R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 2

husband

On your lips fills me with the sweetness
I used to feel in a soutane and surplice,
a puny boy knees welded to the altar steps,
“Introibo” the priest would say, “I will go
--to God ‘s holy altar.”
“Ad deum qui laetifiicat juventutem mecum”
“To God the Joy of my youth”
And joy came, I don’t know how,
and then darkness spackled with widening hope,
clouded by the promises of truthless people
and a bounty of specious love and praise.

When you called me joy came down again,
an incarnation of certainty and light
that driveth away the darkness,
cleanses my heart and stirs my senses
as no altar ever did. Your truth is greater,
my wife, because it is the eternity of desire--
the moment we were born to yearn for
and to seek, and finding it, treasure
as once (believing) we knew the promise,
the word made flesh.

Softly, as Morning

Sometimes as with demons and mermaids
I struggle to keep up, but in my cup
there is no Pushkin: my demions
speak yiddish and have hooked noses
and my mermaids have fins--a pun for they
are Scandinavian and do not ply
the erratic Baltic waves singing to men,
shivering nymphs in a mariner’s driunken vision.
How can we make our tobgues cooperate
My love: They say the same things differently:
"Oh, my immature mind, fruit of brief study!
Remain calm, do not force my hands to the pen"
When he was learning the European way ,
Kantemir wrote in desperation after a thousand years
Of song and dancing: how do you educate a poem,
teach the pen to obey dead Homer's
Muse, drag it down the mountain,
off the battlefield, or fish it out of the sea
and give it an ant-epic respectability
that hides the fat like a matron;s girdle?
We will discuss these things: you will read with passion
and I will throw ice on it, though I burn inside
for your orihgnality and for our tomgues to be one
and to sing one song springing from the fire.

Love Song for a Tajik Girl

Across from us three guys are listening.
They are not unusual; they are farmed
from local mud. To distract you
as your face saddens and pales
I tell you a story.
I tell you how I gave a speech about women
and told the hearers
that women were not
as good as men but far, far better.
We get from them our words and our walking
our first taste of justice,
our hope for the good life
Our craft, our learning, and, if we have it, empathy.
Empathy! I look at your face
and for a moment (because of them)
your joy disappears:
one thought swallows another,
the ckock runs faster,
And I think of a line of poetry--
“Beauty is momentary in the mind.”
And we get from them
beauty, if we have it, and you have that:
I study you for signs of sorrow
but we are finishing--time is going
for they are staying
and soon you will be safe with me.
As our intruders stare I think of men
and how it is always men
who rob us of civilisation,
how they build cities
just to knock them down,
like a kid with bricks or houses
made of sticks by some Asian river
--or their dauighter's self esteem.
I want to walk to their table
and say, Leave us alone,
because we have no time
to call our own: time is unjust to us.
“The fitful tracing of a portal”
said Stevens.
And we get from them
The need to love,
and ability to fill the need
And the sense of God in the forest, my love--
And the life of God in us,
“The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh, It is immortal. “

Her Nativity

All day long my head
has been swivelling from duty--
and so, the exams lay untoched,
the lecture, a blank page
airtickets unbought,
and you -- away in your rabbit hole
amongst the tender winter rabbits.

Not seeing you as you huddle
in the normality of a winter day
is the price I pay for seeking you
in my head, another you:
waiting to emerge from earth like Eve
from Man, and you from my hopeful
drifting consciousness of you.

I have kept secrets, mine
and yours, through autumn and cold--
as quiet as snow, as solemn as
a votive candle in an empty church.,
I have kept them when the spirit
within you tore at your body,
when you could not face your desk,
when friends found you vain
and rage made you sallow,
keeping it as quiet as a snow owl
perched above the rocks, watching,
for I knew the ice would go,
and knew when you emerged
after the cold winter
from your secrets and torments
you would face me as a twice born creature
the creatures fashioned by the human heart
in its honesty.
And you would say
"See what the snow has brought to life?
It has hatched all my secrets even
the dark ones ,
and they have run away and returned to mud,
because they fear me:
The snow has made everything grow--
everything that it covered
will blossom in beauty and colour
and We will overthrow
all temporray life and dark."

