Ayman Maarouf

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Then I,
think of nothing more than the words I love you
in this soft, wide blue space in whose ziggurats there rest the half-gods, the hunters, the prophets, the harsh tyrants, the people of principles and of the great odes, the loiterers in rooms of illusion and waiting halls and taverns, and those who claim love, of whatever kind, by night or by day.,
It makes no difference.

I think of nothing more than this,
and I crack my fingers here in the vast darkness
that scatters at the sound of your white, rising, beautiful voice with this morning stretching from the first image of the imagination high in the mountains of Bastuwair to the last alley in,
the streets of Jableh.

I had intended,
to seize the blindness that shook me
and to make of it clay in which I would bless life and bless for it the meaning of life. But your bright, decisive passing through my mind confounded the virgin springs bathing beneath the thick shade in the water by the river,
and so my alphabet was thrown into confusion.

Ah, at the froth of words,
multiplying and kindling in the mirrors and spreading,
and I have no way of giving up my refuge in silence. I murmur at its door, I mumble and stammer. My one instrument in writing to you is erasure. I erase and I write. I erase what I write and I write what I erase. Erasure is the tool. Here on the edge. On the edge of everything, exactly,
Erasure,: – is the inkwell.

Time was,
busy arranging your embroidered blue
and the knot in my fingers then was this: from which sky could I borrow for words a metaphor to help me on the road to the poem,
in interpreting the down of colour,
and the vocabulary.
,
,
You did not speak to me that day of names.
You pinned a rose to my shirt and left me to the morning.
You left a few words tasting of almond and one ripe sentence like wine. And when I woke to the morning star, your image was,
like silver, radiant on the water.

I lived without a name.
And I did not notice, on the road to the legend of your love.
The chants of your laughter were the balcony of the house, the huskiness of your voice among the corridors and the flowerpots was the doorknob, and the image of your face,
the lamp of resurrections.

I did not speak to you long.
I stood at the door of your temple like an exhausted god.
You took me and baptised me with strange water and carried me through all that lilac of the night so that you might point my directions towards the water,
and the course of the day.

That day I was born on the path,
and I took the heart's instinct towards you as a road, and spelled out the worlds in your name, and then, as I walked, proposed to the water that you should be,
the flower of the orbit.

My course is your tall palm tree,
and my directions among the galaxies are the water of your springs.
Summer passed and summer, countries and peoples and valleys passed, banks and edges passed, and across my balcony in the book of metaphors there passed a long willow of narrative, while I made from the wine of songs the skies of your face and swore, each time an image crossed my mind, that it was you and you alone,
in my sky the sky of meanings and the wine of songs.

Ah, for your water.
Ah for you and ah for me
Peace be upon you. Peace upon the skies of your face.
Peace upon your chosen name.
O Khadija.

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