Chapter One
Atlas The end of the road is a beautiful mirage: White jeeps with mottos, white And blue tarps where the dust gnaws At your nostrils like a locust cloud Or a helicopter thrashing the earth, Wheat grains peppering the sky. For now Let me tell you a fable: Why the road is lunar Goes back to the days when strangers Sealed a bid from the despot to build The only path that courses through The desert of the people. The tyrant secretly sent His men to mix hand grenades With asphalt and gravel, Then hid the button That would detonate the road. These are villages and these are trees A thousand years old, Or the souls of trees, Their high branches axed and dangled Like lynched men flanking the wadis, Closer now to a camel''s neck And paradoxical chew. And the villages: Children packed in a hut Then burned or hung on bayonets, Truck tires Anchoring acacia limbs as checkpoints. And only animals return: The monkeys dash to the road''s edge and back Into the alleyways, And by a doorstep a hawk dives And snatches a serpent-your eyes Twitch in saccades and staccatos: This blue crested hoopoe is whizzing ahead of us From bough to bough, The hummingbird wings Like fighter jets Refueling in midair. If you believe the hoopoe Is good omen, The driver says, Then you are one of us.
Pulse 1. It wasn''t over a woman that war began, but it''s better To see it this way, my myth professor loved to say, a man From the South rumored to extort the bodies of college girls Into higher grades. My girlfriend of the time told me so- He was a creep, she Got an A in the class and liked his joke about religion As self-mutilation, it was Ramadan then and, O Helen, I was fasting. I lie awake in a desert night east
Of the Atlantic on the verge of rain, the catapulted grains Of sand on hot zinc roof, the rustle of leaves, the flap Of peeling bark on trees whose names I do not know, and where Would I find a botany guide here. Water flowed Like a river from the Jabal once. There were elephant pools, alligator Streams, and a pond for the devil to speak in human tongues, All desiccant names now after an earthquake Shuffled the ground decades ago. It will rain soon, I''m assured, since nothing has stopped The birds from migration. All the look-alikes Are already here: the stork, the heron, The white flying flowers, the ibis, and the one That aesthetizes you more.
2. Nothing holds ground in a poem. I was with a crane building its nest When a man from a grass-shrapnel village Handed me a note that a soldier Lay in my bed with a bullet In his thigh ... I was in the middle Of tents, mothers in a city Where each night the donkeys Are chattering birds after fetching wood And lugging water. Then comes tranquility: The distance from the square To the quantum of speech: This one falls out like a parasite From the gut, a tiny snake. This one Is the age of lacrimal juice, brief Like a harvest or a gilded watch With a cracked face, on the wrist Of the man who wears The same suit everyday: in a few days The body will expel its dead. In a few days, land will bury the living And memory will do as it did.
3. Three sizes of firewood, One for the skull, two for the spine. The skull is a woman''s, Pregnant, lactating, or both, The bundle elegant on her head, The neck royal, steady, and sometimes She''s among friends, carrying A child on her back in a cloth sack. The first spine is a donkey''s. But its back Is not long enough. And if The likelihood Of having your donkey robbed, Yourself raped or killed upon venturing Too far, is high, You would have to wait For the camel Owners to come into your market Of the displaced, they already have Taken all your cash-A camel Caravan floating like ocean otters On the desert floor Is a hell of a cadence. The wood they carry is massive.
4. And in no time She was up in the mango tree. He Only demanded that she Descend take off Her dress And walk home down the orchard path Naked. A girl of fourteen Climbed down Stepped out Of her body and gazed at Her mother the first to reach her With a shawl: Whatever they ask Say he never Touched you Whatever happens He never touched you.
5. It started with a hand Grenade in the clutch Of a boy going down The road for a stroll. He fiddled with its ring As if it were a collar: There are no canned Foods here to feed a pet. In the meandering wadi, Where the waterholes Sometimes collapse at the end Of the parched season, a child Stood deep in a well with a bucket Crepuscular except for a smile, As a dancing parade leading A bride to her new home Slipped us in its rhymes: Khawajah, khawajah ... Up the banks a few women Gathered teargas husks to sell As spice containers.
