R. Joseph Hoffmann's Blog: Khartoum, page 6

Sundays

Running before dawn over rocky wet ruts
Led by the thin beam of your phone
To that bright mortuary of a flat:
This transience of mine and yours,
This whirring of purposes, breaths.
A soft cooked egg made in a kettle,
Crepes drizzled with ghee and berries,
Still fresh on your proffered tongue,
Shirtless embraces the trembling friction --
Flesh so taut to touch it was canvas
Then so tender to touch it was
The final brush of a guitar chord.
Grace being momentary and fury air,
When the only way was to surrender.

رویایی از آتوسا

You break down barriers silently.
Before I hear a creaking on the stairs,
you are in the room, singing to me
in the tongue of artists and magi
like the last prayer at Isha'a
or the first speckled bird at dawn.
You do not call me by name
but can recite chapter, ayat of my tale
and vow it cannot happen twice.

Before I wake you break
locks and rearrange the room.
How shall I know my way?
"Paths are for the blind," you say:
"Too much geometry kills love.
You cannot see what stops you--
the walls and doors are in your head--
they're what true lovers dance away.
You came at my hello, now stay."

Masîḥ

I brought home
from the tribes and Benjamites
a new name: Deliverer of Jews,
from the Kidron of the god-fearers,
savior of their flocks and laws, ransomer
of old men fussing over white beards
and singing noisily to their deaf baal,
the god Yhw who chooses and unchooses,
lord of storms, deserts, and catastrophe.

Babylon is gone now: its temples broken,
its waters burbling with the thin blood
of false prophets and Egyptian girls,
its prisons full of teachers,
hawk-nosed usurers and their boys.
The mad son of Nabu (they say) died
after killing his own sons,
savaging his daughters and priests
Nəḇūḵaḏreʾṣṣar
king of world before me--
lord of Māt Akkadī , Elam,
Lagash, Uruk, Kish, Isin,
like Cyaxares among the Medes
before me in Jerusalem
before me in everything, and yet mad.

No one is Persia:
not the sea people
the Phoínikes renowned among the palms
and poets, not the camel fuckers
to the east, with their platoons of gods
and endless journeying, a witless people
without walls and cities.
No one was Xšāça, the clever people
who spread the fire of God,
the wisdom and good of Thvarshtar
a light to people everywhere.

Babylon has fallen;
Judah will fall too
but not while Persia reigns,
not while Cyrus is lord of hosts
mighty in battle. Let the ʿIḇriyyîmi
the Sahashu of Yhw return:
carry the old men,
and let the young ones
follow the deer to the place of refreshment.
Kings preserve gods,
gods must have temples:
As the mad son of Nabu defiled the house of Yhw,
Cyrus commands a new one
for Judah and his sons.

Give your baal Yhw tribute,
but know I am king.
Observe yours moons and festivals,
your bull sacrifices,
your music and dancing.
But proclaim that Persia is light.
For the tribute you give to me
I will be true to you
and to the Amorites in the hills
and Philistines by the sea
Nothing is Persia.
No one else is Cyrus, deliverer and king.

For Rupert Brooke

It is not lost
in the rushing grayness
of less and less mattering,
or in the shattering cold
of brightness at the end--
past the flashes and lapses
of temporary pain,
and things to be done
(we hope)
for the last time.

It is lost when you feel
that love is impossible,
as unnatural
as a poem,
spacious as night,
existing only
as an exiguous prick
in the world's dark cover
hiding an eternity
of light

Nativity

The devil has arisen
in this bleak Christmastide,
for the gates of the ancient hell
that kept him in prison
are bolted by a good man's spell
and the last good man has died.

Lady Clay

You hoped they were right--
About your face having Hepburn in it.
Some of the poses hurt,
Others got louts to look and like you,
Your stick figure straddled backward
Over a bed of thorns. You cut your hair
Ending the siege of braids
And your mother's somber hope
That you would meet a German boy
(Maybe in Turkey) marry inostranets
And give her something for her worry.

The camera lies. The camera never lies.
You grew so sick of you and the billion
Yous who lived a life of day-to-day approval,
Smashed between tabulated likes,
Approaches, rips, and canceled rendezvous
That you wept to travel to a lost place,
Meet yourself there, in picture and faces,
Evict the lovers who soiled your couch
Left you at dawn to your mirror and feedback:
Maybe to find a famous book again,
To forget about New York for another year
And the images you worshiped as a child.

