Even a holiness
Holding my body, and this might be the way.
15
Abbas brings me an orange from the grove,
Peels it and peppers it,
Swallows a piece and gives me another.
I flinch at the bitter and raw,
Spit out the pulp.
“I’m out for the pruning,” he says,
Sweeps up the peel in his pocket.
“You spend too much time alone.”
“See if a letter has come,” I ask,
As I ask every morning,
My futile and vain prayer for the day.
He nods his head delicately,
Touches my arm
With his veined, mottled hand.
“Orange pudding I’ll make later this week.”
“What day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
16
Believer in methods of science, the meters and grams,
Finder of Fermat’s “least time” before Fermat,
Practitioner of “Galilean experiments” before Galileo,
Feigner of madness to escape
Death by caliph—
Great al-Haytham,
Show me your faith.
You found the way that we see:
Light starts from beyond the body,
Then enters the eye,
Slanting through crystalline humor
And vitreous gels.
Light does not streak from the eye,
As others thought.
With sight tubes
And taut string and chambers,
You found the movement of light—
Rectilinear, reflection, refraction.
Mathematical edge of a knife—
You found the point on a surface
That connects other points via light,
Like the point in your mind
Joined to the point of truth,
And the one thing
A hand must hold.
There, at your table, with rulers, protractors,
Warm breeze from the gulf, goats crapping—
Al-Haytham, tell me what I can see—
Is it this sun in my room?
17
Smaller, the room I had decades ago
When I went to the country across the sea,
Taking my uncle’s old chemistry books,
Slide rules and weights.
Studying science, philosophy, poetry—
Churches for mosques,
Trousers for caftans,
Wood creak of desks, thick-fingered tutors
And beveled glass, laughter of students,
Rectangular courtyards of grass—
I never felt at home.
18
In the blue twilight
I wander my vineyards
While wind whispers softly,
The puyas sway sleepily, waiting for night.
I gaze at the sky
To admire a hoopoe
And pink rising moon.
In the blue twilight, I gaze
At the bird and the papery moon—
One throbbing flesh and the other cold dust—
And I marvel at what harmonies
Couple the two.
Electrons in orbits contained by the quantum,
And atoms conjoined by the dipolar force,
Gravity balanced by pressure
And flap of a wing.
Here, I remember mathematical curves,
Calculus, I learned it all—
Each bird bit and moon fracture
Fixed by the symmetries,
Airborne and airless, aloft.
19
A speck in the distance, across the burnt sand.
“She’s coming,” Abbas says, “the laundress’s daughter.”
“Then it’s Wednesday.”
“In five minutes she’ll be at the gate.”
“Ten minutes,” I say, holding my thumb out
To measure her angle. “I reckon
She’s one thousand meters away.”
“Your mind is as tight as a sheep’s ass.”
Ironed caftans and sarwals,
Our white cotton cloth,
Even Abbas’s ragged boxers, all clean.
The laundress’s daughter waits shy
On the terrace, she’s eighteen or nineteen—
Abbas counts out coins in her hand
Without touching. I look from my window,
A dark strand of hair has just slipped
From her scarf, rests on her shoulder,
And somewhere the groan and the love smell,
My cock vertical, lifetimes ago. Quickly
She tucks back her hair, turns away,
Softly says, “Pick up on Monday.”
20
Bowl of couscous. I eat
But I cannot be filled.
On my table the couscous, an inkwell, a pen.
And a photograph kept in a drawer—
Woman I barely remember,
Prickle of life left only here, in this picture,
Her days and her nights vanished. What string
Of knots led to our meeting that day
On the bridge? What caused her to look
At me, then look away? Was it the angle
Of sunlight, the hue of my hair?
Why did she speak to me?
How many nights
Did she sleep in my bed? I’ve forgotten
The sound of her voice,
Tilt of her head,
The calm sea of her hand.
Sometimes I dream of her, night dancer,
She drifts past my bed.
And the others, my children and wife.
Did I have any choice?
I want rock and hard edge, gush
Of my blood in straight lines,
Matter, inertia, and force,
Explanation.