6. Two soldiers, one with his Klash Limping to the earth behind his back. A donkey cart led by a boy who stares. The empty space where a bus, A can of people, stood in the morning, The news it flipped three times And many more were gone. She loves big automobiles with ornate exotic drawings, My doctor friend. I open my French dictionary on Wednesday, It says, see also Saturday. A large bird with black wings, White body, arrives on a branch. Four women, one with a pot Of some kind of food you wouldn''t eat on her head. If you come, they will watch you. You will love it, watching back.
7. On the night of the accident That flipped over the military truck Cracking many teenage bones, there was a wedding. The family blazed the air, Bullets came down Into the groom''s chest. Last night we heard a Pop. One of us shouted Wow in her sleep. Another, awake and laughing, said: Here goes the bride And the dowry: cash That looks like human remains, You can feel the grains Of dead skin rolling in your pocket. So handled The notes, so bandaged, taped and stapled, Or used as toll for donkey or cow On the road to stone-thrower mountain: Where the wretched come from And the best oranges grow: Market day, a soldier''s favorite.
8. He fired, they fired, into the air. By now the slight jerk in the listener''s neck Is a Rilkean gazelle in her water spring. Toddlers still take off in terror, besieged By calm in the mother''s voice. The soldier is hush hush. His proud index against his pursed country lips, a flagpole Against a cavern that isn''t his. Just as the cows that were stolen today were not his, The hired rifle not his, The latrine mall and donkey parking lot for shooting range, Not his, the wadi and hills, and when He too would cry for his mother from a shrapnel scratch, A misfire, a sting in the belly, or dust In his eyes that blinds him at the hour of five Each afternoon, pleading for any illness That sends him away from here, his country.
9. The sky is yellow today, Tonight will be so hot you won''t sleep. You stand at the grave of the one You left last night in the clinic to curfew And logistics. An old man, Whose prostate suffocates him, stands Next to you, he was there When there was no headcount Or burial. But today The sky is yellow. You''ve missed the prayer And the digging. You''ve made it For a glimpse of the body in white linen, Under sweet camphor bark and wood. Then saplings and mud. And then the dry sand.
10. In the calm After the rain has bombed the earth The ants march out of their shelters One long frantic migration line They hit the concrete floor Of our dining and living Space then turn into the shadow The wall makes, a straight angle To the courtyard wreckage of dirt and gravel: Did they know the wind Would airdrop new rations their way? It''s always two or three Ants locking their horns to the acid end Over nothing-it seems More than an impulse, The debris plenty for all.
11. This child Wears its skin like spandex on the bone. There''s a dry lake fontanelle. Fontanelle or foramen Isn''t the aesthetic alone, so what If you threw in Greek or Latin. Both are openings in the head, one Is a lack of closure: This child has a mother Whose husband was recently killed, A nascent narrative. This child was an old man once. This child heaves its ribs, its eyes Are cholera eyes, pennies On a glossy screen, image In myelin, time I came off it and told the truth: I don''t feel good today ...
12. Halimah''s mother did not seem aware Halimah was dying. You should have seen Halimah fight her airlessness Twisting around for a comfortable spot in the world. She would gather all the air she could In an olympic snatch and curl Then turn toward her mother''s breast to suckle, But nothing changed, Neither smell nor taste Of mother''s milk was proof of life. Halimah Died of a failing heart Early this dawn, her mother, with tears now, Was on the road, twenty steps past me Before I turned and found her waiting. We walked back toward each other, we met, we Read verses from the Quran, Our palms open, Elbows upright like surgeons Ready to gown up after scrubbing, the slap Of rubber gloves before we went our separate ways.
13. In paradise, hospital beds Sit under ageless Mahogany and sycamore that bear Every kind of fruit. Hot meals are autumn leaves, Branches are waitress arms And also poles for drips. And birds drop the pills In your mouth from bills Of surgical precision. For Aspirin the swallow. For Benadryl the nightingale. No harm befalls you. The roots will sense your ailment. The flowers will scan your organs. Geranium for the spleen, Poppies for the brain, And where there''s a latrine A jasmine vine will blossom.
