Call Me Ishmael Tonight Read online

  Contents

  I Have Loved

  Arabic

  For You

  By Exiles

  Of It All

  In Real Time

  Of Fire

  Things

  Shines

  My Word

  From The Start

  Angels

  Of Water

  As Ever

  Land

  Not All, Only A Few Return

  Even The Rain

  Water

  Of Snow

  Air

  About Me

  In Marble

  Bones

  In

  Beyond English

  Of Light

  Stars

  For Time

  God

  Forever

  After You

  In Arabic

  Tonight

  Existed

  CALL ME ISHMAEL TONIGHT

  I Have Loved

  I must go back briefly to a place I have loved

  to tell you those you will efface I have loved.

  Arabic

  The only language of loss left in the world is Arabic—

  These words were said to me in a language not Arabic.

  Ancestors, you’ve left me a plot in the family graveyard—

  Why must I look, in your eyes, for prayers in Arabic?

  Majnoon, his clothes ripped, still weeps for Laila.

  O, this is the madness of the desert, his crazy Arabic.

  Who listens to Ishmael? Even now he cries out:

  Abraham, throw away your knives, recite a psalm in Arabic.

  From exile Mahmoud Darwish writes to the world:

  You’ll all pass between the fleeting words of Arabic.

  The sky is stunned, it’s become a ceiling of stone.

  I tell you it must weep. So kneel, pray for rain in Arabic.

  At an exhibition of Mughal miniatures, such delicate calligraphy:

  Kashmiri paisleys tied into the golden hair of Arabic.

  The Koran prophesied a fire of men and stones.

  Well, it’s all now come true, as it was said in the Arabic.

  When Lorca died, they left the balcony open and saw:

  his qasidas braided, on the horizon, into knots of Arabic.

  Memory is no longer confused, it has a homeland—

  Says Shammas: Territorialize each confusion in a graceful Arabic.

  Where there were homes in Deir Yassein, you’ll see dense forests—

  That village was razed. There’s no sign of Arabic.

  I too, O Amichai, saw the dresses of beautiful women.

  And everything else, just like you, in Death, Hebrew, and Arabic.

  They ask me to tell them what Shahid means—

  Listen: it means “The Beloved” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic.

  For You

  Did we run out of things or just a name for you?

  Above us the sun doubles its acclaim for you.

  Negative sun or negative shade pulled from the ground . . .

  and the image brought in one ornate frame for you.

  At my every word they cry, “Who the hell are you?”

  What would you reply if they thus sent Fame to you?

  What a noise the sentences make writing themselves—

  Here’s every word that we used as a flame for you.

  I remember your wine in my springtime of sorrow.

  Now the world lies broken. Is it the same for you?

  Because in this dialect the eyes are crossed or quartz,

  A STATUE A RAZOR A FACT I exclaim for you.

  The birthplace of written language is bombed to nothing.

  How neat, dear America, is this game for you?

  The angel of history wears all expressions at once.

  What will you do? Look, his wings are aflame for you.

  On a visitor’s card words are arranged in a row—

  Who was I? Who am I? I’ve brought my claim. For you.

  A pity I don’t know if you’re guilty of something!

  I would—without your knowing—take the blame for you.

  Still for many days the rain will continue to fall . . .

  A voice will say, “I’m burning, God, in shame for You.”

  Something like smoke rises from the snuffed-out distance . . .

  Whose house did that fire find which once came for you?

  God’s dropped the scales. Whose wings will cover me, Michael?

  Don’t pronounce the sentence Shahid overcame for you.

  (FOR MICHAEL PALMER)

  By Exiles

  Where should we go after the last frontiers,

  where should the birds fly after the last sky?

  —MAHMOUD DARWISH

  In Jerusalem a dead phone’s dialed by exiles.

  You learn your strange fate: you were exiled by exiles.

  You open the heart to list unborn galaxies.

  Don’t shut that folder when Earth is filed by exiles.

  Before Night passes over the wheat of Egypt,

  let stones be leavened, the bread torn wild by exiles.

  Crucified Mansoor was alone with the Alone:

  God’s loneliness—just His—compiled by exiles.

  By the Hudson lies Kashmir, brought from Palestine—

  It shawls the piano, Bach beguiled by exiles.

  Tell me who’s tonight the Physician of Sick Pearls?

  Only you as you sit, Desert child, by exiles.

  Match Majnoon (he kneels to pray on a wine-stained rug)

  or prayer will be nothing, distempered mild by exiles.

  “Even things that are true can be proved.” Even they?

  Swear not by Art but, dear Oscar Wilde, by exiles.

  Don’t weep, we’ll drown out the Calls to Prayer, O Saqi—

  I’ll raise my glass before wine is defiled by exiles.

