Book of Desert

img

 

 

Book of Desert

 

I

 

The despicable man didn’t say any word in front of assailant Bedouins.

Horses were flaying, pillows were darting in divans,

sultans were whispering to odalisques,

and they pretended believing them. 

 

Bedouins don’t bother anyone,

and the hidden fans awake the urbanites

in their paradises and their bathrooms. 

 

II

 

The Bedouins reached the fire immersed with the eulogy,

the groom throw himself in the circle of the dance,

where his parents catch him and he was bristling with arms,

at the top of the mountain, the terrorists advanced on the horses…

passing the night there.

 

Her heart dejected for the idea that she would die by their hands. 

And they tear her young body by daggers.

 

 

III

 

The Bedouins on the small horses,

 in their brocaded belt the short-blades daggers,

in the mourning, the prisoners emerged to the courtyard.

 

Thousands of soldiers, whit naked body,

thousands of Bedouins under the hooded cloak-Bedouins resolved to discover

another spot-gripped

on the head of the victim.

 

IV

As the manner of the scorpion, I spit the blood out

of my nose, venom advanced with the fire of the day.

 

You are the first I met…I stab myself...my spear is naked…

the tails of scorpion should sting you.

 

The fire should kidnap you, every night more levity than the daylight.

 

V

 

We came since the aurora to denude the body of the despotic.

 

We passed with desert …we scattered the mines inherited since the pagans,

and we prepare our self-ready to deflower her hymen.

 

Those are our ancestors whom the solders leaved them under the sun.

 

They sat till the daylight in silence of deserted court.

 

VI

Flower of the sands in their hands. 

By their bayonet, they write eternal things…this is the dust

of the young desert which didn’t dreamed by the Qadi,

and his eyes weren’t in the street for knowing the eyes of Bedouins

which were overburdened from mixing the horses with ground.

 

The desert that inhabited by the kings,

 die under the time and their images,

the urban from the passions and cry like the ships that roamed in the seas.

 

VII

The harlots come from the countryside…

love and work required more than night,

the waiters of the night come from the wilderness,

take in the arms chilliness of the night and the perfume of the women.

 

The wide night slip from the tavern,

the wide night slip from the tables,

and at the end of the night the countrywoman work in the bed…when

the waiter takes off his white apron and put out his head on the table.

  

 

VIII

 

She passed the night closed to tents of the Arabs,

these are their sandals, their saddles of horses, and their canes,

 

This is their night…advanced with

white eyes to the tent of Bedouins-women

 sat circle around the fire. 

 

Arabs lamented in their white mosquito net,

and in their divan, they put the pillows on their heads.

 

There she is nude, looking out Arabs

when they come down the wilderness to celebrate

the spring with the queen of the ants.

 




 

 

When I was a stage actor and you are treacherous Greek woman

 

 

I

 

Why should we engage in this journey to Athens? 

What language of love should we learn? 

In which of Bacchus ‘pleasure should we excel?

 

Our lips have ripened,

And we have to kiss.   

 

We must sleep on the steps of the Acropolis,

or on the bus, or in the historical parks

in front of the statues rising up like beggars. 

 

We have to sleep and listen to

the cello which is playing for the tender grass,

playing for the egg shells on the sidewalk,

playing for the pretty one who sells contraceptive pills at the pharmacy. 

Perhaps we have to knock on the doors of the hotels and shout:

we are foreigners...foreigners and poets too. 

 

II

 

I was scrutinizing over your eyes, you the merchant lady,

I was delighting in hearing your ancient story about Zino of Citium.

How do you know all these legends, this mythology? 

The cigarettes you offered me have expired

upon the death of an ancient goddess.

I am calling you...  I shout at you, you are not made of stone, made of mythology

you are not made of dust. 

I have long dreamed of your destruction, the fall of your teeth.   

I foresaw the announcement of your mourning, you goddess merchant. 

But no sign of your death saves for the Erinyes on tobacco packets

and something will die out in me tomorrow in the afternoon.

 

III

 

Are you coming from this grey morning?

I am grateful for this frailty, for this boredom. 

Grateful for the bouquet of thorns and the faded rose,

for the love advice that you lavished on me as an expert.   

If I go out today from my room where would I go?

The streets are destroyed,

The trees are haunted by the nightmare of Greek rain,

The buildings veiling the sky are stirring mourning,

The buses are an animal kingdom in the streets,

The coffee shops are closing at dusk and women are going

in the cover of darkness lest someone stares at them.

