Adonis: The Wound

I.
Leaves, asleep under wind:
a ship for the wound.
The wound
glories in these ruinous times.
Trees growing in our own eyelashes
a lake for the wound.
The wound shows up in bridges
as graves reach out
as patience wears thin on the opposite banks
between our love and our death.
And the wound, a beckoning gesture,
inflicts us as we cross.


II.
And to that language
in which the bell sound chokes
I confer the voice of the wound.
For the stone, approaching
this withered world from afar,
for the act of withering
for these slippery times
carried skidding on their sleighs
I light the wound's fire.

As history smolders in my clothes,
as blue claws spread across my book,
as I cry out at the day

"Who are you? Who throws you
across these pages
in my virgin land?"
that's when in my pages I glimpse
in that land two eyes of dust.
I hear one saying
"I am he, the wound
that grows bigger
in your petty little history."


III.
I called you clouds,
you my wound, my migrating dove.
I called you feather
called you book
and here we are
where the dialogue between me
and a deeply rooted language begins.
We meet in the storied isles
on failure's deeply rooted archipelago.
And here I am
teaching this dialogue
to wind and palm tree,
to you my wound
you migrating dove.


IV.
If only the land of dreams and mirrors
had seaports,
if only I had a ship,
or the remnants of a city.
If only I possessed a city
in the land of children,
that land of lamentation,
I'd recast it all in ingots
so that the wound, molded into song,
could cut like a lance
that pierces trees, rocks, and sky,
a song supple like water,
as defiant and perplexed
as conquest.


V.
Rain upon our desert
O world decked with dream and longing.
Rain down enough to shake us.
We are the wound's palm trees.
From those trees captivated by the wound's silence,
trees which nursed the wound
through its night,
among arches of eyelashes and arms bent with care
break off for us just two branches.

O world decked in dream and longing
O world that falls onto my forehead
etched like a wound,
keep your distance. The wound is closer than you.
Keep your seductive charms away. More beautiful than you
is the wound.
And the magic that reaches
from your eyes
to the last kingdoms
has only been the wound's pathway.
The wound has passed over it,
stripped it of its deceptive sails
and left it without its island.



Translated from Arabic by Adnan Haydar