The Pity and the Horror
by Breyten Breytenbach
However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.” - Marina Tsvetaeva
You don't know me. There's no reason why you should and little cause for you to listen to what somebody like myself may have to say…
That’s how I started an open letter to General Ariel Sharon, on 7 April 2002. At the time he was the Prime Minister of Israel. A delegation of writers had just returned from a short visit to the West Bank and to Gaza - Russell Banks, Juan Goytisolo, Bei Dao, José Saramago, Wole Soyinka, I and one or two more. We were guided by Elias Sanbar and Leila Shahid of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and accompanied by a film crew. We had gone there to see for ourselves, and to read in public together with Mahmoud Darwish and other Palestinian authors as a gesture of solidarity. After all, they were practically cut off from the outside world. Upon our return, each one of us tried to give an account of the experience. Mine took the form of this letter.
It continued: Indeed, I don't imagine you have time to pay attention to views that do not correspond to your own. In fact, I'm convinced you do not listen to anybody who doesn't say what you wish to hear.
Should it interest you, I'm a writer born in South Africa now living and working abroad. For some time back there I too grew up among a "chosen people" who behaved as Herrenvolk - as all those who believe themselves singularized by suffering or entrusted with a special mission from God.
In the letter I apologized for the wound inflicted by the comparative allusion to the people of Israel as putative Herrenvolk, because of echoes from a recent past when, in Europe, so many Jews were the victims of a ‘final solution’ imposed by a people who did describe themselves as a master race. But how else was one to illustrate the so-called ‘justification’ for the comportment of Israel’s army when one was flooded by the horror of their exactions?
These rough equivalences don't come lightly. As writer, I'm deeply apprised of the need to keep the words uncluttered of any urge to rouse easy emotions. This is what facile comparisons do - they nullify understanding the complexity of the observed phenomena by a rush of outrage heating the throat and staining the adversary with the vomit of borrowed or vicarious condemnation. Apartheid was not Nazism, though to say so was a striking slogan. And the policies perpetrated by Israeli forces on the Palestinian people should not be equated with Apartheid. Each one of these processes and systems was evil enough to merit a thorough description of its own historical singularity.
And yet... there were similarities - and yes, differences: This blind competition, on both sides, to be recognized as more-victim-than-thou; cloaking atrocities in the 'divine' right to self-defence; the shameless manipulation of perceptions and the mendacity; the concomitant brutalization of society; the disdain shown for the humanity of the Palestinians - indeed, denying even the most elementary humane treatment of a terrified and trapped civilian population...
It was all only too familiar. The underlying assumptions informing and 'justifying' your actions are racist, I wrote to the general. As was the case with the South African regime, the preferred methods by which you hope to subjugate the enemy consist of force and shedding blood and inflicting humiliation. Cynically, you think you can get away with this as long as you play up to what are described as the vital interests of the United States in the region. I don't think you really care a Haifa fig for American interests, do you? (And why should he?)
He probably despised the Americans for being blinded by their own material crassness and their ignorance of the world, and he must have tired of having to keep on scrunching their balls, because of their own accord they were not going to last the course, being easily lured away by their narcissistic consumerism or by a partisan passion for other capers such as elections which they could steal. True, Sharon’s used car salesman doppelganger, Netanyahu, displayed his 'craft' of crude propaganda and bold lies more openly there, and had considerable success with avid audiences, as if he were a dirty finger tweaking the clitoris of a swooning American public opinion. But you too, I wrote, by opportunistically echoing the semantically challenged American president (and putting words in his mouth) who describes every 'other' as a terrorist, have shown that you take the rest of the world for fools. Surely, not all of us agree that the highest good in the world is America's greed for cheap oil, and that we should therefore be expected to adhere to the inviolability of corrupt regimes in the region!
