Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) - A Grave for New York lyrics

1 So far, the Earth has been drawn as a pear – I mean a breast – But, nothing between a breast and a grave stone except a trick of engineering: NEW YORK A civilization with four legs; each direction is murder and a path to murder, and in the distance the moaning of those drowning. New York A woman – a statue of a woman, in one hand raising tatters named liberty by sheets of paper which we name history, and in another hand strangulating a child named the Earth. New York A body with the colour of asphalt. Around its waist a damp belt; its face a closed window… I said: Walt Whitman will open it – I utter the original pa**word – but no one hears it except a god no longer in his place. The prisoners, the slaves, the destitute, the thieves and the sick flow from his larynx, and no opening, no path. And I said: Brooklyn Bridge! But it's the bridge linking Whitman to Wall Street, the leaf of gra** to the Dollar leaf… New York-Harlem Who is the one approaching in a guillotine of silk? Who is the one departing in a grave as long as the Hudson? Explode, O, rites of tears; interlace, O, things of weariness. Blueness, yellowness, roses, jasmine; the light is sharpening its pins, and in the pricking the sun is born. O, wound, hidden between the thigh and the thigh, have you blazed? Has the bird of d**h visited you, have you heard the last throes? A rope, and the neck entwines the gloom, and in the blood the melancholy of the hour. New York-Madison-Park Avenue-Harlem Laziness like work, work like laziness. The hearts are stuffed with sponge, the hands are blown with reeds. From the piles of dirt and the masks of Empire State rises history, odours dangling sheet upon sheet: Not the sight is blind, but the head, not the words are bare, but the tongue. New York- Wall Street-25th Street-Fifth Street A Medusian ghost rises between the shoulder and the shoulder. A market for slaves of all races. People living like plants in gla** gardens. Wretched, invisible creatures penetrate the texture of space like dust – spiral victims. The sun is a funeral wake and daylight a black drum. 2 Here, On the mouldy side of the rock of the world, nobody sees me except a black man on the point of being murdered or a bird on the point of dying; I thought: A plant inhabiting a red vase was metamorphosing as I moved away from the threshold; and I read of mice in Beirut and elsewhere swaggering in the silk of a white house, armed with paper and gnawing at people; of remnants of pigs in the orchard of the alphabet trampling over poetry. And I saw: Wherever I was- Pittsburgh (International Poetry Forum), Johns Hopkins (Washington), Harvard (Cambridge- Boston), Anne Arbor (Michigan- Detroit), Foreign Press Club, The Arab Club at the United Nations (New York), Princeton, Temple (Philadelphia), the Arab map a horse dragging its steps while Time dangled loose like a saddle towards the grave or towards the darkest shades, towards the dead fire or towards a dying fire, revealing the chemistry of the other dimension in Karkuk, al-Dhahran and the rest of such fortresses in Arab Afro-Asia. And here is the world ripening in our hands. Heh! We prepare the Third War and establish the first, second, third and fourth bureaux in order to make sure that: 1- on that side, there is a jazz party, 2- in this house, there is a person who owns nothing but ink, 3- in this tree, there is a bird singing; and in order to declare that: 1- space is measurable by cages or walls, 2- time is measurable by ropes or whips, 3- the system that constructs the world begins by murdering the brother, 4- the moon and the sun are two coins glittering under the throne of the sultan. And I saw Arab names across the width of the Earth more tender than eyes, shining but as a lost star shines, a star who has no ancestors, and whose roots are in his footsteps…. Here, On the mouldy side of the rock of the world I know, I confess. I remember a plant which I call life or my country, d**h or my country- a wind that freezes like a cloak, a face that murders play, an eye that dismisses light; and I invent your contrary, O, my country, I descend into your Hell and scream: I extract a poisonous elixir for you and resurrect you. And I confess: New York, in my country the colonnade is yours and the bed, the chair and the head. And everything is up for sale: daylight and night, the Stone of Mecca and the waters of the Tigris. And I announce: Despite that, you pant- racing, in Palestine, in Hanoi, in the North and South, the East and West, against figures who have no history but fire. And I say: Ever since John the Baptist, each of us has carried his severed head on a platter, awaiting the second birth. 