Two Poems

Abstract

Fady Joudah’s fourth poetry collection, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in the winter of 2018. His poetry and translations have been awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, among others. Golan Haji is a Syrian Kurdish poet and translator who now lives in Paris. His latest poetry collection, A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know, was published by A Midsummer Night’s Press in 2017. His most recent translation into Arabic is Alberto Manguel’s Stevenson under the Palm Trees (2017). 20 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2018 poetry Two Poems by Fady Joudah & Golan Haji After Wine Over dinner we spoke of the game of recurrence dissolving into an old dog’s tail, loquacious desire far from the borders of the body, yet is the body’s. What’s inside and never makes it out to skin or what’s outside and doesn’t touch us. Victims, we told ourselves, will inherit the future one day, but souls will linger distant from redemption. Don’t follow the signage and keep your eyes on the phrase. News of the explosion will hang around. The hell of pictures on the web. Faces of the dead on Facebook will wait for your walk home. A woman who awakened your first lust when you were a kid was killed in the morning while talking to her sister on the phone. First a blast then stillness. You were late to dinner. You had lost your way to the restaurant. You couldn’t have known she had just died and what you thought were Klee’s paintings in the gallery clawing your afternoon nerves was her calling your name one last time. In the neighborhood of your boyhood, you rise with tractors and loaders, start your engines, clear the infinite wake with only the living to show for. Isn’t that what so hurt Nabokov about the Bolsheviks? Not the real estate, private tutors, governesses or the inheritance, but the loss of childhood? Listening to music you feel better. Long ago in Amuda one of your uncles fell in love with a woman. He strung for her an erotic necklace he sang whenever he was drunk and unconcerned with the truths of the world. Her brothers put a bounty on his head. Decades passed in Damascus and that woman’s granddaughter fell in love with your uncle’s grandson. He was also a singer, sang of Guevara and Paul Robeson, went to Iraq and came back dead. His shrine was his body in a coffin in a boat that crossed the Tigris from east to west. Author note: These poems are part of a longer sequence that Golan and I collaborated on for my new collection, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. All the poems are based on our correspondence in Arabic, via email, phone, or in person. While the poems’forms and diction in English are mine, their content is mostly shared with varying degrees of “ownership.” In the case of “Last Night’s Fever,”for example, what originated as an event discussed over the phone became a file of several pages that Golan shared with me in an email, as if an entry in a diary.“After Wine”is borne of an entirely different mechanism (after the two of us met in Paris). I wrote it in near-immediate recollection of its energy and detail. – Fady Joudah WORLDLIT.ORG 21 Last Night’s Fever, This Morning’s Murder I read your name among the numbered, nearly called you to console you of your own passing. Thirty summers ago, susurrant wheat guided me to a wounded sand grouse chick that had punctuated the dirt with its blood. I couldn’t identify its wound or didn’t look for it before I made an empty can of camel lard its nest. The metal shone in the sun like shards of broken mirrors we kept in the basement. I waited alone at the bus stop south of the only remaining poplar tree we buried you under, in what remains of the courtyard. Your house stood in front of the ice cutters’ shop where blocks...