14. He came, the humanitarian man, and In the solitude of giving, he befriended A stray dog as mirror. Everyday after the long arduous hours Of the humane, he would come home To be consoled: the dog Waiting inside the door, Wagging and panting, in a rave. He named him Something foreign to the population So as not to offend anyone. He trained him To sit on the cheap sofa One finds in places of conscious exile. And the dog got to know the front seat of the car, His tongue licking the air, hair Blowing, children cheering barefoot. Then it was time To make the dog part of his family Of dogs back home, but the cruel Government of the wretched refused: There was no identity card. And no mirror inside the mirror Could console the dog, slumped by the door In hunger strike until it died. He came, the humanitarian man, He came and loved, then he went.
15. It''s sixty minutes past the hour. We are two khawajahs running in the first autumn Downpour, and what else to name the fall Of desert in the summer months: Wadis fill with water And turn the jaundiced earth green, Green like autumn A woman told me when I asked what color Her diarrhea was ... autumn Is for chill metamorphosis. No doubt They think we are mad running in the pelting rain, The dirt roads for once Are ours alone, no children Shouting our titles as if we were prices in an auction. Maybe, one day, one kid Will pick up running, For love handles, say, or for protracted divorce, Or for the self in the upper percent. Or maybe another child is a poet Who will write the two strangers In one of his famous pieces For who we really are ... And we would call it even.
Proposal I think of god as a little bird who takes To staying close to the earth, The destiny of little wings To exaggerate the wind And peck the ground. I see Haifa By my father and your father''s sea, The sea with little living in it, Fished out like a land. I think of a little song and How there must be a tree. I choose the sycamore I saw split in two Minaret trunks on the way To a stone village, in a stone-thrower mountain. Were the villagers wrong to love Their donkeys and wheat for so long, To sing to the good stranger Their departure song? I think of the tree that is a circle In a straight line, future and past. I wait for the wind to send God down, I become ready for song. I sing, in a tongue not my own: We left our shoes behind and fled. We left our scent in them Then bled out our soles. We left our mice and lizards There in our kitchens and on the walls. But they crossed the desert after us, Some found our feet in the sand and slept, Some homed in on us like pigeons, Then built their towers in a city coffin for us ... I will probably visit you there after Haifa. A little bird to exaggerate the wind And lick the salt off the sea of my wings. I think God reels the earth in when the sky rains Like fish on a wire. And the sea, each time it reaches the shore, Becomes a bird to see of the land What it otherwise wouldn''t. And the wind through the trees Is the sea coming home.
Chapter Two
Immigrant Song In the kitchen in the afternoon, peeling oranges and splitting cantaloupe gut, All that is left is storytelling. The one-radio, one-coffee-shop village now an almond field And vacation-brochure ruins besieged by grass. Everyday around noon a boy on a mule, the men out in the fields, Bread fresh out of brick-oven, wrist deep in olive oil, elbows dripping. The one-radio, one-coffee-shop village without an ink-line on paper, Now spilled like beads out of a rosary. Not what they would have grown. We the people in god we trust. We the people in god we trust everyday around noon a mule. We the people dream the city: Oooh you give me fever. Oooh you give me fever so bad I shake like beads out of a rosary. Fever so bad it must''ve been malaria.
Hey doctor! You mule-ride away, you cost the rest of harvest.
Hey doctor, the city''s a medicine cabinet. We plant tomatoes, okra, squash instead. And a fig tree that won''t grow in Tennessee frost.
Trees die standing. One-cantaloupe, one-rosary kitchen.
Mother Hair My hair, black now, was Achilles hair When I was a child. Or maybe Mamluk, maybe Crusader blood, Though Napoleon could only throw His hat at the walls of Acre- Or maybe the ischemic morning I rode the school bus Heading for the desert on a field trip- It doesn''t matter. My mother intuited loss And stroked my head before I waved goodbye. In the desert I ate the figs my father had left By my shoes the night before. In the desert Camels are ships Parting asphalt, and the school bus Smashed into them and killed So many children aboard. When the bus returned Mothers filled the schoolyard With wailing, Smacking their cheeks, Pulling their hair, Counting their children. But there were none missing. It was only rumor. There was only Nightfall and my mother, ready, Wearing black, my hair now, Maybe Canaanite or Bedouin, Maybe Fatemah or Zaineb.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Earth In The Atticby FADY JOUDAH Copyright © 2008 by Fady Joudah. Excerpted by permission.
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