The Tombs at Meroe

I am traveling in the desert places.
The gauge says I have enough water to Suakin,
Enough to get to the sea: so I begin again--
But there is dust, the sun is beating
On my face, the engine overheating,
And I have a gallon of water to share with the engine.
There is no bus on this camel track, no traffic
And I do not want to die a Bedouin,
My bones in two weeks found
Picked, packed to the neck in a mound,
My skull used as a football by nahhabim
I know that if my brain heats up my eyes will die
So I must wait until sunset and pray for dark
Make a tent of the Rover, stay still as a stick.
In light there are no hills, and no salvation.

Unfazed by bread, temples, a swarm of angels,
Would Jesus have sold his soul for
love--
Only the touch of a cool hand on his face,
Or the water offered by the girl at the well?

The Story of Love

You thought of her thin feet,
heron ankles, the bones protruding
from her small waist
and the grace of her walk.
You saw her once in Gaborone:
she glanced at you and sneered
as she walked by with other girls
and you loved her instantly.

She watched you all evening
in a dark restaurant in Chelsea
while her boyfriend prattled
absently about his commute
and how the Reading train
is always ten minutes late.
Twice she excused herself,
both times yawned in hyperbole
as she passed your chair.
You thought about her eyes
all the way back to Oxford.

She is from Taiwan,
a friend invited for dinner
by your wife who is
s'envoyer en l'air
by the senior partner, also present.
You are not to notice
the tugs and hints
of that relationship, so ask
the girl how she likes California.
A lot like Taiwan, she says:
More Americans, though.
You sigh when she says goodnight;
a thank you card comes,
(just for you) signed April.

Somewhere, perhaps in Oslo,
the archaeologist
you met in Jordan six years ago
thinks of you, the unhappy you
who unbraided her thick hair
and professed a love for Norway.
At the end of the project
there was a banquet
and you kissed her goodbye,
promised not to lose touch,
and to see her in Sudan.

Bishkek

It's enough for me that you were here
Despite knowing you have disappeared
To Vienna, or the promise of beds in Uskadar,
You, who wouldn't be satisfied and ended
As soft wax for men's melancholy visions.

Is this Chuy? I lived on Toktogula
And rode in broken taxis down soviet lanes
Studded by trees that had lost all glamour.
Sometimes we walked, held hands,
And you would ask about my rootless passion,
my favourite Russian play, my deceit,
and whether you were its end.
And sometimes you would say
That girl you looked at--
do you want to be with her?
You were the priest whose absolution
Conveyed the guilt and the stripes
in one consolidating lick.

It is enough for me that I found you
and loved you and lost love in this place.
And lost my soul, like the German doctor,
Not for evil but self-knowledge.
There was such completeness
In my love for you: it consecrated a city
And its white mountains,
its cracked sidewalks, absurd cafés
And gutters running in icy melt.
I remember nights spent without you
Early morning transfigurations--
Days spent with you locked behind closed eyes
Wishing us to be transforned
into a suitable myth,
Always wishing to wrap a cloth around you,
Take you to the jeweler on Gorky and say,
This is my gold:
How much is her love worth in earthly terms?
It's enough that you were here
and were Loved by me, here.

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At Clearing

The wall between Haskell's place and mine
Is now strewn stone. Some purple vine creeps beneath
And fallen rotwood surrounds it.
It does not want to be remade into a stone thing,
A rock fence, burn pit, or well. It wants to rest
On cold Maine earth with a mossflower bed
In the wet of balsam and green fiddlehead.
It had lived for ten thousand years
Before it was pulled from the earth
To make way for the wooden houses,
Gardens, and herb patches of settlers
Who piled it barely three feet high to define
What is his part and what is mine.

Walls fallen must be respected, like honest words:
They cannot be lifted up again,
The purposes we gave them undone
By ice and time, neglect and children.
Stacking even one stone on another
Is sacrilege. Nature abhors property:
The white man's stele making every man a saint,
The granite monuments and libraries down in Boston,
Creating importance and wisdom,
The chiseled church spire pointing at God.
But these things tumble too, like certainty,
And love is no match for gravity and time.