UNTITLED

Wandering among twisted streets on long dry afternoons,

in those shrieking bazaars that are a conspiracy whispered

through the broken teeth of pavements, I am made

homeless by distance. I would like the horizon to-travel

with me like in the old days when the air was cool as a

white reed and the far houses wore the deep colours of

evening. But these are neighbourhoods wide as towns,

where each house hums a different silence—like a family

in which no one has spoken to the others for days. And

the restless roads unfold without end—a tumult of

forgetting that even the clouds cannot measure.

I hoard the day’s few treasures and bring them out when

day-light dips behind the city’s far terraces. I like the wild-

eyed mask on some quiet awning, the lusty grape, the

fever in the eyes of old, diffident men who walk in those

burning mornings where cars insult stillness and

motionless trees behind public walls refuse to yield their

sweetness to the air. The cries of bare-footed flower-

sellers in the early morning, the wind sifting like tinkering

rain through the fronds of one proud palm, the names of

playing children shouted into the twilight—these ate my

flimsy refuges.

O night, O night within night, I want to peel you like the

mystical forgotten onion. These distances mock at my

gifts and I have no maps. I want sitting here, to discern

the deep movement of rivers and women’s voices made

tender by dawn, the rooftop weeping of cats in the heat

and the magical breathing of electric cables—just a few of

those palpable signs that make the city stir beneath one’s

desolate heart. But I make my home alone, in unlikely

places: the dark comforting corners of restaurants, the

window in which a leaf moves and changes, the calm bed

ever anchored to the morning’s dull and tepid light.