Call Me Ishmael Tonight Read online

  You have dwelt at the root of a scream forever—

  The Forever Shahid’s countersigned from the start.

  (FOR HAYDEN CARRUTH)

  Angels

  The pure pain with which he recognizes angels

  has left him without cures among the dreamless angels.

  The dawn looked over its shoulder to ask the naked night

  for the new fashions in which it could dress angels.

  Is it that I’ve been searching in the wrong places for you?

  That your address is still Los Angeles, Angels?

  The air is my vinegar, I, its perfect preserve—

  Watch how I’m envied by Heaven’s meticulous angels.

  In Inferno the walls mirror brocades and silks.

  Satan’s legions—though fallen—are, nonetheless, angels.

  “Let there be Light,” He said. “And the music of the spheres.”

  To what tune does one set The Satanic Verses, Angels?

  I won’t lift, off the air, any wingprints, O God—

  Hire raw detectives to track down the mutinous angels.

  All day we call it wisdom but then again at night

  it’s only pain as it comes from the darkness, Angels!

  Why is God so frightened of my crazy devotion to Him?

  Does he think that, like Satan, I too will finesse angels?

  Do they dye their wings after Forever, tinting their haloes,

  aging zero without Time, those androgynous angels?

  You play innocence so well, with such precision, Shahid:

  You could seduce God Himself, and fuck the sexless angels.

  Of Water

  But first the screened mirror, all I knew of water!

  Imagine “the thirstquenching virtue of water.”

  Who “kept on building castles” “Upon a certain rock”

  “Glacial warden over ‘dreams come true’” of water?

  Of course, I saw Chile in my rearview mirror,

  it’s disappeared under a curfew of water.

  Hagar, in shards, reflects her shattered Ishmael.

  Call her the desert Muslim—or Jew—of water.*

  God, Wordless, beheld the pulled rain but missed the held sun . . .

  The Rainbow—that Arrow!—Satan’s coup of water.

  Don’t beckon me, Love, to the island of your words—

  You yourself reached it, erasing my view of water.

  Her star-cold palanquin goes with the caravan.

  Majnoon, now she’ll be news—out of the blue—of water.

  When the Beast takes off his mask, Love, let it be you

  sweetening Tomorrow Doom’s taboo of water.

  No need to stop the ears to the Sirens’ rhetoric;

  just mock their rock-theme, you skeleton crew of water.

  Are your streets, Abraham, washed of “the Sons of Stones”?

  Sand was all Ishmael once drew of water.

  I have signed, O my enemy, your death-warrant.

  I won’t know in time I am like you of water.

  For God’s sake don’t unveil the Black Stone of K’aaba.

  What if Faith too’s let love bead a dew of water?

  I have even become tears to live in your eyes.

  If you weep, Stark Lover, for my breakthrough of water?

  Shahid’s junk mail has surfaced in a dead-letter office.

  He’s deluxed in the leather Who’s Who of Water.

  * When Hagar and Ishmael were left in the desert, God answered Hagar’s plea for water for the infant Ishmael with the Zumzum spring in Mecca.

  As Ever

  (after Ahmad Faraz)

  So I’ll regret it. But lead my heart to pain.

  Return, if it is just to leave me again.

  “Till death do us part.” Come for their sense of us . . .

  For Belief’s sake, let appearances remain.

  Let YOU, at Elysian Fields, step off the streetcar—

  so my sense of wonder’s made utterly plain.

  Not for mine but for the world’s sake come back.

  They ask why you left? To whom all must I explain?

  I laughed when they said our time was running out—

  I stirred the leaves in the tea I’d brewed to drain.

  Break your pride, be the Consoler for once—

  Bring roses, let my love-illusion remain.

  An era’s passed since the luxury of tears—

  Make me weep, Consoler, let blood know its rain.

  From New York to Andalusia I searched for you—

  Lorca, dazzled on your lips, is all of Spain.

  “Time, like Love, wears a mask in this story.”

  And Love? My blind spot. Piercing me to the brain.

  Oh, that my head were waters, mine eyes a fountain

  so that I might weep day and night for the slain.

  Shouting your name till the last car had disappeared,

  how I ran on the platform after your train.

  To find her, ’round phantom-wrists I glue bangles—

  What worlds she did not break when she left my lane!

  Still beguiled with hopes of you, the heart is lit.

  To put out this last candle, come, it burns in vain.

  Land

  Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land—

  There is no sugar in the promised land.

  Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love,

  I’m already drunk in your capitalist land?

  If home is found on both sides of the globe,

  home is of course here—and always a missed land.

  The hour’s come to redeem the pledge (not wholly?)

  in Fate’s “Long years ago we made a tryst” land.

