Sun Tearing the Page’s Flesh
Like a candle’s wick
I extinguish the light in me
Like an eraser I erase
my face with my face
•
Where I am going:
the mirror leads to blindness
the shadow to Satan
the desert to writing
•
All that is on this page:
word without flesh
tear without salt
and whiteness fleeing
even the dead
•
For I have never seen the desert
begin with the voids of the wind
and end in the scraps
from a language’s mill
•
Ah truth like the dead face is charred
by a tomb’s darkness
•
The crime is to wrap flesh in paper
or writing in the same paper
or to toss this flesh on a plank
Or to bury it cold in the earth
before the sun may
steal within it
•
Dreams are buried in the sand near a snake
Or in a well covered by a torn shirt
Or in a prison and once we leave it
they flee from us
•
But the day’s scent is imprisoned in a wheat
cellar
Mice in the Wardrobe of Solitude
1
I do not want to be the chair
opposite the corpse
nor the dead insect of the void
between words
nor the stone of the eye
breaking the spine of the glass
nor even the red that never
saw the drop of blood it laps up
2
I do not want the blue of the sugar paper
to absorb the tear
that last night ended
the rainfall
nor for the word earth to remain
without the shawl’s
whiteness
3
I do not understand the mill’s shape
when the wind sweeps through it
nor the rain
that escapes through the holes
of my shoes
and I do not know where I am
when I see a land
bordered by the posts of my death
and I do not understand the sky
when the rain falls straight
to the floor of my skull
instead of in the bucket
that softly rocks my bed
4
But I understand the fever when it takes me
for it distills all I hear
and erases all I see
in the self sweating myself out
until I recover
and open the world like a refrigerator
to find nothing
but the odor
of the white
rotted by the ice
The Insect of Infinity
Abdallah Zrika
translated from the Arabic by Tim DeMay
Listen to the original Arabic read by the poet:
The language in The Insect of Infinity is familiar and simple, made up of words that represent the things around us, the basic nouns often within reach. Some of these are highly local—the "blue of the sugar paper" picks out a specific sugar package commonly served with tea in Casablanca, Zrika's home city—while many are universal—the chairs and beds and candles. In these quiet lines, however, each object glows from its center, as if to say that meaning is there, in looking a little harder at the scenes that are almost rendered invisible by Zrika's near-paradoxical lines, "Like an eraser I erase / my face with my face." The two poems here are apt condensations of the 2004 book, which is at once a meditation on death and on the body: this accounts for the movement between presence and absence, local and universal, specifically detailed and washed out into watercolor. And perhaps most important are Zrika's cadences, the almost-but-not-quite mystical chant of a voice buzzing between the world and the beyond.
Abdallah Zrika came to recognition with his first collection of poetry in 1977, رقصة الرأس والوردة, (Dance of the head and the rose), whose popularity eventually took him to prison in Casablanca for “attacks on sacred values." French poet Alain Jouffroy has called Zrika’s work “a kind of beyond-the-earth, an opening of being to the indefinable real.” The majority of Zrika’s poetry, including Bougies noires, Insecte de l’infini, and Échelles de la métaphysique, has been translated into French by Abdellatif Laâbi and Bernard Noël, as well as by Zrika himself.
Tim DeMay is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Chicago, where he researches experimental art and resistance. His French and Arabic translations have appeared in Banipal, Gulf Coast, ArabLit Quarterly, and Asymptote.