The Green Dot

Hira lovely citizen of Lahore
was under a qadi's fatwa to marry
after graduation.
She came to me in
tears, told me she loved me,
and would kill herself.
Me, a stranger
a foreign devil remitted
to give the daughters and sons
of rich daddies
spoonsful of the liberal arts
"the arts that mrake you free,"
we explained hypocritically

But Hira had a plan:
They would let her stay
a year unmarried
in her sister the dentist’s house in London,
Go (with no scholatship) to LSE
--and besides--the guy they had chosen
for her husband at five
was the proud owner
of a video store in Wantage
an aficionado of flash and sound
and she could see him,
unromantically, on Saturdays
and when they weren't looking
she would slip onto a plane
without Daddy’s ok
and fly to New York
where I would scoop her up
and her sad Lover, son of a qadi,
would be stuck
selling games in Wantage forever.

While I waited for the Reckoming
we would Talk
and talk and laugh for hours
Life was messaging
and the green dot
an unistakakable call to passion.

Distance hath its ways
to prevent disappointment,
and so,
everything was perfect

Her sister said she woud never tell
for Hira was her precious sister,
her father, an ogre
who'd known the father of the video boy
in earier village days.
His daugher's marriage to the friend's son
would seal daddy's boyhood
like glue on old black album paper,.

But her brother in law--
a lawyer--heard her chatting
at green dot time,
and once,
with her phone unguarded,
he began to read and blush
and oh, and oh!
the things he found there!
the things he saw, and oh--
Enough to send papi scurrying from Lahore
to Surry with an impeccable decree
And a ticket home,
Ali would meet them there
in white tuxedo and gray slacks.

Cornered and convicted
dear Hira swallowed 50 capsules
of her broither in-law's Lisinopril
slowing her heart
to a dull, occasional thump.

Seeing my green dot her heart tensed--
Seeing my green light it fluttered rhy tmically
Shecalled me in spasms and wept
I am dying--darling come.
You have to come
They nust see what they have done.
It will be too late, I said,
Do not do this sin,
You cannot win. You cannot win.
You cannot win.

Dear

A year ago, framed in the window,
five deer appeared not knowing
I was home.
Used to each other's cues and privacy
they ate apples from low boughs in skittery watch --
untii a female took to her hind legs
to reach
a new bounty
on higher branches and stayed
suspended on thin, strong legs
for minutes.
I reached for my camera.
The shot was splendid
and five months ago I had it framed,
so that during the wet days of August
when the urgent flowers
begin to sleep
and every other day is
chilly autumn,
I can recall their defiance,
their spotted beauty--
the busling antlers of the bucks
waiting for a game,
the skittish mistrust
and momentary terror of the does.
But of the snmall herd, only she (still suspended)
held the late afernoon sun aloft.
only for my pleasure.

Turning from the window,
I think how far away
you will be as you rise
to claim your golden prize--
A leap toward heaven
and a fall to earth
clutching in your teeth
a sprig of laurel to remind me
of your ascent, proof that you
were different--after all.

Why do they all not rise
to take the dappled fruit?
Why now when I look at the picture
do I see onlyyou in it?
your smiling aloofness,
your beating, terriifed heart,
your stubborn will--
and your graceful perfect rise.
Now I see only you
against the sky at evening
and the ordinary dusk-deer
searching the grass
In the silence of their lives.

Stones

My Grandfather, a scientist was a practical man.
As he grew old he grew into himself and became quiet,
His eyes open but flashing warnings not to disturb him.
I was his only grandson,
My sister the only girl.
And when we moved far away I remember
He fixed me in a stare and said
I will come to you in April
And we will go to the river and look for rocks
That look like turtles, maybe were turtles once.
I threw my arms around him in tears and said
Sicher sicher Schildkröte im April!
He felt like death to me, a folded rack
And to say goodbye, he blinked his eyes once.

I did not see him again. He died in March,
And we went with my sister to his large house
Far across the sea. My sister was bored
At the funeral, all creped and black
With rosaries clacking on pews. Women in lace scarves,
And afterward my grandmother
Hissed, Come with me, we have something to do.
She left my father and sister napping in my
Father’s old room on the upper floor, whilst my mother
Received cakes and requiem wishes at the door.