And above it all, I do not have a date with you

 

IV

 

Everything that you left in my room is there. 

The basket of clothes in the bathroom has not moved.   

The shelves full of your stuff:

Your bra, your white panties, your vintage jean, your socks, your book about stoicism,

Your blouse with rings under the armpits.   

 

Everything in my small studio was permeated with a bit of your smell. 

Even my body that still bears the mark of a woman from Athens, a graze. 

Would say - I love you...  and there we are, I turn to the wall,

and stare at the shapes of the wallpaper, avoiding anything that reminds me of you.

 

V

 

I feel, today, more lost than a heart of landless peasant. 

You cry like a sweet snake in front of me and you put your

 mysterious hand on the table. 

My silence and my glass are like a well burrowed by Achill in the sand.

Should I drink a little then flee the coffee shop and jump on the bus? 

A button of your shirt still in my pocket. 

The forgotten bra, still under my pillow.   

Your suitcase in the hallway and your shoes under my bed,

but the yellow bus which used to carry us no longer stops for me. 

 

I am not Telemachus anymore, absolutely not if you don't love you...   

That is what I'm doing tonight while everything is closing to an end. 

Nothing makes you care or worry a little about me.   

 

You know the woman that I have loved before you,

has also left me and disappeared in the vagueness of Greek mythology.

 

 

VI

 

This city built in stone and words,

has never been named one day Ithaca... 

I'm hiding from you in the cellar of the hotel (a cheap hostel),

I have only a sparse supply of pencil and everything that is needed to make coffee.   

My ideas have no shadow neither has my body got a smell. 

I felt your desire from afar, I felt it

when it was hiding in the cave of another man.

And I am here alone, facing myself,

 I have tried to find you in my bed, I have tried to mate with you

When the lusty Epicureans came to celebrate in my room.

 

Although you are so faraway

I have tried to live with a godless woman from another godly philosophy.

 

VII

 

 

-We wandered from dawn to dusk - and what may that be of writing poetry in Athens

Here Bacchus is leaning over a tavern on the lake.   

A drunken actress is on the sidewalk.   

Fierce fishermen and small-time-assassins all carrying fish in their hands.   

they say that the actress is subjugated by the harang of males,

and fishermen who plant their feet in the sand.

But after midnight when the server will pick up the bottles and the glasses

 After the end of the feast, Bacchus will come down his tavern

to carry the actress in his arms and rejoin

the band of fishermen and small-time-assassins.

 

VIII

 

When the Greek student raised her hand... 

I imagined that she was pointing to a new star in the galaxy. 

I was sitting in the cold terrace without a lover,

without family, without food, without coffee. 

I looked at the star in the galaxy that the Greeks will end up discovering.   

I watched the raw joy, nurtured by the revived knowledge,

after my death, all that was held in the hand of the Greek student.

 

I said: Madam cold has settled in the Acropolis,

 and philosophers have been dead for quite a long time,

and I need to gather up words, signs and glances,

a trace, a trace even so slim... of joy. 

 

Madam, I am without a country and without a woman. 

The Greek girl I loved left me

and the poets that I have known have all become soldiers.

 

IX

 

All this suffering that has no end because God does not seek

 the happiness of his creatures. 

Because we have no place here and we cannot stop the night from falling on the way.   

Because everything is ugly in this world except for oblivion, impertinence

Look at this waitress who speaks to me of Socrates while the tourist rubs against her

Look at the water flowing before throwing in our fish.

As I said yesterday: I have not fountain or small gondola where you could lay to rest.   

As for my ideas, they are bottles on the shelf

 

But one day, a very close day we will be bathing naked

on the sand and you'll hear the whisper

of my fish in your pond?

 

X

 

The Sophists were not happy with my inquiries.   

But their chatter woke me up in the middle of the night,

Even if I know it will fade at dawn with the disappearance of the stars.

I slept in the cheap small hotel, where you left me alone.   

I only have little money to spend on myself.   

I have no question to ask to nobody.   

The book, close to me, open as an old wound, I needed to read a few paragraphs

written by a strange philosopher.   

That I open my hand to the raucous coffee shop.   

That I talk with the old man reading the newspaper,

That I flirt with the oppressed waitress that you hated.   

