead of the one it named Ali
I arise
Tobacco cuttings being my pants I draw my moon on their leaves
And I hearken sounds that emanate not from me but are mine thus I observe
The air coming forth from the trees, carrying boats that rock and slump
And when the night's feather is exhausted
And the dawn drinks its milk
The sun
And the house
Go
To the same bed
Be understanding, O house ridden with swallows' wings; and accept the wind's kismet!
A man and a woman are sharing grief grief that gets between one eyelash
And another But among branches that cannot accommodate even the shade
A man opens the paths
After his death, he realizes that the man was his best friend.
On Fridays he finishes work early he walks among olive trees
Light he leans on their shades he's never stooped except to embrace
Things that cannot stoop The Sultan could never forgive him that the village could take him
Seriously only after his death
After his death,
I befriended trees that were still listening to his sighs
I befriended places that roofed time with green sparks he'd named
Here he is
Holding his orisons in his hands and walking as though he were the mist on the skyline.
The grass is the companion of his footsteps and nothing but straw surrounds him; and when he escorts
The sun as it smothers its stove, he looks like a sail that emerges out of the deep ocean
And can find no harbour The skies being his shores and his waves from the horizon he emerges and unto the horizon he sinks And he is not to fold his own wings.
They have said: "he used to carry a wand that illuminated his way and on his way back home
He would descend from the rainbow as though from a staircase"
They have said: he once referred to his own feet saying: "they never sought a Sultan".
And when death snatched him, a thicket grieved over him, and Qassabeen lay its cheek on the ground They said: ''Around his tomb, screaming, lamenting voices congregate during the night A passer-by would often hear them and deem them female voices he would be seduced and would incline towards them, burning with lust When he gets closer he would hear only trees and stones…''
In his company, I could have written the wind's childhood, I could have read the stones' old age I could have raised the dream as a roof and married life tinge by tinge
I could have warped myself in time and drawn him
With eyelashes
From which
My days
Are suspended
Bells beside
Bells
I laugh and with me laugheth a day that hath not come
And I go into alliance with another history.
Abul-Abbas Al-Mukhtar has the face of an olive tree The gendarme has the heart of a matrimony vine And Abbas once wept when the river almost overwhelmed Ali and the flood nearly carried him to its ultimate destination His mother's face could not have stopped the torrential rain her voice could not have tamed the thunder
Sublimely did grief depart
Adrift did the dawn hustle, scattering its lamps
And here's fatigue
Sitting on the doorstep bent A walking stick
Between his feet A dam between his eyes He talks
His wrinkles settle in the well of his words His voice
Is a string that modulates on space his distraction is the ember that cooks distance His hands bleed in gestures
And the gestures bleed in salt and in waves
And we observe the moon rolling dismembered
And in his name the women sit down
As faltering, flickering
Candles
And there is nothing between the clothes and the skin but
The blade of
Sex.
…A history was once born to him in a tent that had the shape of memory
He associated with a spectre; he married it not knowing it was the desert
The sea had no power over it
And the sun could only weep over it
Go out to history
O child
Out he goes
The sun has the tang of a woman deserting her house the sky has the looks
Of famine
He felt depressed, he sighed, he frowned, he cried
And the clouds took him by surprise
He feels depressed, he sighs, he frowns, he cries
And when he felt that the dust that turned into mire was extending before him like a carpet of fluff he was not accustomed to he took his shoes off so that he could get closer to his original nature
He darned his tattered clothes and reconciled them to a nippy wind
Coming from Al-Aqra' Mount
A wind in which he would breathe the fragrance of Latakia and Antioch, a wind in whose company he would enter the radiance of distances
Visible
Invisible
He would emerge from the vent of dusk
And judge the sun.
Here is darkness
He becomes flabby and his flanks become rent
He did not ask for advice he did not solicit any star
Wings accompany him/ the air did not come into being
The coasts accompany him/ nothing in the seas is thirst-quenching
And here is the gate of the world
Clattering
Before him
As he moves away…
Exit a butterfly Enter a butterfly And the stage looks like Qassabeen
We learn how to confine the sky in a book how to eschew learning
We play truant urged by the white colour of paper guarded by ink spots
We saw bakeries carrying mountain crests We saw days wrap themselves in palm trees,
walking on legume feet And between mustard and hollyhock we could hear gossip about the elopement of a woman or the
funeral of a lover
Suddenly
It rains in whoops against windowpanes The houses turn
Into hills The clouds have teeth the moon has fingernails
And letters marking the wind's pulse fall off the notebooks of the plants
But
What do the letters recall,
What does the wind preserve?