3 Crumble, O, statues of liberty, O, nails planted in breasts with a wisdom that emulates the wisdom of roses. The wind is once more blowing from the East, uprooting tents and skyscrapers. And there are two wings inscribing: Another alphabet rises in the topography of the West, and the sun is the daughter of a tree in the orchard of Jerusalem. Thus I set my flames ablaze. I start anew, formulating and defining: New York A woman of straw, and the bed is swinging from void to void and here is the ceiling rotting: each word is a sign of falling; each movement is an axe or a spade. And to the right and left are bodies which desire to alter love sight hearing smell touch and alter alteration itself- opening Time like a gate they break and improvising the remaining hours s** poetry ethics thirst utterance silence and negating all locks. I said: I'll tempt Beirut, – Seek action. The Word is dead, others say. The Word has died because your tongues have given up the habit of speaking for the habit of mumbling. The Word? You wish to reveal its fires? Then, write. I say: Write. I do not say: Mumble. Nor do I say: Copy. Write – From the Gulf to the Ocean I hear no tongue, I read no Word. I hear noises. That is why I glimpse nobody hurling fires. The Word is the lightest of things; yet it carries all things. Action is a direction and a moment, but the Word is all directions and all Time. The Word- the hand, the hand- the dream: I discover you, O, fire, you my capital, I discover you, O, poetry. And I tempt Beirut. She wears me and I wear her. We wander like a ray asking: Who reads? Who sees? The Phantoms are for Dayan, and the oil flows to its destination. God is truthful, and Mao has not been wrong: weapons are a very important factor in war, but not decisive. Man, not weapons, is the decisive factor; there is no final victory or final defeat. I repeated these proverbs and aphorisms, as an Arab does, in Wall Street where rivers of gold of all colours flow coming from the sources. Amongst them I saw Arab rivers carrying millions of dismembered limbs as sacrifices and offerings to the Master Idol. And between each sacrifice and the next, sailors were cackling as they rolled out of the Chrysler Building returning to the sources. Thus, I set my flames ablaze. We dwell in black fury that our lungs may fill with the air of history. We rise in black eyes fenced like cemeteries in order to defeat the eclipse. We travel in the black head in order to march abreast of the approaching sun. 4 New York O, woman crouching in the arch of the wind, a form farther than the atom, a dot trotting in the space of numbers, one thigh in the sky, another in the water, say where your star is. The battle is approaching between the gra** and electronic brains. The whole of life is hung on a wall, and here is the bleeding . At the apex is a head joining the pole to the pole, in the middle is Asia and at the bottom the feet of an invisible body. I know you, O, corpse swimming in the musk of poppies, I know you, O, game of the breast and the breast. I gaze at you and dream of snow, gaze at you and wait for autumn. Your snow carries the night; your night carries people as dying bats. Each wall in you is a cemetery, each day is a black digger carrying a black loaf a black platter, and with them plotting the history of the White House: A- There are dogs that interlock like cuffs. Cats which beget helmets and chains. And in the alleys which sneak on the backs of rats, white guards procreate like mushrooms.. B – A woman ambles behind her dog; he is saddled like a horse and has the stride of a king; around him the city crawls like an army of tears. And where children and old men covered by black skin pile, the innocence of bullets grows like gra** and terror strikes at the breast of the city. C- Harlem – Bedford Stuyvesant: Sands of people congeal into tower after tower. Faces weave the times. Refuse is feasts for children, children are feasts for rats… in everlasting festivities for another Trinity: the Tax Collector- the Policeman- the Judge- The authority of devouring, the sword of annihilation. D – Harlem (Blacks detest Jews). Harlem (Blacks dislike Arabs when they remember the slave trade), Harlem – Broadway (People enter as molluscs in alembics of alcohol and d**). Broadway – Harlem, a fair of chains and cudgels, and policemen are the germ of Time. One bullet, ten pigeons. Eyes are boxes undulating with red snow and Time is a limping crutch. To tiredness, O, olden negro, O, infant negro. To tiredness again and again. 