  Clearly, these men were here only to destroy,

  a mosque now the dust of a prejudiced land.

  Will the Doomsayers die, bitten with envy,

  when springtime returns to our dismissed land?

  The prisons fill with the cries of children.

  Then how do you subsist, how do you persist, Land?

  “Is my love nothing for I’ve borne no children?”

  I’m with you, Sappho, in that anarchist land.

  A hurricane is born when the wings flutter . . .

  Where will the butterfly, on my wrist, land?

  You made me wait for one who wasn’t even there

  though summer had finished in that tourist land.

  Do the blind hold temples close to their eyes

  when we steal their gods for our atheist land?

  Abandoned bride, Night throws down her jewels

  so Rome—on our descent—is an amethyst land.

  At the moment the heart turns terrorist,

  are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?

  (FOR CHRISTOPHER MERRILL)

  Not All, Only A Few Return

  (after Ghalib)

  Just a few return from dust, disguised as roses.

  What hopes the earth forever covers, what faces?

  I too could recall moonlit roofs, those nights of wine—

  But Time has shelved them now in Memory’s dimmed places.

  She has left forever, let blood flow from my eyes

  till my eyes are lamps lit for love’s darkest places.

  All is his—Sleep, Peace, Night—when on his arm your hair

  shines to make him the god whom nothing effaces.

  With wine, the palm’s lines, believe me, rush to Life’s stream—

  Look, here’s my hand, and here the red glass it raises.

  See me! Beaten by sorrow, man is numbed to pain.

  Grief has become the pain only pain erases.

  World, should Ghalib keep weeping you will see a flood

  drown your terraced cities, your marble palaces.

  Even The Rain

  What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?

  But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain.

  “
Our glosses / wanting in this world”—Can you remember?

  Anyone!—“when we thought / the poets taught” even the rain?

  After we died—That was it!—God left us in the dark.

  And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

  Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.

  For mixers, my love, you’d poured—what?—even the rain.

  Of this pear-shaped orange’s perfumed twist, I will say:

  Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.

  How did the Enemy love you—with earth? air? and fire?

  He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.

  This is God’s site for a new house of executions?

  You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?

  After the bones—those flowers—this was found in the urn:

  The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.

  What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?

  A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain.

  How the air raged, desperate, streaming the earth with flames—

  To help burn down my house, Fire sought even the rain.

  He would raze the mountains, he would level the waves;

  he would, to smooth his epic plot, even the rain.

  New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me—

  To make this claim Memory’s brought even the rain.

  They’ve found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these?

  No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.

  Water

  When pilgrims brought back no bottles of Samarkand water,

  everyone filled our samovars with almond water.

  There was only a tea of the second water

  we remembered home samovars with cinnamoned water.

  As soon as springtime came in every house

  we drank tea steeped in cardamom and almond water.

  The floods left little of our land to us

  but how grateful we were for the unsunned water.

  A terrible time is coming après vous après vous

  What fire will you find to refund water?

  At the temple and the mosque the rose petals

  lay all night perfuming the stunned water.

  This may surprise you but after the forty days

  the sunshine left us helpless with stunned water.

  It was a dark time and everywhere the soldiers

  had made sure we were thirsty for their garrisoned water.

  So if this is indeed a matter of nature then the sky

  was the flesh and its reflection was skeletoned water.

  What did your ancestor bring from Samarkand? Water?

  In our samovars it becomes cardamom and almond water.

  Of Snow

  Husband of Water, where is your Concubine of Snow?

  Has she laced your flooded desert with a wine of snow?

  What a desert we met in—the foliage was lush!—

  a cactus was dipped into every moonshine of snow.

  One song is so solitaire in our ring of mountains,

  its echo climbs to cut itself at each line of snow.

  The sky beyond its means is always besides itself

  till (by the plane) each peak rises, a shrine of snow.

  Snowmen, inexplicably, have gathered in the Sahara

  to melt and melt and melt for a Palestine of snow.

  Kali turned to ice one winter, her veins transparent—

  On her lips blood froze. A ruby wine of snow!

  If Lorca were alive he would again come to New York,

  bringing back to my life that one Valentine of snow.

  Do you need to make angels, really, who then vanish

  or are angels all you can undermine of snow?

  I who believe in prayer but could never in God

  place roses at your grave with nothing to divine of snow.

  When he drinks in winter, Shahid kisses his enemies.

  For Peace, then, let bars open at the first sign of snow.

  Air

  Drink this rain-dark rum of

  air column of breath column of air.

  About Me

  (after some lines Of Wislawa Szymborska)

  I’m too close, too close for him to dream about me,

  for he is held (he is al-Mustalim) about me.

  Now the grace to disappear from astonished eyes!