I do not remember the journey to the river
I thought, perhaps, we would find him there
But only water running swiftly by us,
And at the point where the Neckar turned east
A flat of mud full of rocks of all descriptions.
He said (she whispered) you would know what to look for--
And at my toe was a a mere brown, heavy
Stone perfectly formed as a shell
And at its edges a seam as clear as day,
a seam like stitches that once opened to a living creature--
Petrified inside: It had not moved from this bank
In all this time, and every night, till I was twelve
I placed it under my pillow hoping it would
Hatch into a living creature, a reborn turtle.
a pet for a younger imaginative boy
I have it still, still as still as stone.

An Andalusian Tale

In the story of Hayy’ he learns love
when his mother, a gazelle, dies.
Stricken, he cuts her open and finds her
lungs inflating, deflating, and her heart
quivering from a steady pulse to spasms
that remind him of fish drowning in air--
their eyes fixed on nothing, their life
in water cut short by a change of atmosphere.
He decides he is not a deer, yet he feels loss
and he does not know what to call it:
It is different from the beating heart
and from the gathering and losing of breath
yet his heart races and he gasps for air.
and when he moves away from his deer mother
the feeling follows him from tree to river.
And when he tries sleep he wriggles when he
Is caught in dreams of her and his deer brothers--
Who do not feel what he feels and have moved on.
And so with all love, with this love for you:
It will not let me go, will not release me
even after a thousand deaths and journeys,

Thorns

Coming round the barn,
bare-foot at midnight--
a mad dash from cottage to the big house,
(No one would see )
I impaled my bare foot
on a branch of pure,
curved thorn, so deep
I felt the blood running
towards my toes, and the roses murmured,
Beware of beauty !
but saw nothing but the grass.
And limping I thought
That’s what slippers are for,
to save us the pain.

I could not sleep that night;
it was as though
I had been stabbed,
I could not find comfort
In any position.
And what difference did it make
to a row of thorns,
waiting to hurt me by stealth,
hiding beneath the beauty
of their insincerity.

So in the morning
I bandaged my foot in gauze
and waving my cutting sheers
in gloved hand
I approached the bush that
clung to my house
threatened my windows,
and clung avaricious
for its life
to the old unpainted boards
that had been there a hundred years.
Oh the flowers and buds were beautiful!
And as I sliced left and right
they fell like whiskers
in the sink,
changing from pulsing red and pink
to sickly white, in a stroke.

Yesterday in your eyes
I saw what I had killed.
Not with sheers
but words, loud and sharp,
Sometimes hissed
like a snake warning an ambler
And how the hue of your cheeks
went pale from the pain
and your eyes
dead toward me
the disturber of joy.
in a single stroke.
too proud of the sharpness of his words
to punish the things he stumbles on,
that meant him no trouble
--that just wanted to be in the sun,
and pink or red
in the light, and all you wanted
was the light, to be in the light
and I had come to rip you away.

Late in July, crawling
close to the barn, the roses
ramble up the new trellises
I have built for them
as compensation for their comrades.
There are a million of them
dizzying in their brightness, a scent
so sweet you shut your eyes,
you breathe deeply.
Of course you must keep
the door free of thorn-webs,
for going in and out,
and in the August they will die,
as the Maine winter
reminds them their purchase,
of the year is limited to summer.

The death in your eyes
does not fade so easily;
The pain of your face
Is penance to my consciousness.
It will be there now
in every pause and aversion
every smile withdrawn
and every sideward glance.
every door that closes to shut me out.
Nature cannot repair it;
April will not come.
There will be other thorns,
but they will not sting as badly
as this wound, or bleed as much

The Visit

You cannot go back here
You were made for there
You are a child
of a different place
It happens sometimes
It has been happening for years
But now, only now
you know.

That place is not you now
Not your place, it is theirs
it will become strange, like the
stairway in a stranger's house
and it will become peaceful
to forget-- Friday dinners
and the smells of familiar kitchens
and an uncle's laughter
at what a cute kid you were.

Maybe in your old place
one cousin will say she saw it coming,
and the aunties will shake their heads
Coming yes, always a little different,
rebellious, wanted too much--
Different.
but then she will sigh and say,
Didn't she have lovely hair