5 Harlem I have not come from outside: I know your rancour, know its tasty bread. Famine has nothing but the sudden thunder, prisons have nothing but the thunderbolt of violence. I glimpse your fire progressing under the asphalt in hose pipes and masks, in piles of refuse which the throne of the cold air embraces in outcast footsteps wearing the history of the wind as shoes. Harlem Time is in the throes of d**h and you are the hour: I hear tears roaring like volcanoes. I glimpse mouths gobbling people as they gobble bread. You are the eraser to erase the face of New York. You are the tempest to grip it like a leaf and hurl it. New York IBM + SUBWAY coming from mud and crime travelling to mud and crime. New York = A hole in the Earth's crust out of which madness gushes river after river. Harlem New York is in the throes of d**h and you are the hour. 6 Between Harlem and Lincoln Center, I moved along, a number lost in a desert covered by the teeth of a black dawn. There was no snow, there was no wind. I was like someone following a ghost (the face is no face but a wound or tears; the figure is no figure but a dry rose) a ghost – (Is it a woman? A man? A woman-man? ) carrying bows in its chest and lurking in ambush for space. A deer pa**ed by and he called it the Earth. A bird appeared and he called it the moon. And I learnt that he was running in order to witness the resurrection of the Red Indian…in Palestine and its sisters, space was a ribbon of bullets, and the Earth a murdered screen. And I felt I was an atom rippling in a ma** rippling towards the horizon, horizon, horizon. And I descended into valleys elongating and running parallel. And it occurred to me to doubt the roundness of the Earth… And in the house was Yara, Yara is the end of a second Earth and Ninar is another end. I placed New York in brackets and walked in a parallel city. My feet were laden with streets, the sky was a lake in which swam the fishes of the eye and the conjectures and the animals of the clouds. The Hudson was fluttering like a crow wearing the body of a nightingale. Dawn approached me, a child moaning and pointing to its wounds. I called the night, but it answered not. It carried its bed and surrendered to the pavement. Then I saw it covering itself with a wind than which nothing was more tender except the walls and the pillars… A scream, two screams, three… And New York started like a half frozen frog leaping in a pool without water. Lincoln, That is New York: leaning on the crutch of old age and sauntering in the gardens of memory, while all things tend towards artificial flowers. And while I stare at you, amongst the marble in Washington, and see your double in Harlem, I think: When will the time of your imminent revolution come? My voice rises: Liberate Lincoln from the whiteness of marble, from Nixon, from the guard-dogs and hunting dogs. let him read with new eyes the leader of the Zenj, ‘Ali b. Muhammad; Let him read the horizon read by Marx, Mao Tse – tung, and al-Niffari, that divine madman who made the Earth so slender and permitted it to dwell between the word and the allusion. And let him read what Ho Chi Minh desired to read, ‘Urwa b. al-Ward: I divide my body into many bodies…, ‘Urwa didn't know Baghdad, and he might have refused to visit Damascus. He stayed where the desert was another shoulder bearing with him the burden of d**h. He left for those fond of the future a portion of the sun soaking in the blood of a deer he used to call: ” My darling! He arranged with the horizon to be his last abode. Lincoln That is New York: a mirror reflecting nothing but Washington. And this is Washington: a mirror reflecting two faces- Nixon and the weeping of the world. Enter into the dance of weeping; rise up there's still a place still a role… I adore the dance of weeping which becomes a dove that becomes a flood. The Earth is in need of a flood. I said weeping but I meant wrath. I also meant the questions: How do I persuade al-Ma'arra to accept Abu al-‘Ala; the plains of the Euphrates the Euphrates? How do I replace the helmet with the ear of corn? (The daring to hurl other questions at the Prophet and The Book is imperative), I say as I glimpse a cloud adorning itself with a necklace of fire; I say as I behold people streaming like tears. 