A more pernicious red herring needs to be smelled out. It is blatantly averred, again and again, that any criticism of Israel's policies is an expression of anti-Semitism. With that assertion the argument is supposed to be closed and sealed. (A softer version of the above position, with the same aim, would be that one should refrain from criticizing Israel as this will play into the hands of overt or closet anti-Semites, because the belly of the beast is still fertile and one does not know how poisonously loaded certain references and words still echo.) Of course, I reject this attempt at censorship and intellectual bullying which intends to disqualify the grounds for debate. No amount of suffering - be it of the Tutsis, the Kurds, the Armenians, the Vietnamese, the Bosnians or the Palestinians - can confer immunity from critical assessment. (And, to put it sadly, no amount of suffering would seem to inoculate people against visiting the same vile practices they were subjected to upon others.) Draping oneself in the cloak of elected holiness and a self-proclaimed exceptional status, or hiding behind the purported promise of some Holy Land promulgated by One God of Jealousy and Intolerance, cannot excuse the crimes carried out by an invading and occupying army. For that matter, the mirror actions of massacring innocents in cold blood, as ordered by fanatic warlords in the name of Resistance, is as unacceptable. No reference to some ostensibly sacrosanct 'Greater Israel' can camouflage the fact that the settlements are armed colonies built on land shamelessly stolen from the Palestinians, festering there as shards in their flesh, or operating as snipers' nests intended to thwart and annul any possibility of Palestinian statehood. There can be no way to peace through the annihilation of the other, even when he's an Arab, just as there can be no paradise for the 'martyr'.
This 'anti-Semitism' allegation is utterly deplorable, especially coming from Jewish intellectuals who so often constitute the reasonable, rational, humanist and creative backbone of Western societies. Why should we be subjected to this special pleading or look the other way when it is Israel committing the unconscionable? Is what's sauce for the goose then, in some Yahweh-inspired way, not sauce for the kosher gander?
No, General Sharon (I said): past injustices suffered cannot justify or gloss over your present fascist actions. A viable state cannot be built on the expulsion of another people who have as much claim to that territory as you have. Might is not right. In the long run your immoral and shortsighted policies will furthermore undermine Israel's legitimacy as a state.
I explained to the general how my letter had grown from the opportunity of visiting the Territories for the first time. (And yes, I'm afraid they can reasonably be described as resembling Bantustans, for only too often are they reminiscent of the ghettoes and the controlled camps of misery one knew in South Africa.) I only glimpsed Israel briefly, upon entering and then later leaving after spending a night in the opulent but dismally deserted David Intercontinental Hotel of Tel Aviv - and after being quizzed by a young female immigration official whether I had slept with any Palestinian woman! You may say my impressions are fatally one-sided. Perhaps. Certainly, I didn't see much of Israel, though one is never out of sight of Israeli demarcation lines, checkpoints, tanks and armed outposts in the West Bank.
I wondered, General Sharon: are your two nations really all that different? You are of a similarly diverse mixture of cultures and origins, you are, all of you, Diaspora people, and you are equally intelligent and quick-witted and excitable. You may well be brave in a similar fashion. On both sides there are creative minds of exceptional integrity at work. On both sides, also, there are an extra-ordinary number of self-serving, power-hungry, obtuse individuals, fanatics with their spirits obfuscated by this God-nonsense - or using it as a pretext.
As provocateur - cold-blooded and cruel - you, Ariel Sharon, stand out among your peers. In your dogged but ill-considered attempts to subvert previous agreements and to scupper the possibility of peace - except for the peace of the graveyard and of scattering premised on the 'total transfer' or 'disappearance' of the Palestinian entity - you are bringing turmoil to the region. This you probably planned, like some Samson pulling down the pillars of the edifice on foe and friend alike. It remains to be seen whether the inaudible growling of your principals in Washington will inflect your campaign of calculated terror and wanton destruction - or whether it is but a slap on the wrist, a smokescreen behind which to better align the 'free world's' war on 'terror', and (in passing) for the domination of resources and a global control of markets and water and cheap oil and, insultingly, for imposing 'democracy'.