21
Newton, thin as a mathematical line,
Aquiline nose, fierce-eyed and secretive—
You kept a notebook of questions,
The dip of your quill in an ink of oak galls.
You sought the gods’ hidden knowledge,
Sketched in that notebook your pictures
Of pendulums, levers—
You pondered the sloping of curves,
Tangents and lines—
Toyed with your series of numbers
That marched on forever like waves of the sea—
Thought of all motion as tiny infinities,
Fluxions and calculus.
You found equations that govern
The comets, the path of the moon, gravity,
Curve of the stream in my bath.
You split the colors of light.
“All can be known.”
You ate from the Forbidden Tree,
Then planted new trees.
Modern Prometheus, you stole
The gods’ fire and gave it to men.
Suspicious recluse,
You grasped the gears
Of the galactic clock.
You made the mortal immortal.
Tell me one thing that is true.
22
What is the measure of circle and arc?
Magical digits of pi—
Here, the first seven hundred and eighty-six,
Sacred sum of the letters of Basmalah:
3.141592653589793238462643383279
502884197169399375105820974944
592307816406286208998628034825
342117067982148086513282306647
093844609550582231725359408128
481117450284102701938521105559
644622948954930381964428810975
665933446128475648233786783165
271201909145648566923460348610
454326648213393607260249141273
724587006606315588174881520920
962829254091715364367892590360
011330530548820466521384146951
941511609433057270365759591953
092186117381932611793105118548
074462379962749567351885752724
891227938183011949129833673362
440656643086021394946395224737
190702179860943702770539217176
293176752384674818467669405132
000568127145263560827785771342
757789609173637178721468440901
224953430146549585371050792279
689258923542019956112129021960
864034418159813629774771309960
518707211349999998372978049951
05973
23
Great Newton, you hid in your rooms,
Outcast like me,
Careless of meals, stockings untied,
Drinker of rosewater, olive oil, beeswax—
You found the force
Between planets and sun,
Pattern of cosmic attraction,
Heard clearly the music of spheres.
You gauged the distance to stars
And the vast rooms of space,
Which were naught to the space of your mind.
You struck the door of the universe.
What raging night seized you
And screamed that the world
Must be number and rule?
24
Bang goes the clock in the hall,
Zinging the air, slicing hours
To minutes, the minutes to seconds,
Precisely the strokes of the world—
Just as the clock towers chimed
While I walked through the streets
Of Montparnasse
Foolishly wearing a fez—
Beside me my children and wife, white-skinned,
Untouched by the stares.
25
I am a fragment
Hurtling through space
While the breeze of the universe
Ruffles my hair.
Evening. I gaze
Through my telescope,
Searching the colors of stars.
Some are the hues of goats’ wool,
Some ochre olive,
Or pink bougainvillea.
In chasms of space
I see stars born from gases,
Great thrumming furnaces oozing their heat,
Convective motions, electron opacities—
And elsewhere stars dying,
Cold cinders
Or giant explosions, eruptions of light,
Cities consumed in a nuclear blast,
Billions of years dimmed in a second.
I have learned
That the heavens are violent and fragile
And doomed to destruction,
Just as this thimble the earth.
All in the cosmos is failing,
And nothing remains,
And we measure the hour of the stars,
As I measure one morning’s light.
Here, in the glass of this eyepiece.
26
Morning. I offer to go with Abbas to the market,
He gestures me back, hobbles away with his cane,
Faster than men with good legs.
Alone, I take my warm bath, small clouds of froth,
Scent of my olive oil soap. Dressed in my work clothes
I go to the garden—the primrose,
Verbenas, the ghost flowers, globemallows,
Fragile blue bells of phacelia. Stooping on knee
In the sandy soil, pinching the deadheads,
Spent fabric falls down to the ground, translucent
Like skin. Some of the flowers are dying and past,
But I leave them to live three days more.
27
The village magician appears in my garden,
An ancient man gnarled as an olive tree,
Wearing a filthy frayed sheet trailing
Like nightmarish bridal gown—
Holds out his hand for some coins,
And I give him white ghost flowers.
Magician, you sprinkle stray granules of iron
On your sheet and exclaim at the intricate patterns,
But there is far greater power than this.