7 New York I squeeze you between the word and the word; I grab you roll you write you and erase you. Hot, cold and in between; wakeful, slumbering and in between. I crouch over you and sigh I lead you and teach you how to walk behind me. I crush you with my eyes, you, the one crushed by terror. I try to command your streets: Lie down between my thighs and I'll grant you another space; and your things: Clean yourself and I'll give you new names. I could find no difference between a body with a head bearing branches which we call a tree, and a body with a head bearing thin threads which we call a person. I confuse a stone with a car; a pair of shoes in a shop window appears to be a policeman's helmet, and a loaf of bread a sheet of zinc. Yet, New York is not nonsense; it is a Word. But when I write: ‘Damascus' I don't write a word but mimic nonsense. D.A.M.A.S.C.U.S. …still a noise, I mean a rush of wind. It once emerged out of ink never to return. And Time is standing guard at the threshold asking: When does it return, when does it enter? Thus are Beirut Cairo Baghdad, total nonsense like motes of the sun… One sun, two suns, three, a hundred. (So- and -so wakes up, his eyes filled with tranquillity mixed with anxiety. He leaves his wives and children and goes out carrying his shotgun. One sun, two suns, three, one hundred…here he is like a string defeated curling under himself. He sits in a cafe. The cafe is crowded with stones and toys which we call men, with frogs vomiting words and covering the seats with filth. ) How can so – and -so rebel when his brain is filled with his blood, his blood is filled with chains? I ask you, who say to me, I know no science, I specialize in the chemistry of the Arabs. 8 Mrs. Browning, a Greek in New York. Her house is a leaf in the book of the Mediterranean. Merein, Ni'matulla, Yves Bonnefoy. And I am a desultory figure saying unsayable things. Cairo was scattered among us like roses oblivious to all times. Alexandria mingled with the voices of Cavafy and Seferis. This is a Greek icon… She said, as Time stuck to her lips like a red perfume. Time was arching its back, and snow was leaning on its elbow, (midnight of April 6, 1971). And in the morning I rose screaming just before the hour of returning: New York! You mix children with snow and bake the cake of the age. Your voice is an oxide, a post – chemistry poison, and your name is insomnia and suffocation. Central Park prepares feasts for its victims, and under the trees lurk the ghosts of corpses and daggers. The wind has only the bare twigs and the traveller only the blocked roads. And in the morning I rose screaming: Nixon, how many children have you murdered today? – This is a trivial matter, (Calley) – It's true that this is a problem. But isn't it also true that this reduces the number of the enemy? (An American general). How do I give New York's heart another size? Does the heart also extend its boundaries? New York – General Motors – d**h. We shall replace men by fire! (McNamara) – They dry the sea in which the revolutionaries swim and Where they turn the land into desert, they call that peace! (Tacitus). And I rose before dawn and roused Whitman. 9 Walt Whitman I glimpse letters to you fluttering in the streets of Manhattan. Each letter is a wagon loaded with cats and dogs. To cats and dogs is the 21st century; and to people annihilation: This is the American Age ! Whitman I didn't see you in Manhattan and I saw everything. The moon was a husk hurled through the windows, and the sun an electric orange. And when a black road, a road with the roundness of a moon leaning on its eyelashes, leapt out of Harlem, behind the road a light splintered all over the asphalt and sank away like gra** as it reached Greenwich Village, that other Latin Quarter, I mean the word you get when you take the word hub and add a dot under the h **. (I recall that I wrote this in the Viceroy restaurant in London, when I had nothing but ink, and the night was growing like the down of birds.) Whitman The clock announces the hour . (New York- women are piles of refuse, and refuse is a time sliding towards ash ) . The clock announces the hour (New York- The system is Pavlov, and people are for experiments… where