The few days I’d spent in Palestine with the World Parliament of Writers delegation left me with a mixed bag of strong but conflicting impressions. How small the country is! How inextricably linked the two peoples are! The stones, the stones everywhere. The topography of names familiar from the Bible. The beautiful light. The attempts to make the place look like some Switzerland by planting out-of-place conifers. The inhospitality of the land, except for lush coastal plains. How abysmally sad the villages, reminding one of the lifeless and apathetic towns of East Germany. The green lights in the mosques and all the unfinished habitations. The ugliness of the architecture everywhere, the ubiquitous light grey limestone building blocks. The inanity of the invasion and the occupation - all those lit-up detour roads built for the exclusive use of settlers and Israeli citizens. The surly pettiness of the controls at checkpoints - having little to do with security and everything with the primitive urge to humiliate, frustrate, harass, and drive to insane rage a confined population. The extreme youth of the occupant soldiers, and sadly, that they are so obviously well cultivated boys and girls. The ruthless rapaciousness with which Israel destroys the possible Palestinian economy and steals their money and their goods. The ancient revenge: bulldozing houses, uprooting olive groves (I believe one can buy beautiful old trees for a song in Israel). The equally primitive sight of armed positions under camouflage netting and Israeli flags in commandeered houses. The defilement of Palestinian public places. The vaunted 'democratic' Israeli media knowingly lying to their own people, denying the war crimes carried out by their troops, haggling like soukh merchants about the exact number of houses flattened 'accidentally'. The Berlin walls around the settlements in Gaza (and behind them university extensions, research institutes, American-linked hotels, golf courses: all the illusions of 'normal' opulence), and then the rubble of destroyed Palestinian quarters looking now like Ground Zero. The way little 'refugee camp' kids looked us straight in the eye, apparently uncowed, but then we were told they're probably all traumatized not only by the hovering dogs of your gun ships, General Sharon, and your antediluvian tanks and your men in battle gear shooting at everything that moves, but as well by all the hyper-active adults surrounding them. The old kerchiefed women in the narrow alley of some recently attacked camp screaming that you, Sharon, will never make them depart and that they chased away your soldiers "like dogs." Screaming abuse, also, at the spineless Arab states and the cowardice of their own Palestinian Authority.
The ebullience of the intellectuals and artists under siege in Ramallah - arguing, laughing at their own plight. How they all say: "We don't want to be heroes, we don't want to be victims, we just want to lead normal lives." Their wry despair. Mahmoud Darwish: "There is too much history and too many prophets in this small land." The visit to Abu Amar, Yasser Arafat, a holed fox, his trembling wax-yellow hands clinging to the empty clichés of "a peace of the brave" and "the conscience of the international community." A bourgeois lady lamenting the desecration of the Palestinian landscape. And a human rights lawyer claiming: "We are grateful to Sharon for two things - he united all the Palestinian factions and he took away every option except to resist." (Famous last, wishful words!) Later on the same haunted man, chain-smoking and with the sweat of death already on him, remarked bitterly that repression had now penetrated the skin of the people and therefore they had nothing except their skins with which to defend themselves. Hence the human bombs.
For these, I wrote to the general, will be my contrasted conclusions: You have not broken the spirit of the Palestinian people. Quite the contrary - they are now more resolute than ever to build a state; it doesn't matter how much you bully them. They saw the renewed onslaught coming, they knew you were but playing footsy with General Zinni, probably primed to do so by Dick Cheney. They also know that since you have now made them stronger you must strike harder and deeper because you are caught in a conundrum of your own making. Like Bush in his crusade against the infidel and the disobedient you have to accelerate your distension of international public ethics and flaunt common sense even more, and throw good moral money after bad political calculations. They know that nothing they can do will appease you short of turning turtle. (Or committing suicide quietly, far away from Israeli agglomerations.) They fear you will have to compound this crime against humanity which you are committing at present, that you may indeed break their hopes for a secular, modern, democratic and viable state accountable to its population, and bring forth the devil among them. They also know this will profoundly divide and weaken Israel. But you don't care, do you?
