Three Poems

Windows that Overlook the Yard
 
Behind the window
strangers sit and smoke.
They redden the season’s yellow
with their watchful eyes
looking at the skies.

Instead of strangers,
rats play instruments.
The absentminded
sing a song for the dead.

Behind the corroded lines
of the window, faces—
torn, detracted, lonely—
faces that are fed up with time,
a bizarre country.

Some hand picks up the sprinkler,
watering the sunrise;
death and sunrise yield
a black-and-red flower,
                       splendid.

When the sprinkler yields flowers,
my darling, red will turn into lights,
love will turn into longing.
The house, a garden . . . 
                                    naa,
                                          like the crow says: “naa”!

Behind the window,
strangers hail back
a bud that’s red and black.



Morning, 5 O’Clock                          
 
I must start walking.
I am neither the timeworn walking stick
in the legends, nor a luggage of remembrances.
Afoot, on a dray horse, mule, or riding some wheel
following the trail of a previous carriage . . .
I must start walking.
I must lose myself in the depths of
my country someday; must go against
the river’s tide until arriving at the town’s
small fountain, at the ruined mounting
of a dried pond, at the old men standing
alone at the altar.

Must go all the ways a cloud goes;
the fugitive cloud, above a land without
trees, in the middle of a dark forest where
the souls of martyrs and of those displaced
are seeking, in the snow, their departed heads.

A finger is left without a ring,
exploring the heart of the ice.

It is a day in the depths of Iran, a day
in the depths of the world, but I must know
that to find is to relinquish one’s longing.
It is a day in the depths of the world, at the feet
of an inconceivable wall, where a sticky ivy
has grown. Must be willing to go that way, spin
the wheel of vortex, attach one’s ashes to the smell
of some seaweed or hang it from some grass.

Neither a baggage of memories from
the moon and the stars, nor the walking stick
of a witch from whose ankle a flower blossoms.
No, this is not just leaving, grasping the hefty
dust and dirt of a sundown in the unclad village.
It is not a delusion or the echo of the sound
of a hymn, and the drops that are falling
through the stone cracks are not searching
for the fountainhead of a stream.

This is a bitter seeing; it is an unseeing gaze,
with open eyes, within the dreams and sceneries,
a colorful apple in the heart of the noon’s dirt.

I must start walking and refine myself
in the dead of night, or wrap the day into
a small handkerchief—spread it during the demure
sundown—like the tablecloth for the afternoon tea.
Must await the hour when the tablecloth
is filled with light and jewels: a satiated moonlight,
the jug of thirst, the sleepless dream; this broken
wreckage from which leakages stream down in gold,
wriggling through the dead and the comfortless wind;
in between the unkempt-haired trees that, carrying
the coffin of air on their shoulders, are on their way . . .

I must start walking into the depths of a missing
graveyard where words and tones and meanings
would go missing with me, and in the silence
of dawns that will arrive, I shall seek a different
meaning, learn a new mother tongue from the temple’s
muezzin; learn the skylark’s trilling . . . which—during
the morning’s rippling homage—creates the beating
of a continual migration.

I must practice patience when the light’s growth
has been on the rise in a bloody scorpion where
the night’s clock has been rolled out, and
a dead sunlight, through the straits of small
second hands, shines, where a benign and striking feast
has been left on the grass’s dank rug, without a guest.
I must start walking and inquire about an ailing alter ego.
I must turn around, go back, farther . . . so that my home
will be nearer when being on a journey.

Awaiting the seven remote cities,
the trysting place of the child’s eyelash.
O, you, the moments, you are intoning
the melodious echoes of the skylark’s trilling.



From Pavements 

I.
After all the journeys I made
without you; after the wind traveling
through the airways of silence.
And after the child will have fallen
asleep in the rug’s reflection of flowers;
it would be fitting to wear shoes and walk
alongside the street—indifferent to the echo of ice
—and behold faces in the fog’s frame;
the fog of the deadliest morning of these times.

The tree of fog is green at the intersection
of fog and in the few cozy cafés and the
scent of sweet lemons . . . If I could imagine
sleeping in missing parks under the rippling
shade dominated by clouds. If I had walked
in the city discovered by the wind. If I were
certain of the wind that paths would never cross
other paths, I would hum this very song
for good
              . . .
and—without crashing into
the nightmares—flow in city streams.

But beginnings are ordinary:
an earth without a story, with no need
for a rider. And the heavens won’t read prayers
for the dead. It would be far better for you
and I to wear shoes, like the old days,
and go after accidental deaths.

II.
This is the time when I have reached my youth
and seen the soil of my homeland in the fog
that was on the blue of the wall.
And it is my knowledge telling me that
the pure noon is dark in Darooh village
and in the mirage of Naomid meadow.

In this desert, the night is bright with the rain,
and a cool candelabrum is hanging from the sphere . . .
The timeworn tree breathes
and the birds’ nest is in distress
about tomorrow’s thirst.
Where is tomorrow?

Tomorrow: The tree has leaned
on the sun from the storm;
the unswerving tree that’s exposed
to mighty dust . . . Time touches down
on the street’s march. Time has grounded,
and the poet is a war correspondent.