the war the war the war !). The clock announces the hour . (A letter coming from the East. A boy has written it with his arteries. I read it: The doll is no longer a dove. The doll is a field gun, a machine – gun, a shotgun… corpses in roads of light connecting Hanoi with Jerusalem, and Jerusalem with the Nile.) Whitman The clock announces the hour, and I see what you saw not and know what you knew not. I move in a vast expanse of cans crowding like yellow crabs in an ocean made up of millions of islands- persons; each is a column with two hands, two feet and a broken head. And you O, criminal, exile, immigrant, nothing more now than a hat worn by birds which the skies of America do not know ! Whitman, let it be our turn now. I forge a ladder out of my stares; weave my footsteps as a pillow, and we shall wait. Man does die but he is more lasting than the grave. Let it be our turn, now. I await the Volga to run between Manhattan and Queens; I await the Hwang Ho to flow into the mouth where the Hudson flows. Baffled? Didn't the Orantes use to flow into the Tiber? Let it be our turn, now. I hear tremors and shelling. Wall Street and Harlem meet – Paper meets with thunder, dust with gusts. Let it be our turn, now. Oysters are building their nests in the waves of history. The tree knows its name, and there are holes in the skin of the world, a sun changes the mask and the ending and weeps in a black eye. Let it be our turn, now. We can spin faster than a wheel, split the atom and float in an electronic brain fading or glittering, empty or full, and find a homeland in the bird. Let it be our turn, now. There is a little, red book ascending, not the stage which decayed under the words, but that which has been expanding and growing, the stage of wise madness and the rain which awakes in order to inherit the sun. Let it be our turn, now. New York is a rock rolling over the forehead of the world. Her voice is in your clothes and mine, her charcoal dyes your limbs and mine…I can see the end, but how do I seduce Time to let me live to witness. Let it be our turn, now. And let Time float in the waters of this equation: New York + New York = The grave or anything emerging from the grave, New York – New York = The Sun. 10 At eighty I commence eighteen. I said this I say and repeat, but Beirut doesn't hear. A corpse is this, which identifies the complexion with the garment. A corpse is this, which stretches as a book not as ink. A corpse is this, which doesn't live in the grammar and morphology of the body. A corpse is this, which reads the Earth as a stone not as a river. (Yes, I love proverbs and aphorisms, at times: If you are not infatuated, you are a corpse) . I say and repeat: My poetry is a tree, and between the branch and the branch, the leaf and the leaf, there is nothing but the motherhood of the trunk. I say and repeat: Poetry is the rose of the wind. Not the wind, but the windward, not the orbiting but the orbit. Thus I abrogate the RULE, and establish a rule for each moment. Thus I approach but don't exit. Exit never to return. And move towards September and the waves. Thus I carry Cuba on my shoulders and ask in New York: When will Castro arrive? And between Cairo and Damascus I wait on the road leading to… …Guevara encountered freedom. They sank together into the bed of Time and slumbered. When he woke up he found her not. He abandoned sleep and entered the dream, in Berkeley, in Beirut and the rest of the cells, where everything prepares itself to become everything else. Thus, between a face tending towards marijuana, carried by the screen of night, and a face tending towards IBM, carried by a cold sun, I sent the Lebanon flowing, a river of wrath. On one bank rose Jubran, and Adonis on the other. And I exited from New York as I exit from a bed: The woman was an extinguished star and the bed was breaking into trees without a space, into a limping air, into a cross with no memory of thorns. And now, in the carriage of the first water, the carriage of the images which wound Aristotle and Descartes I am strewn between Ashrafiyya and Ras Beirut, between Zahrat al-Ihsan and the Hayek and Kamal Press, where writing turns into a palm tree and the palm tree into a dove. Where the Thousand and One Nights procreate, while Buthaina and Laila vanish. Where Jamil travels between the stone and the stone and nobody has the fortune to find Qais. But, peace to the rose of darkness and sand peace to Beirut.