Iman Mersal
trans. by Robyn Creswell
Five POEMS
Some things escaped me
One day I’ll walk by
the house I lived in for years
without measuring its distance from all my friends’ houses.
The fat widow who woke me at night with her moans of pleasure
isn’t my neighbor anymore.
I’ll invent methods to make sure I’m not distracted,
like counting steps,
or biting my lips to enjoy the tender sting,
or I might busy my fingers with ripping apart a whole packet
of paper handkerchiefs.
I won’t look for sideroads
to help me avoid the pain.
I won’t forbid myself to casually loiter
while training my teeth to chew the cud
of hatred rising within me.
I’ll try to reconcile myself with the cold hands
that pushed me toward that house
by remembering how I never
soiled the bathroom’s whiteness
with my distinctive kind of darkness.
No doubt some things escaped me.
These walls never entered my dreams,
so I never wondered what color of paint
would suit the terrible glare.
This house where I lived for years
wasn’t a student dormitory
for me to leave my one good dress
on a nail behind the door,
or hang my old photos with sticky tack.
I wonder if the sentimental quotations
I copied out from Love in the Time of Cholera
have settled there now in a heap of words
that reads like an absolute farce.
Respect for Marx
In front of brightly-lit windows
overflowing with lingerie
I can’t stop myself
from thinking about Karl Marx.
A respect for Marx
is the only thing my lovers had in common,
and I allowed all of them, though to differing extents,
to paw at the cotton dolls
hidden in my body.
Marx
Marx
I’ll never forgive him.
It seems I inherit the dead
After I walked back among all the large shoes
from my mother’s burial,
leaving her to tend her chickens in some obscurer place,
it was my job to protect our house from the neighbors’ spying
and I got used to sitting on the doorstep
waiting for the heroine—the one they always treated badly—
of the radio serials.
The day my friend received a visa
to try out her body on a foreign continent
(and although she hadn’t forgotten, as she usually did,
her cigarettes on my table),
I decided that smoking was henceforth necessary
and soon I had a private drawer
and also a mysterious man
who was in fact my friend’s former lover.
Also
when doctors fail to find a kidney
Osama’s body doesn’t reject—
Osama,
whose kidneys shrivel
because he represses his bitterness for the sake of elegance—
then I might use his thumbprint
while talking to prove I’m here.
It seems I inherit the dead,
and one day
I’ll sit by myself in a café
after the death of all those I loved
without any feeling of loss
because my body is a large woven basket
where they have left
their traces.
Black Fingers
Marrying a piano player
is different from marrying a sailor.
They all know that
and so they won’t see you again at port.
The last image of you
will be of a creature dangling from a rope
fingers splayed over her eyes
while her thin feet hang miles away
from the musical scales.
The grandmother said Silly chicks are food for hawks
The father said Don’t talk to strangers
The professor said East is East and West is West
The friend from the café said Leaving your homeland is a mistake that can
only be fixed by never looking back
The doctor said You’re expecting
The doctor says You’re expecting
and you say No, I’m pregnant
not because it’s more feminine
and not because English is always unfair,
but because pregnant is a word that feels full of itself
which is exactly what you are.
Map Store
Imagine him coming back from a war—
one of those wars that happen elsewhere,
from which some people return with memories enough
to make a film that almost feels realistic—
coming back, as I say, from a desert in North Africa
and opening, with his newfound expertise in thirst,
a juice stand.
He was dropping some ice into those freshly-squeezed
beverages which became at the end of the forties
an emblem of the new Pax Americana
when he discovered water puddling under the cooler.
He imagined a sea, a mainland, an island
and in this way there grew within him
the vague idea of what geography is.
Later, a grandson who had never been to war
converted the juice stand into a map store.
If you pass by it some day
on a blocked artery in the heart of Manhattan
you’ll see people who aren’t from here
coming and going and rarely buying anything.
I once saw a woman brush some dust off a mountain
and a girl trail one of her braids over a lake
and I heard one man try to describe to another
the location of his distant house in a distant village close to a distant city
which appeared as a tiny dot on the map of his distant country.
I pass by this place
not to share these strangers’ griefs
nor to pour water into the Nile, which appears as a motionless snake
on the picture that hangs facing the door,
nor even to contemplate the aura that must have been there
just above the right knee of the store’s original owner
whom I now see in a portrait wearing his uniform and medals
but with no sign of his wooden leg
and no trace of the water that leaked from his cooler.
Truly, I don’t know why I pass by this place
but I can see now with my own eyes
the map seller
terrified, perhaps for the first time,
living through a war he had no time to sign up for—
because this time the war came to him.
Iman Mersal is among the most celebrated contemporary poets in the Arab world. She is the author of four collections of verse and three works of prose, including How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts, a hybrid of cultural criticism and personal memoir.
Robyn Creswell is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University and author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton). A former poetry editor of the Paris Review, he currently is editor-at-large for poetry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux book publishers.