This is the pity and the horror.
Time passed. The letter I’d written to Sharon earned me a load of criticism, as was to be expected (did I really expect otherwise?) - vituperation, and even abuse. Claude Lanzman, the respected French filmmaker of Shoa, published a two-sheet essay in Le Monde aimed against Wole Soyinka, Juan Goytisolo and myself (José Saramago was beyond even naming since he had compared conditions in the West Bank to Auschwitz), illustrating why I particularly (such a promising poet in my time) had become a virulent anti-Semite. Fritz Raddatz wrote an open letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung under the title: "Sie sind infam, mein Freund." Etc.
But then I remembered the text written and read by Mahmoud Darwish on the day we visited the Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah. (A few days later Israeli soldiers retaliating against a particularly lethal suicide bomb attack in Israel were to sack the Centre; everything would be ripped apart and the Star of David splotched on the walls.) "What is the place of poetry in these barbaric times?" - Darwish had asked in a soft voice, peering myopically through thick glasses... "Poetry is fragile despite its metaphorical recourse to the power of silk and the firmness of honey. Fragile, because its work to change the soul and make the heart bigger is slow and invisible. And so, even though it unites the intimate with the universal, it cannot escape its image as daughter of solitude and of the outer edge, like an echo rising from an obscure dream... The poets should not deny that solitude, nor glorify it, but must continue being the eternal travellers between their interior and the outside. It's up to them to lighten the load of questions about the usefulness of poetry. It is they, who ought to renew the anxiety of their art by even more creative anxiety, because they will never find an immune theory against the poetic irruption...
“Mankind is now in a 'state of emergency'."
Then, on August 10, 2008, I heard the terrible news that Mahmoud Darwich had passed away.
Much had happened in the intervening years. General Sharon had decided, unilaterally, to withdraw Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip and dismantle some settlements there. It became evident that this was, unfortunately, not to be the beginning of a comprehensive peace agreement that would finally allow for the coming about of a viable Palestinian state on contingent territory, but part of a strategy to consolidate Palestine’s dismemberment and to tighten the noose around the West Bank so as to further destroy their hopes for survival as a distinct people. A Wall of Shame was constructed, annexing even more Palestinian land and cutting villages off from their fields. Israel has an ancestral knowledge of ghettoes.
And Ariel Sharon was felled by a massive stroke. What a strange fate! He’d probably been at his happiest as a farmer in the desert, making the barrenness bloom and maybe looking for lost sheep. Something about the personage spoke to me from my own past; I’d known farmer warriors just like him - tough, gruff and cunning, and often at odds with their own hierarchies and with the soft-palmed city dwellers. Barrel-chested people who killed easily and abundantly, even though they often held deep religious convictions. People who, finally and stoically, despaired of history and of human nature.
Did he even know about my ‘open letter’? Had I been unfair to single him out? Did I give in to the easy demagoguery of outrage in a place where I would not have to pay any price and where I was not equipped to recognize the irrationality of pain?
Sharon did not die. In fact, as I write this now in 2008, he is still alive somewhere, in a coma. Rather, kept ‘alive’ like some vegetable or a crystal being cared for by the best that medical science can muster - with no possible future and nowhere to come back to. Where? A crypt? In a sterilized room? In a desert cave, perhaps?
There followed the ill-fated war by Israel against Lebanon, the invasion of the southern part and the attempts to wreak as much destruction as possible on that country’s infrastructure, with blind but methodical malevolence. There followed, in Gaza - as was inevitable, given the humiliation of sham ‘negotiations’ without any tangible results ever, and of relentless pressure and of targeted assassinations and of destroying the credibility of the PLO, and precipitated by the corruption of the cadres - the implosion of Palestinian unity and coherence, with faction turning against faction in street battles. A people were now to be beggared and starved, their dream destroyed.
