Listening Suture A beam of photons, muons, say 17.3% are remnants of the deceased or, in planetary demographics, it's 71.3%--I can't say whose dead, if any are mine or had journeyed from other galaxies on home or away legs, they're here, riding it out on beach nimbus monarchs as if light never ends. A silver dolphin then two glisten black, arch their spines as pelicans play eureka with leaping argent fish. I'm with my family, encore, liquid or flesh, displacement is a body. "There's no center that isn't made up of periphery," my daughter says, the two of us knee-deep in Gulf water whose clarity is Mississippi silt. I say "And within each periphery a center rises up." On the drive back lightning struck summer's habit. She was at the wheel and hard rain pounded the highway, the windshield's lids too slow for the din. Her knuckles turned pale. "Here comes an underpass," I said. "A series of them," she said. Mausoleum for a Scorpio "Speak to us of poetry and politics," he said to me from his seat in the audience as I was on stage. Throughout the weekend, before the prize was made public, he was euphoric, buoyant, generous, said his father was a tyrant. "Say something about exile," he requested a little later. We were in a small town no one lives in, that patrons had turned into a hostel for arts and culture, outpost for fair and festival, colony for a future that spares ranches, hiking trails, vulture flocks that trim carcasses and claim fences. The main hall was a restored cottage where an icon was born: her mother tended the land, her father walked to work and home, and her brother, unaided, built the treehouse in a pecan we can still see. Later, the poet, with mic in hand, took the stage and said that he stood for beautiful things in literature, for kind speech, then read a poem by a brilliant woman who'd recently died. Troubadours aside, he added, and pound for pound, the precious lunacy of translation, "There's no language like ours:" We have Shakespeare, have abolished consanguinity, erected a sky to bark up the cellulose of time, "and I don't say this to be bellicose," he preempted the thought reserved for presidents, not prophets. Far from morose in an age of infidels, between his thumb and index, he held a daffodil he'd plucked from a nearby pond, an anthem he never abandoned. At dinner he told me three decades had passed since he'd come across a love poem a famous Arab had written. He didn't like it. That's alright, I thought, it's sentimental, rhymes in the original, and its best parts are untranslatable. He spoke with the tender transparency of fibers liberated from ill will. "And that Nobel Laureate, he's great, but arrogant," he clarified, "though another cried at the sight of a hill in the backwoods of Burgundy." "Shakespeare is not English," I said, my poker face on. "You mean he belongs to the world?" he replied after a brief pause--then picked up a thread from an earlier chat, on the mysticism that pervades Asian shores, occasionally setting sail to us, or we to it: "As for the Sufis," he said, "it's all been done before." And I hadn't taken him for a believer in antecedence. Though it is in his spirit that pigeons fly as lightly as they alight. The Holy Embraces the Holy 1. That you have nothing to say, your deep sadness reserves me as a den reserves a security blanket. That in the mirror I see you. You were not there. Your silence was a mask. I read from it. 2. The studies done so far have not been good studies. We agree: more research is needed, more money allocated, so that we practice what we return to when we say, don't judge me. I took LSD once. I experienced no visual or auditory hallucinations. The drop possibly had no drop in it. Or maybe the vendor thought to protect my friend a young medical doctor then, from herself. Or she overpaid. Or the hit was a gift. 3. We went hiking. There was a rattlesnake and I heard what it had to say. April snow was melting in Zion national park, we had no wet or dry suites. I saw two currents meet, one held off the other: at the interface a mirror. God's face in slo-mo plumes of dirt and gravel. Then in a self-contained area blinded by a bluff we came across a woman calling out to "Bob." He was her husband, she said. She could have been Japanese, had an accent as I have an accent with certain names. We offered her a few discerning glances into the woods before my friend whispered one of Zeno's paradoxes to me: which story did we want to see through on acid? 4. Six months later in Paracas, with the same friend, before I became the son of the mother who loved me or loved me not, we visited the national park on the Pacific. The resort was where stone desert is alive with sea and no greenery negotiated life. Mindfully we went about acquiring more debt: dinner was included, but we didn't have enough for lunch or breakfast. Complimentary tea or coffee with warm bread and rolls of salted butter was what the Queen said we could eat. By the third morning, we went for the gratis like it was a jugular. 5. That your sadness was a silence and your silence no mask. That you have become epic, no chronology sustains you. 6. In Paracas I shroomed. No hallucination. My grip on reality was wicked. The waves delivered the gust to shore and I summoned my magic carpet, straddled it like a bike, my tiptoes on the ground. On the cliffs a fleet of red condors pulled out their panopticons for the seals a hundred meters below. The wind was an exalted rubble off the edge. With their wingspan some condors rose as if free falling then floated above waiting. 7. Condor Legion: the air squadron that bombed Guernica. Historians: when they are "camp followers" of empire. Poets: when empire's tragic clowns. 8. For dinner, freshly caught large sea bass worthy of display for the dining room guests. We did not tip the waiters, we were not yet the great doctors of America. The driver, we tipped. He played our kind of music on the car radio and took us to a cave where water cymbals crashed into stone, and nearby fisherman pitched their rods along the shore like streetlights. 