  Was—after the last sky—this the fashion of fire:

  autumn’s mist pressed to ashes styled by exiles?

  If my enemy’s alone and his arms are empty,

  give him my heart silk-wrapped like a child by exiles.

  Will you, Beloved Stranger, ever witness Shahid—

  two destinies at last reconciled by exiles?

  (FOR EDWARD W. SAID)

  Of It All

  I say This, after all, is the trick of it all

  when suddenly you say, “Arabic of it all.”

  After Algebra there was Geometry—and then Calculus—

  But I’d already failed the arithmetic of it all.

  White men across the U.S. love their wives’ curries—

  I say O No! to the turmeric of it all.

  “Suicide represents . . . a privileged moment. . . .”

  Then what keeps you—and me—from being sick of it all?

  The telephones work, but I’m still cut off from you.

  We star in America, fast epic of it all.

  What shapes galaxies and keeps them from flying apart?

  There’s that missing mass, the black magic of it all.

  What makes yours the rarest edition is just this:

  it’s bound in human skin, final fabric of it all.

  I’m smashed, fine Enemy, in your isolate mirror.

  Why the diamond display then—in public—of it all?

  Before the palaver ends, hear the sparrows’ songs,

  the quick quick quick, O the quick of it all.

  For the suicidally beautiful, autumn now starts.

  Their fathers’ heroes, boys gallop, kick off it all.

  The sudden storm swept its ice across the great plains.

  How did you find me, then, in the thick of it all?

  Across t
he world one aches for New York, but to long

  for New York in New York’s most tragic of it all.

  For Shahid too the night went “quickly as it came”—

  After that, old friend, came the music of it all.

  (FOR ANTHONY LACAVARO)

  In Real Time

  Feel the patient’s heart

  Pounding—oh please, this once—

  —JAMES MERRILL

  I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time.

  A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time.

  Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hellfire?

  A former existence untold in real time . . .

  The one you would choose: were you led then by him?

  What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?

  Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth—

  The funeral love comes to hold in real time!

  They left him alive so that he could be lonely—

  The god of small things is not consoled in real time.

  Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys—

  It’s hell in the city of gold in real time.

  God’s angels again are—for Satan!—forlorn.

  Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time.

  And who is the terrorist, who the victim?

  We’ll know if the country is polled in real time.

  “Behind a door marked DANGER” are being unwound

  the prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time.

  The throat of the rearview and sliding down it

  the Street of Farewell’s now unrolled in real time.

  I heard the incessant dissolving of silk—

  I felt my heart growing so old in real time.

  Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned.

  What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time?

  Now Friend, the Beloved has stolen your words—

  Read slowly: the plot will unfold in real time.

  (FOR DANIEL HALL)

  Of Fire

  In a mansion once of love I lit a chandelier of fire . . .

  I stood on a stair of water; I stood on a stair of fire.

  When, to a new ghost, I recited, “Is That What You Are,”

  at the windows in the knives he combed his hair of fire.

  You have remained with me even in the missing of you.

  Could a financier then ask me for a new share of fire?

  I keep losing this letter to the gods of abandon.

  Won’t you tell me how you found it—in what hemisphere of fire?

  Someone stirs, after decades, in a glass mountain’s ruins.

  Is Death a cry from an age that was a frozen year of fire?

  I have brought my life here where it must have been once,

  my wings, still hope and grief, but singed by a courtier of fire.

  When the Husband of Water touched his Concubine of Snow,

  he hardened to melt in their private affair of fire.

  Don’t lose me in the crowds of this world’s cities,

  or the Enemy may steal from me what gods revere of fire.

  The way we move into a dream we won’t ever remember,

  statues will now move into wars for a career of fire.

  What lights up the buildings? My being turned away! O, the injustice

  as I step through a hoop of tears, all I can bare of fire.

  Soldier: “The enemy can see you and that’s how you die.”

  On the world’s roof, breathless, he defends a glacier of fire.

  I have come down to my boat to wish myself Bon Voyage.

  If that’s the true sound of brevity, what will reappear of fire?

  A designer of horizons, I’ve come knocking at your door.

  Buy my sunsets, please, for the Pacific’s interior of fire.

  I could not improve my skill to get ahead of storms though

  I too enrolled in Doomsday to be a courier of fire.

  “on the last day of one September” “one William was born”

  Native of Water, Shahid’s brought the Kashmir of fire.

  (FOR W. S. MERWIN)

  Things

  Blood, Hook & Eye: Certainly here lay true true things

  for Our Master Plan—by the plough—among blue things.

  About the death penalty—as you held back a tear—

  even the children cried out that they foreknew things.

  “The two houses in which I was raised were torn down.”

  Summers raced to autumnal lands to bedew things.