I had met Mahmoud Darwish again. I was privileged to participate in homage to him in Aix-en-Provence. He had been dangerously ill in the meantime, some heart disease ran in the veins of his family, he had undergone an operation with his chest cut open, spent time in a coma. From this dark visit to the underground emerged an enigmatic but brave volume of poems, Mural. His friends gathered around; we sat on terraces under plane trees of that southern town of troubadours and pétanque players. We smoked cigars and drank wine. For a while there was light and there were birds and Mahmoud made teasing remarks. Arab-speaking immigrant workers had come from afar, from all over the region to pack the auditorium where he read his poetry. It always happened. It reminded me of that night we read with him on the stage of a theatre in Ramallah - how absolutely full and rapt the place was with poor people who’d walked over the hills in darkness, avoiding Israeli checkpoints, to now stand for hours shoulder to shoulder, how they collectively breathed back at him lines of his verses, and how he joked that they should elect the donkey as a national symbol. There are times when the moon actually smells of wonderfully odorous crushed herbs and of stones.
The news of his death brought anguish and a pain that were nearly unbearable. Again, some of us had the luck, only a few weeks earlier, of listening to him reading his lines in an arena in Arles. The sun was setting, there was a soundless wind in the trees and from the neighbouring streets we could hear the voices of children playing. And for hours we sat on the ancient stone seats, spellbound by the depth and the beauty of this poetry. Was it about Palestine? Was it about his people dying, the darkening sky, the intimate relationships with those on the other side of the wall, 'soldier' and 'guest', exile and love, the return to what is no longer there, the memory of orchards, the dreams of freedom...?
Yes - like a deep stream all of these themes were there, of course, since they so constantly informed his verses; but it was also about olives and figs and a horse against the skyline and the feel of cloth and the mystery of the colour of a flower and the eyes of a beloved and the imagination of a child and the hands of a grandfather. And of death. Gently, repeatedly, terribly, by implication, mockingly, even longingly - death.
Many of us were petrified. Maybe we sensed that this was like saying goodbye - I remember seeing Leila Shahid’s downcast eyes and trembling lips. Like this? On foreign soil? Time stopped there, and the lament was made nearly joyous in the ageless rhythm of the two Palestinian brothers in black on their ‘uds accompanying the words coming to us from the earth and from a light blowing over that distant land. We wanted to weep, and yet there was laughter and he made it easy for us and it became festive.
Afterwards, I remember, we did not want to leave the place. Light had fallen but we lingered, embracing and holding one another. Strangers looked each other in the eye, fumbled for a few words to exchange, some thoughts. How awkward it has become to be moved! I remember thinking how deeply he touched us, how generous he was. And how light. Maybe, had he known, he would have wanted to take leave in this way. No drama. No histrionics. No demagogic declarations. Maybe not even much certainty anymore. Despair, yes - and laughter. The dignity and the humbleness of the combatant. And somehow, without us knowing or understanding, his wanting to comfort us. He said he was stripping his verses of everything but the poetry. He was reaching out even more profoundly than he'd ever done before for the universally shared fate and sense of being human. Perhaps he was trying to convey that it was now time to "remember to die."
The next day when we left, when we said goodbye in that Hotel Nord-Pinus with its huge posters of corridas and the photos of bullfighters fragile like angels in the intimacy of preparing for walking out into the blinding light, with the sweet smell of death lilies in the foyer, I wanted to kiss his hands and he refused.
Time will pass. There will be eulogies and celebrations. He will be 'official', a 'voice of the people'... He knew all of that and he accepted it, and sometimes he gently mocked the hyperbole and the impossible expectations. Maybe the anger will be forgotten. Maybe even, the politicians will refrain from trying to steal the light of his complex legacy, his questioning and his doubts, and perhaps some cynics - abroad as well - would, this time, not disgust us with the spectacle of their crocodile tears.