Pattern of forces:
Magnetic that spring from electric,
Electric that flow from magnetic,
Symmetrical, right and left hand reversed,
Folded together and twisting through space
In a vibrating wave of pure energy.
Pattern of atoms:
The tiny cathedrals,
Like Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle,
Framed by electrical force
And Planck’s number.
Electrons that spin on their axes
Like magical tops, fixed in their energies,
Notes of a scale.
Electrons that weave in their willowy
Arcs, ordering the union of atoms
To make flawless crystals and glass, to make
Every jot of amoebas and stars,
Each of my breaths in this instant.
And this is a thing I believe.
28
Years ago, in my studies,
I would dive down for days
Without sleeping or food
In a feast of ideas, books, conversation,
A thrash in my mind, how to consume the world,
Blasting and tilting life,
Reciting my verses, test tubes and flame,
Measuring movements of planets,
Diagrams, algebra, history and empire,
Ethics and dualism—all of it swallowed
In great heaving gulps, brain rush,
Intent on being chemist or poet.
29
I sit in my chair reading physics,
Old song on the radio,
Soft so it won’t wake Abbas,
Sound of the sea, headdress of stars.
At the moment of midnight,
I embark on a journey inside myself,
Marco Polo of organ and vein,
My own body a miniature realm
Of the Great Kublai Khan.
What is this thing that I am,
Forces and loss?
Liver and lung, masterworks,
Hormones and nerves, the conductors
Of symphonies. Cells,
The skilled singular players—
I go deeper, am caught in a chemical sea
And electrical storms small as molecules.
Deeper, the chromosomes,
Text of my body, the ladder and rung,
Three billion steps folded thousands of times,
Going nowhere yet leading to all.
Helical molecule twisting at fifty degrees,
Constant in all living things,
Constancy fighting the inconstant stars.
30
Take this equation.
It measures the strength of a bridge
Like the bridge to Zafir’s house in the sand—
Mandate with xs and ys for the load,
For the tensile strength, gravity,
Forces of molecules, torquing and strain.
Purity. Capsule of number and form,
Irrefutable. Ask and it answers.
Solving equation,
A linked chain of logical steps,
Square roots and integrals, tangents and sines.
I stand on the bridge—
Pure sines, derivatives
Dazzle the air, sing in their hard arcs,
Lift and parade, certain,
Impervious to boom and blast,
Free of emotion,
Concrete from concrete
And mountain from number,
Its sureness, my sureness.
31
My birth no one remembers—
The cries of my mother, my father
Away for his business,
No record of who first said “God” to me,
Who rubbed the date on my mouth,
Pattern of light through arched
windows,
The scents in the air—uncles and aunts
Have no memory.
But the birth of the cosmos—the heat
And the densities follow equations,
The temperature 1.5 × 1010 degrees at one second.
Twelve billion years
In the past, all began:
Time formed from nothingness,
Space formed from nothingness,
Universe born by some chance, or not,
Moment of ripe probabilities,
One of uncountable eggs.
And then the explosion,
The energies opening space
And the boiling of light
In the Bang without eye without ear.
And this is a cosmos of endings,
Billions of years in the future
As gauged by the mass and the speed
And the clock of the flight of the galaxies.
Billions of years in the future,
The galaxies, caught in the ocean of space,
Sail apart as the cosmos expands
And the density dwindles to nothing.
Th e stars spend their energies,
Light fades and dims,
And the galaxies ghost ships
Adrift on an infinite sea,
With no heat, with no life.
But the numbers remain.
32
Mother would come to me late in the night,
After her concert,
Humming some song she had sung—
Hair down and barefoot,
Her fingertips brushing my cheek
Smelling of jasmine and sandalwood.
Hers was the breath that could flow in the night
Through the hallways with flickering light,
Voice that said, “Certainty.”
She forgave everything—
Money I squandered,
My fidgeting poetry, years living abroad,
Wedding a foreigner,
Children she never knew,
Return in despair—
Loathing my father,
Even that she forgave.
And she sat with me during the night,
Stroking my brow, while I listened
To waves of the sea—
You are the question and I am the answer,
Your comfort, so breathe with me,
I am the sea that rolls over you,