WAITING
The good memories turn. Admit you loved me, the woman mutters over her mother’s grave. Admit you love me, directed this time at the earth. Loitering in the graveyard, endangered by her own bitterness, listening through headphones to the news. Socialism or barbarism, she laughs. The news telling the terrible and maddening story of her own life. She won’t be visited by poetic inspiration. Lyric is intimate that way, instead of the precious or the profane, lyric’s counsel has been to remain silent. Rescue nothing. Transform nothing. Feign no relief for the living. The capacity for grief, they say, corresponds to the capacity for love. What is the measure for violence, then? Surely violence figures somewhere in the mathematics for grief and for love. Day after day, she wakes earlier and earlier, desperate for even a moment of actual silence, concealed from any vanguard, in deviant relation to the day, the pilfered morning, before the poem and its necessary speech, before the birds and their countless annotations, before the news arrives with its vulgarities and its unsparing desires, before the good memories turn bad, before even grief, oceanic grief. Her eyes open, however, and the ghosts, though merciful, address her, I want to talk to you in private, they say.
WAKING
How does life unfold like that? My god is everything simply contingent, simply accidental, one day the word ‘yes’ escapes from your lips after a decade of refusal, of withholding, of observing what is intimate through a narrow opening. How does life unfold like that? Everywhere houses are falling, and here in cobblestone, in the most unprecedented enclave, life gathers up, where fish and rock, where sleep, where lovemaking and cowardice, both mine and yours. We know there’s a holy war happening, that the axes of good and evil are this time without nuance, and there is no retreat, no escape, reality abounds and abounds. Meanwhile, my body finally participates, like the stray dogs sleeping massive on the roads, like the ferry crossing the ocean each hour. Life is a continuum in every direction, and yet I find myself saying, I was suffering before I met you. Could these words be the incantation that frees me? From whom and from what? I can hardly arrive at the question precisely, and you beg me to let up logic, even language. The mornings were good, the nights even better. Everywhere, pain clarifies meaning, and I bear my own evil, my own betrayals. Meanwhile, I take shelter from the rain under the awning of a mosque, on the European side, waiting. I’ve never prayed, but I know what is near about God, no, not his alibis or his emergencies, but I know which rain, which elegy, is touched by God. So I don’t turn away, not from you, not from your contradictions, your suffering, not this curious moment between us, a stillness so complete, so illiterate. The soft carpet underfoot, washing your face, hands, wrists. Are you the friend to help me through these terrible days? Or is this a life unto itself: green fruit dipped in salt after dark, metres and metres of skin, crossing half of Asia, the unearthing of what is idle not just in you but also in me, how many times have you wept already? What will you be like? What will your love be like? The force of desire, neither only beautiful nor unviolent, but visiting, with absolute necessity, everything else that is possible.