9. That you have nothing to say. That your deep sadness is free to be deeply sad near me, some of what love is for. 10. The week before, we'd been on the Inca trail to Machu Picchu. The stuff about altitude sickness is real, but so is the stuff about coca leaves. We ascended into mist then frigid rain. After long rain a full moon made love to snowcapped mountains in a cloudless sky. 11. In the Sacred City, I wanted to visit the moon temple on Huayna Picchu. Time said I had to take the hill running and hopping at a comfortable nonstop pace so that I might make the last bus down to Aguas Calientes. On my way up I passed a depleted man sitting on a rock. His half-life was visible in a plastic water bottle. On my descent, he was near the top, a decaying wolf who couldn't blow a house down. I stopped to water time. He gulped, said he was French, asked me where I was from. 12. Did he say "French," or did I infer it from the few words he muttered in his deep state of rapid heartbeat and mediocre oxygen exchange? He asked me first: after I insisted he'd take an extra gulp from my canteen, for heart and lungs to turn serene. I took his question to mean that he wanted to credit my kindness to a place when he gets to tell his story. I gave the credit to Palestine. 13. His face, which had been a theatre of struggle, went blank. Suddenly he was playing poker alone. Did I have a face? Could I have passed for several options, Algerian, Spanish, or could I have been an Afrikaner? Maybe "Palestine" was the last thing he expected to hear. Or his face had nothing to do with the word. Maybe he anticipated "American" first and foremost because I did say "water." 14. That in the mirror I pulled up your hands. A pose you've shadowed all your life isn't always a pose. That your hands were all water, all night, light was with us stabbing us in the back. 15. Years passed for years. Into a patient's room I introduced myself with an apology. For two weeks he'd been a hopeful captive subjected to the merry-go-round of doctors. A dying man with another dead person's heart that gave him all it could. And in this world, a person is rarely transplanted more than once. "Yes," was the transplanted man's response, "you guys are like clowns in a van." Faceless (as, in fairness, he was to me) I burst out laughing. 16. A few days and he mentioned endings, said that a chaplain randomly assigned to his floor asked him if he wanted to speak about faith. The chaplain was Muslim, Ali, and the patient was not that kind of Texan. "If only more Muslims were this nice, the world would be a better place," the transplanted lone-star said to me. Leaning against the wall, hands behind my back, I nodded in cold agreement. 17. "You're a, a ..." he asked. I nodded yes, neither one of us uttering the word. "And you have a sense of humor, too. The other day you laughed at my joke." He loved sailing. 18. That you have nothing to say. From the unrequited to the unconditional to the imaginary. That your sadness unbuttons my heart, kneads its clowns. That a heart remains a heart in its beyond. Isomers & Isotopes 1. Our paradise is trampled. Our childhood wasn't insured, it endured in damaged dwellings. 1. No paradise is untrampled, it formicates us junkies. We spin to love, murder, suicide, and our lips are our hips, silage and cud. 1. As grownups, for decades in pecuniary bliss, our resale value tripled that of our parents. 2. From room to room the rain had risen from the sea, from room to room our cells merged their fires with the darkness of our sleep. 2. The beat follows you affectless. 2. The rain had risen from the sea to gentrify us, Oh Aspergillus fumigatus, the detritus was mostly next door. 2. We met our deductible and it was low. We rolled our years then smoked our years. 3. I was a visitor, was just visiting when she died in the hospital where I was born. 3. I was visiting her faculties as a plastic tube sealed her windpipes which a mass from her esophagus had burrowed into. 3. In farewell she wrote on clipboard "Revolution 'til we triumph." 4. She went through a lot to get here, through concrete and dried up in it. Then pirates took her in. She learned their songs and the earliest of them was in a wedding. 4. "Ma'am, your fat pads are not who they say they are, and since the rise of the eye-snatchers we can't be sure of your retinal Hancock." 4. I drabbled and droned semantic remorse, Eddie the monster, Eddie the horse, and was just at another queen's court when my parents crossed as time on a rock that pokes a rib chronic. 4. "Ma'am, the shaman who offered you the first stems to sprout in snow, did she say her name?" 5. In stereo, in stereo we prolong the music, we're good at rotating light, polarizing it, there's language between us. 5. And clusters discrete from other clusters to prevent our closing up on ourselves as we wait for the sun to change its ways. 5. Reliably the weather invariably comes with maps. 6. If white came first, if red stole the brain's flow until stars appeared portals for blue. 6. Omnipresent the beast follows you affectless. 6. Smooth gray hairless scalp of a head preserved in rotting, casing vestigial and orbital cavities. 6. The torso displays arachnoid limbs and pterosauroid wings. The splendor's in the thing's fluidity: it flows in water and you walk on air. 6. This isn't Death but the God of your childhood enuresis. Decades have passed since you last wet your bed, still your body insists on messengers on mute. 7. Dreams like phantom limbs. Dreams of bladders on the verge. 7. Therefore, the villages are tickled with irrigation and krill travels deep in a gray whale suit. Therefore, herrings pleat coves white with egg and sperm. 7. As for sirens--those always cease when they reach me. Those I always hear. Excerpted from Tethered to Stars: Poems by Fady Joudah All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