Exit a butterfly Enter
A butterfly And the stage looks like childhood
Who is the child that throws stones at the sky? Who is the child
That snares the skyline with a net of tears?
And ye Old man,
Exposing a sublime chest that can accommodate mountains,
Teach us
What do you say to the air when the birdsabandon it,
What do you say to the dust when it wraps itself in thorns?
Exit a butterfly Enter a butterfly And the stage looks like Qassabeen
Verily it is the hour of the encounter of sowing and reaping, the encounter of the dream sandwich and the plate of days
Candle by candle the mountains burn bell by bell
The plains wake Verily it is the time for retreating to the fur of fatigue
Where the air walks on four legs
And time assumes the countenance of argil
Exit a butterfly Enter a butterfly And the stage looks like a journey
Let the feet assume the shape of orbits Let the arms assume the shape of seasons
The sky undoes its anklets It sits down to smell the odour of its own feet and waves of blood are surging and flopping
Blow up, O dam named history Blow you up again and again!
The eagles nearly give up the habit of ascending the summits The clouds nearly give up the habit if raining
Thus did we emerge
We said: O square, O rectangle, O triangle! The orbit associates its countenance with ours And here we are spelling the ether circles As bitterness lies dormant
And fern lies and chard lies Poppies lie, the waves and rivulets lie
Breeze after breeze the fragrance of our footsteps arises And here is Qassabeen
Receiving the rise of the tide and acquiring the trunk of the surge
Go out to the land, O child!
O slender thighs,
And ye O crinkled arms, advance!
O creases,
It is you
That creates
The earth.
1957
The gongs on our eyelashes,
The dying words,
And I - among the fields of words -
Am a knight riding a horse of clay,
My lung being my poetry, my eyes being my book.
And I - beneath the husk of words
On glittering banks of foam -
Am a poet that hath sung and died,
Bequeathing -under the poets' faces -
To the birds and to the boundaries of the skyline,
This burning elegy.
1960
Unarmed he cometh forth, unstoppable like the forest or the clouds. Yesterday, he dislocated the sea and carried a Continent.
He draweth the nape of the day; out of his own feet he maketh the day, and he borroweth the shoe of the night, and awaiteth that which cometh not. Verily he is the physics of things. He defineth them and nameth them with names he revealeth not. Verily he is reality and its counterpart, life and its other.
When the rock becometh a lake and the shade a city, he is alive; he liveth and leadeth despair astray, erasing all room for expectancy, dancing for the dust so it will yawn, and for the trees so they will go to sleep.
Here he is, declacing the intersection of the extremes, engraving the sign of the dawn on the forehead of our age.
Life he filleth and nobody can see him. He transformeth life into froth and into it he plungeth. He transformeth the future into a prey and desperately runeth after it. Carved are his words in the direction of loss, loss, and more loss
And his own dwelling is bewilderment, but crammed it is with spies.
He horrifieth and reviveth,
Leaketh with calamity and overfloweth with derision,
Stripping man as he would peel an onion.
Verily he is the wind that declineth not, and the water that to its fount returneth not. Starting with himself, he createth his own kind - He hath no successors, and his roots are in his own footsteps.
Into the abyss he walketh, and he hath the height of the wind.
1961
The forenoon is burn-faced and wandering
And I am the death of the moon
Below my countenance the bell of the night has broken
And I am the new divine wolf.
1961
Rusted are the chariots of the day
Rusted is the knight.
I coming from there,
From the land of the deep roots,
My horse is a wretched bud
And my path a blockade.
What's wrong with you, why are you mocking?
Run away! For I have come from there
I have come to you, clothed in crime,
And bringing you the winds of lunacy.
1961
I can spy among the humble books
In the yellow dome
A punctured city flying
I can spy walls of silk
And a murdered star,
Swimming in a green vial.
I can spy a statue of tears,
A statue made of the earthenware of limbs,
Stooping in the presence of the prince.