Mahmoud is gone. The exile is over. He will not have lived to see the end of the suffering of his people - the mothers and the sons and the children who cannot know why they should be born into the horror of this life, the arbitrary cruelty of their dying. He will not fade away. Not the silhouette in its dapper outdated clothes and polished loafers, not the intelligent eyes behind the thick lenses, not the teasing, not the curiosity about the world and the intimacy of his reaching out to those close to him, not the sharp analyses of the foibles and the folly of politics, not the humanism, not the good drinking and the many cigarettes, not the hospitality of never imposing his pain on you, not the voice that spoke from the ageless spaces of poetry, not the verses, not the verses, not the timeless love-making of his words.
In writing this, looking back over the few glimpses I could get of the horror and the pity, I just wanted to reach out to you. And as I write another ghost image arises from the words on the page: the face of Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet - a friend of mine and a friend of Mahmoud’s. I remember a poem he’d written - of an Israeli father looking for his lost son and a Palestinian shepherd looking for a lamb gone astray, both of them walking over the bare yellow hills of the Valley of Death, and how their calls echo and meet.
I told Mahmoud in Arles how I want to propose to my fellow poets that we should, each one of us, declare ourselves 'honorary Palestinians.' He tried to laugh it away with the habitual embarrassment of a brother. Perhaps, without meaning to, I was blundering into areas of shyness and of a sadness that had stained the folds of the land too deeply to be talked about. Was he not also thinking of the voices in Amichai’s poem? And indeed, our attempts to approach and understand the inconsolable can only be puny and clumsy. We cannot die or write in the place of his people, in the place of Mahmoud Darwish. Yet, somehow, however futile the gesture, I needed to try and say that the gift of his poetry is of importance to all of us in the world, that it grows from a particular light and soil, certainly, carrying the articulations of a very specific struggle and a life that had become word, but that it is also reaching out to our universal consciousness and condition. And that it would be an honour to try and understand ourselves through an understanding of where his poetry came from.
It was already too late. He was leaving. He is gone. But by sharing these fleeting moments with you, I’m sure, we are celebrating the dignity and the beauty of his life.
Some of you, I know, probably cried as I did then and am doing now, when you heard of the death of the poet so far away from home, in Houston of all places. And most of you never even met him!
Maybe, as we cry out for what is lost, we will pause somewhere because we hear a flutter of birds overhead, and hold a protecting hand to our blinded eyes as we search the sky for that darkened rhythm.
The nomadic conversation with Mahmoud Darwish
when you die, Mahmoud
when your aorta thrashing
all sluggish and crinkled
like a purple snake bursts
because the lines can no longer
slither the perfect metaphor,
and your heart as poem spurts
the final blood
in that hospital in foreign parts
of the barbarian land,
when your heart is at last
a sundered vowel
a moon grows above the island
among scudding clouds
of this ‘little winter season’
which soon will spill danker ink
in long verses over the waves
so that crows and goats and dirt-poor children
in song may plash in the madder
as if celebrating birding
three, four, five days and nights
cordage by day, invisible like dying
or the grope surfacing stitch by stitch in a stanza words
to unbind the night
when time has its tidal time as reaper
with the fields of the body
until the veiled fleece fades
and schedules over the nacre land
fall away like rags of rotting flesh
and the mandolin moon bloats virginally full
a sloop of bone
your skull, Mahmoud
* * *
cover me quickly, you said
no wailing and no grandiloquent display
skywrite at best a blinding quatrain
so that the meat and the measure of your poem’s pain
may be eclipsed
there is no identity
just a soughing space of shiver
in a ripened rind and rime of being
all is movement until it stops between
to sing,
time is the timeless minaret lover
over image patterns of the skin
drape no flag over my coffin or my kiss,
a flag is to have a shirt snipped from its cloth
for the homeless
a flag is the rag with which the clown