  Note how I possess this—love’s last!—theme about me.

  Not so, my lord. “Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. O God!

  I am too much in the sun. I know not “seems” about me.

  On the head of each pin dance the fallen angels.

  If only they would needle the Supreme about me!

  I pull my arm out from under his sleeping head,

  limited to my own form, my scream about me.

  My ears catch the rustling of last wills torn to pieces—

  The dead so poor, infatuated, teem about me.

  Now Christ will never die so readily for you,

  left nailed with His wounds’ sorry regime about me.

  A house is on fire without my calling for help.

  Like fangs in the dark, windowpanes gleam about me.

  Elusively gay but not quite presently straight,

  one is stone in his own forest stream about me.

  On Doomsday God asked the Pure, “Why didn’t you sin?

  Didn’t you trust the best (ar-Rahim) about Me?”

  I read letters of the dead and am a helpless god,

  their bad taste, their electrical steam about me.

  Father of Clay, this is Shahid; I am become flesh—

  No spirit dusts or will itself redeem about me.

  Note: al-Mustalim (“the enraptured” in Arabic).

  ar-Rahim (“The Merciful”—one of God’s ninety-nine names in Arabic. The traditional Muslim prayer begins: “Begin in the Name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful”).

  In Marble

  Because there’s no thyme or fenugreek in marble,

  they say, “Let’s go and play hide-and-seek in marble.”

  There on the tower (our life, our life, our life)—

  watch the gull open and shut its beak in marble.

  On her temple’s black walls, Kali prints her tiger’s

  gold-red stripes till all’s as if batik in marble.

  Go where I will? Where will I go? Who hears my song

  now that justice is radical chic in marble.

  My lover went to Chisti’s mother-of-pearl tomb

  and almost found, calligraphed, my shriek in marble.

  To be reduced to God’s tears, from Heaven to Hell,

  angels wail, and that too cheek-to-cheek in marble.

  A penniless voyeur, I go downtown to see

  Rodin’s lovers—in one gift shop—peak in marble.

  A hand broke. It was in plaster. I took it in mine.

  He who was a god is now so bleak in marble.

  Of course, I’ll say something about the Taj Mahal

  silvering in the moonlight all week in marble.

  The sky, beyond itself, was besides itself when

  above the clouds it saw mountains peak in marble.

  From whose lips will a remembered god breathe at last?

  If I am left mute, let someone else speak in marble.

  Farewell, you museum-people, now leave me to face

  my oracle spoken by an antique in marble.

  Apollo (for weary way-worn wandering Shahid)

  is yet another heartbreaking Greek in marble.

  Bones

  (after Hart Crane)

  “I, too, was liege / To rainbows currying” pulsant bones.

  The “sun took step of” Brooklyn Bridge’s resonant bones.

  From Far Rockaway to Golden Gate I saw blood

  washed up on streets against God’s irrelevant bones.

  If the soul were a body, w
hat would it insist on?

  On smooth skin? On stubborn flesh? Or on elegant bones?

  “The window goes blond slowly.” And I beside you

  am stripped and stripped and stripped to luxuriant bones.

  So Elizabeth had two hundred Catholics burned

  (Bloody Mary had loved the smoke of Protestant bones).

  In the hair of Pocahontas a forest shudders.

  Inventions cobblestone her extravagant bones.

  They refuse to burn when we set fire to the flesh—

  those flowers float down the Ganges as adamant bones.

  “Footprints on the Glacier” are the snowman’s—or mine?

  Whosever, they’re found under some hesitant bones.

  Someone once told us he had lost his pity for

  (he did not qualify with “ignorant” or “tolerant”) bones.

  Migrating from me to me to me the soul asks

  a bit seriously: what is our covenant, Bones?

  Mustard oil, when heated, breaks out in veins which then

  cayenne the sacrificed goat’s most compliant bones.

  The troops left our haven hanging in the night and said

  the child’s skeleton was made of militant bones.

  And so it was Shahid entered the broken world

  when everyone had bypassed the heart’s expectant bones.

  In

  God to aggrandise, God to glorify

  —GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  Now “God to aggrandise, God to glorify” in

  the candle that “clear burns”—glare I can’t come by in.

  What else for night-travel? The extra pair of socks?

  Besides the tin of tea, pack the anti-fly in.

  If you don’t succeed at first, do certainly give up—

  I too shut off those who say Just keep tryin’!

  Galloping flood, hooves iron by the river’s edge—

  Heart, this beating night, how will you rein the sky in?

  Thank you for the parchment and the voice of the sea.

  A drowned god used the shell to send his reply in.

  When the last leaves were birds, stuck wingless to branches,

  the wind glass-stormed the season you’d left me to cry in.