That I bend my head to greet the young man who has

charmed he heart of all the wise men here with his extreme beauty,

and then I give my last dollar to the drunken

beggar sleeping near the window.

 

But I woke up again...  Nothing,

except that I am a stranger and I live in this world alone.

 

XI

 

How could I find sleep?

and who would tell me a new story?

in Greece I have heard many stories...   

I have heard the myths and the legends of kings and gods.   

I've heard the stories of all the philosophers but sleep has left me. 

The wise waitress told me:

Sir you are going to a sleep soundly and for a long time,

when the Greeks will stop telling their stories and will offer you wine, food and women.

 

XII

What do we still have to say about love? 

Glass after glass we drank you and I in a Greek tavern.   

We have not awakened the gods in the books we had read/were reading.   

We have not engaged a conversation with mythical heroes, but we got to smile at her cat, a sibyl, that threw a glance out the window of the bar,

and we started to kiss before all who were present then we went to undress in bed. 

Did our crying out wake you up?

In the morning we've reassured you:

these aren't the battlements built by your emperors who collapsed

but the passion of our bodies that were breaking apart.

 

XIII

 

You are the gift of the gods who ruled Athens.   

The gift of purity which has never disappeared.   

Why did you get naked and fall asleep on the stone?   

 

Come, the Sun of the Acropolis has wrecked you.   

 

Come, I won’t run away with another woman.   

I won’t leave you tonight as you did last night.   

I will lay there by your side on the white stone in a square of Athens...   

And I will quickly forget the gift of the Sun...   

Because I have been spellbound since Socrates ‘death by Tenebrae.

 

XIV

 

Cruel is this clock hanging on the wall of the restaurant, like the face of Creon. 

I waited for you... 

I was alone and I was looking at those faces with their uniformly fierce features.    

The books don’t contain names that I do know anymore.   

The newspapers I dare not to open them.   

Love is fleeting like dust between my fingers.

Madam the waitress:

am an estranged man in the uproar of Athens.   

Creon fixed on the wall of the restaurant is going to punish me.

 

XV

After the hunger in the night...   

In the cold of Athens.   

We found a den.   

We only had the love words to cover ourselves. 

And now you're going away towards the baths in ruins that smell of urine/

and I tear off my worn winter coat.   

I have a weakness for unfinished acts and a nostalgia

for one other country, a country that is unfamiliar to the Sophists,

 a nostalgia for books that are not written by the Greek philosophers.   

 A longing to be near you and get far away from the Acropolis. 

You are the goddess who will judge me... 

So allow me to least search under your clothes to find myself. 

 

XVI

 

You are a Greek poetess and me: the hero of Aeschylus Tragedy.

 Believe me you will not hate me in the morning, if we do sleep together at the night.   

And the world will not withdraw from you if I discovered your body. 

I know, my hair that I don’t brush is ugly but I am proud of it.   

I do not like the philosophers and poets. 

I want to be presumptuous; I wish to be vulgar thief. 

Even if you insulted me, you would revive

all the burning desires that crave you,

 you would greet the heroes of the stories, those who chose the sidewalk as theater,

those who chose life in the streets. 

 

We, heroes of plays, live without suitcases,

the loss is our homeland.

 

XVII

 

No one else than you carry my crazy idea. 

The nothingness that has allowed your existence,

and the presence of the things held in your hands:

the blouses with your smell, your yellow sandals,

the frame that you hang on my wall

and the broken table next to the bathroom. 

at the threshold of my room

of my little hotel, you undressed

penetrating the room totally naked.   

 

I was next to the window I was reading the little book with the torn cover,

in my hand a half full fountain pen. 

Let me be still, I have barely two pages of the book to read.   

But you threw it on the table and you leaned to drink up all my feelings. 

 

 You told me:

Prepare yourself to soar, you who are not from Athens.

 

XVIII

 

Greek poetess, you play your music in the streets and I as stage actor.

Coming from afar to woo you on the grass of the public gardens of Athens... 

Under the summer sky star-studded, or near the station without passengers. 

I came from far away so that together in the morning,

 we could feel the hunger and that we could sustain ourselves

 at night of what tourists would give us. 

But for the last two months we have not been together.   

You left for a faraway island and,

 I still hang around the seedy bar oozing the smell of beer.   

And every night I feel but one sole desire.   

To find myself engulfed with you in bed again.


 

Other Books