teaches a child in the circus the laughter of colour
and the blur of betrayal
our flag blows free to remember the Nakba
when olive trees were wrapped in dead fire
just this, just this
let music weep, you said
a feast with bright laughter for my friends
and a glass of wine lifted high to the day and the wind
as red as the ringing throb and spoil of a heart
* * *
midmorning in heaven above West Hill
with moon a perforated dipper
of light dredged from time
bleached to bone by gospel tides
of verbs become verbiage
to stool in stone the size of a dream
which only goes to show
that since the outset of star configurations
there’s been a door to life in the universe
oh watchmen, you lying low in the lee of your blindness
to leer at the light in our salt
and the shimmering of rose roosting our wounds:
if you were to gaze on gazetted faces of the dead
you’d remember the gossamer mothers in gas chambers
and know: this is not the way
to recover your identities
you standing in the doors of our demure dwellings
come inside from the blind binding out there
come darken our thresholds
come rest your whitened eyes
so that we may know ourselves
as people just like you
come, come drink Arabic coffee with us
and you will see that we weep
and fit into coffins just like you do
* * *
six, seven, eight days and nights:
to move through the land of in-between
is to be the passage of holification
in the air going back to where Catalonia’s
dipped and soiled and dank earth
starts to smoke with the fertile
articling of fall
beguiled by a pealing
of frogs in a poem,
through this eternal night in a celestial pod
filled with people motionless as puppets
with rags over their faces
above a wasteland where the solitary bramble bush
flames tongue-high as if at war
and holy crocodiles of healing squirm fifteen feet
down into sand in search
of the grey coolness and a vow of water
that will help perpetuate the dream of survival,
in the eyelike timeline of shimmering dusk
with stars shooting past portholes
to go dark in tunnels of oblivion,
for abeyance with the end of days
can not be told,
you came to sit in coma by my side
verbosed by the speed with which everything flees
I believe it was a Saturday when I made
the gesture of dying, you said,
and I: you must have left something
in a will and testament
but there was nothing,
and you said I need to call a friend
to inform him about my death
but no-one opened the telephone,
and I: I must go to my grave
to lay it bare for you
with laurel leaves and jasmine and honey
but I lost the graph of the road,
and you said: I have to write a last light line
on the coming and going of shadows
over the moon’s blind face
as if moving through a landscape
with the voweled wings of birds
but seeping water faded the letters to ink
and I: I must commit a deed
here and now
but can think of no action
awarding the weight of a dead man
then you called out: this doom has no tokening!
it’s a joke! the intuit a sewer!
I refuse to believe I was utterly fooled!
perhaps I am somewhere in the in-between
and perhaps I’m an aftertime corpse
on temporary leave in this lewd life
* * *
and in what is left of daybreak
I walk to my outside
and in what remains of the night
I hear the clink of footsteps in me
be greeted, he who shares with me a musing
on the drunkenness of light
of the butterfly
in this tunnel of darkness,
be greeted, he who shares my glass
in the ditch of a night
remitting two spaces, be greeted be greeted
the hollowed echo of my appearance
my friends clear a farewell feast for me
a restful lay-away in the kilter of oaks
a murmured epitaph to marble time in a boat
and always I pre-empt them
at the instant of the filling in of soil
for who clawed at death here?
who died then… who?
* * *
here in the verged north
where earth is gleaned green
right up to the dreamt coast of longing
I still hear you:
to be is to keep moving
through the spectrum of dying
looking for magical scripts in the ash
for the line that may spit a perfect metaphor
past the wrong taste of the tongue
rotting in its mouth
and look: the heart is firespewing silence:
for to walk on burnt stilts through the land
is to preach the holiness-making of nothing
* * *
and I say: if I should die before you
I entrust you with the impossible
I ask: is night still far?
you answer: the next generation
will lay hands on it
and I say: and if I die before you?
you say: then I’ll comfort the hills of Galilee
and write: “beauty is
to reach that which is enough”
but don’t forget:
if I should die before you do
I entrust you with the impossible |