  “I could not find you and feared I’d never find you . . .”

  Then out of the blue you called me. You value—things?

  He “can’t get called / on . . . or taken to the cleaners”

  though it’s time for Anonymous to shampoo things.

  It snowed. Then I had no home. Way way back beyond

  with the exact meaning of faith I’ll argue things.

  Black Death inhabits his field with fascinating pain

  and burns down the accrued Muslim-Christian-Jew things.

  Your country also had no post office until now?

  “But now no one’s left to write to there”—Ah!—to do things.

  I, from the upper berth, slip “down into her dream.”

  Choo-choo “Goes the train towards” some déjà-vu things.

  I save threadbare tapestries, stained silks, ripped cashmeres.

  They say, Now’s the time to buy, to be into things.

  Has a narrow bridge in a flat valley at last

  led me to Paradox proper to see through things?

  Silence is the keeper of the keys to secrets.

  “I can’t talk to my wife / but I can to you”—THINGS!

  He goes through his motions like a ghost while I am

  doomed to watch him forsake me to interview things.

  Shahid, I’m Oak, then Angel of rains and rivers.

  Ah well, Dara also, like your name, means two things.

  (FOR DARA WIER)

  Shines

  Suspended in the garden, Time, bit by bit, shines—

  As “you lean over this page, / late and alone, it shines.”

  I’ve rushed to the country in which pain is asleep.

  Its capital, for your unannounced visit, shines.

  O Wailing Wall O Holy Sepulchre O Far Mosque

  The Tunnel echoes stones, but still no exit shines.

  Reasons for moving? Sleeping with one eye open!

  But Darker’s first edition at the exhibit shines.

  Dying to be cast in saffron plaster—the Brahmin’s!—

  a soul (they mean the Untouchable’s?) in transit shines?

  Water drops on the burner its sizzling red pearls.

  Moonlight, nude on the apricots of Gilgit, shines.

  “The mirror / is in the living room. / You are there.”

  The cold place one body took—which I’ll inhabit—shines.

  WHAT THE THUNDER SAID Shantih Shantih Shantih

  The peace that passeth understanding in Sanskrit shines.

  Have you invented an ending that comes out right?

  Judgment Day is already here, and no Writ shines.

  Mark how Shahid returns your very words to you—

  It’s when the heart, still unbriefed, but briefly lit, shines.

  (FOR MARK STRAND)

  My Word

  I am lying even now—I give you my word.

  Kind of a picnic, an occupied shoe. My word!

  My telegram arrives, no one’s there to read it—

  not even he who on tombs will bedew my word.

  Danger invites rescue, we have a good thing going.

  So let’s break everything, please rescue my word.

  The ghost said nothing that added to our knowledge.

  Upon the candle—which lit itself—who blew my word?

  I’m at home, betrothed to blue, with her refracted light.

  The li
ght is home, this blue is blue all through my word.

  Hard to say who’s winning. Nobody is winning.

  Kansas City! Oriental art! Big Zoo! My word!

  I took the shortest route through Belief’s sad country

  when archangels, on the Word’s command, slew my word.

  This erasure tilts words toward memory or tilts

  against your word—at the tiny hour of two—my word.

  Forgive me, please, could we be alone forever?

  I have never been alone; I’ll live to rue my word.

  Our silence, Beloved Enemy, is not beyond

  whatever love has done to your word, to my word.

  Now don’t put on, please, that face, just wait for me here.

  I stand no one up. See you in a few. My word.

  Will the barbarians bring again their invisible language?

  They were the solution, they foreknew my word.

  Yours too, Shahid, will be a radical departure.

  You’ll go out of yourself and then into my word.

  (FOR JAMES TATE)

  From The Start

  The Beloved will leave you behind from the start.

  Light is difficult: one must be blind from the start.

  You begin to feel better when the clocks are set back?

  Child of northern darkness—so defined from the start.

  Between two snow-heavy boughs, perhaps a bright star?

  Or in one sparkling many stars combined from the start?

  Ontological episode? God doesn’t care.

  “That is why he exists,” you divined from the start.

  Solomon’s throne was a toy, his Judgment mere talk—

  Only our sins must be enshrined from the start.

  Poet, tell me again how the white heron rises.

  For the spirit, they say, is confined from the start.

  To What is mind? we swiftly answer O, no matter!

  Those who know matter never mind from the start.

  Will the middle class give up its white devotions?

  Feed their infants cayenne and tamarind from the start.

  I am mere dust. The desert hides itself in me.

  Against me the ocean has reclined from the start.

  Who but Satan can know God’s sorrow in Heaven?

  God longs for the lover He undermined from the start.

  “But I / am here in this real life / that I was given. . . .”

  To what else should we be resigned from the start?