TO THE EMBALMERS

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1 3 7 R T O T H E E M B A L M E R S G . C . W A L D R E P i.m. Mahmoud Darwish I went into the desert for the velvet flesh of two white fish. And when the heat of the desert was withdrawn from me I settled my chair by my heart’s black flame. A shepherd taught me the echo of the stars’ exquisite math which sounds in the night like a mesquite blossom. Small and golden I approached the bridge I had left inside the unfinished book where my faith lay dammed. Dip your finger in the rods and cones of the desert’s perfect eye, all who could not die were singing up to me. There is no ‘‘final rose,’’ I replied, only a succession of beds on which the clouds take their blue rest. In the arroyos a trickle of honey gathered in search of the bees that had chained it to a prayer. I gazed into it and saw my name spelled again in the worn boards of a pine floor, a stitched cloth over which the brass gears of my father’s war presided. My father went into the desert for a new flag to drape over the sleeping body of my mother, who had rubbed salt and cumin into the twin clefs of her neck and shoulders after she, impoverished, received the emperor’s summons. Now I ask the moon to testify to my body’s chill, the unaccompanied music that bandages the return of the dead. I have no patience and the almond cake is bitter on my tongue. What am I to call you when I see you freshly clothed in the catenaries of swallows? I who chose exile from the land’s sleep-script, its strange harvest borne upward by a wind from deep inside the earth. 1 3 8 Y If I go there now I will find another poet in my house from which my Christ has wandered, a shadow falling clean across the sea’s torn hem. I will follow Him into the smallest wilderness. There is no Babylon like the soul’s Babylon, its hanging garden wreathed in the voices of created things. Strike the pen from my hand if I have misunderstood how the dust returns to us, through the smallest dances. In the coasts of my adoption I grow colder, I cross my chest with a map of all the sun has denied. The temples lie behind me now as the bodies of women. Breathe on me, my childhood in the lost city of love. Let me be the only casualty, the waking wound towards which the forest of my fading heat is climbing. This is the basket I have plaited for you, from strips torn out of the oldest monographs, with the ocotillo’s passion. Beneath me, buried in rubble, a silver is waiting to be born into such commerce as belief may lend. You may name it for my body when you meet it by day at the judgment seat, by night on the narrow road that sheathes my brother-song, green with pine boughs I have stolen from death and death’s trine passage. ...