1
They tell me: Mahbuba is cross-eyed, lazy-eyed, spoiling for a fight.
Cross- and lazy-eyed or is the scale of her allure a little off balance?Cross- and lazy-eyed or she takes aim at hearts, squinting, she seeks
A straight shot, her eyelashes arrows, to cut the heart’s every leg?Her eyes, drunk night and day, share colors:
One is a violet’s bud, the other, a full lily.You have it upside down: her eyes reflect yours. You
Have the tilted sight. When will you learn?Anyone can throw her lacking face onto a mirror
And cite the witnesses, but who believes the visible?The writer of lovers’ virtue and vice, of intimacy and separation,
Of kindness and sorrow, sees two books at one time.Nali, that wild gazelle falls into no man’s trap
For her peregrine eyes are sharp, always alert.
2
In this world, the drifter is best: immaterial, detached.
During the day: among people. At night: quiet, detached.Image: a performance, sunk in attachment, like anyone.
Reality: drunk with divine petitions—hidden, detached.So what if the world awards him head to toe?
His existence is non-existence: content, detached.On the surface, a colorful peacock, the quiet character.
Underneath, a gray dove, essential, detached.Tekiye, sheikh: all are traps of attachment.
Nali will go on, drunk on ruins and detachment.
3
Until the universe began its orbit, planets saw no dusk:
The exalted, holy sun did not appear.Until the sky cried and mist covered the whole country
Flowers didn’t decorate the grass, the lips of buds stayed closed.Until the gardener stopped pruning the original tree
New branches couldn’t reach their full height.Until the Sulaimans became advisors at Judgment Day,
Our Ahmadi Mukhtar didn’t adorn a throne.Speech un-curtained by metaphor is lovely: my King
Was just, never in the world was one just as he.His soul, God’s elevated creation, had no place
Unless a place no less beautiful than paradise’s gardens.Like the science of logic, he has a result.
Our king’s high place, thank God, isn’t empty.The king who took Jam’s throne, Nali, shares Jam’s history.
These days, no one says Alexander couldn’t sit Jam’s throne.
4
As long as that wisp of hair is in the way
Of a kiss, my mouth will taste of venom.Two purple-tipped spheres have risen on her chest.
I am keening. When did the Alianthus grow watermelons?The dragon of her hair guards her beautiful hoard:
Ringlet by ringlet, layer by layer, full to her waist.My moon is the only moon to erase a hundred stars,
My lover, the only flower to seed a thousand others.Her hem is a pure orbit, not a circle of silk
Caught by the blood of the slain.Your absence: wind that scoured the world.
More than my eyes, my heart gathers dust.The sweet juice of red dates: her lips. Her eyes? Almonds.
So much fruit grows from the tall cedar of her body.Your ruby lips are saturated, bearing sugar.
My poor lips are parched, ashen.She is tormented, faithless, quick to fight, slow to atone.
The wretched plague of these days has infected her.My eyes that were Bakrajo and are now like Sarchinar,
They recall Dimdim Spring and the headwaters of Megor,Their pure water sometimes hurried, sometimes dripped.
For a while now, though, my eyes have made a waterfall.I celebrate by burning, like the candle with its tallow tears.
Everyone says, “He has caught the cemetery’s color.”My protector, my torment says, “Have patience!” What an ass!
When has a lover ever had patience?Nali constantly whines and moans
Now that his beloved left him: his heart on fire.
5
Like a cage, this room traps me inside,
Like the spiders’ warp and weft.Tassels of smoke line the roof,
Threadbare as old swaddling clothes.The roof and walls fall apart like a rickety cradle.
In the roof, post by post, you can count the rafters likeThe visible ribs of a workhorse, alive in name only.
Rather than strong mud, they shower fine leaves on the roof.Like autumn rain the leaves fall, one by one, into the room.
Even now, in this room, the chill feels chilly.It’s not a room. Call it a chill with four walls.
When the sky clouds, we cry,Oh, God, what do we do in these abandoned ruins?
Summer days, sunlight fills every pinch of space,
There’s not half a pinch of shadow inside.Summer is hell and winter is hell frozen over.
Hell’s ice and spitfire don’t have such effect.The great brightness catapults such spitfire that
Chameleons, sun-worshippers, gather in my room.The shutters are fragile as a spider’s web except
They catch nothing, not even swarming mosquitoes.On days of hail, raining glass breaks heads and hearts.
On days of rain, water leeches at the room, threadbare and unkempt.In snow and wind, get a sleigh. In rain, get a barge.
Get a paddle or at least a broken basin to bail.Use the bowl to throw the flour out.
Use the paddle in case you get washed out.If this isn’t a mill, why all the flour?
If this isn’t a barge, why does it float?Bowl and spoon, mat and rug, they surge with the tides
Like turtle and fish and octopus.Days, our air is rippling water: rivers and streams.
Nights, the racket of crabs and frogs keep us awake.The water weasels in and takes things away with it.
I cry out, robbed, robbed.The room had been bred. Pregnant and due in spring,
But autumn brought an early birth, premature.Its belly swelled to the floor, but truth was
The seed was only water, the stillbirth brought on by lightning.The sky stones us with hail. Our novices run around,
Cut, ripped up, ass-torn.They run to the surgeon’s, the doctor’s
With their hems rolled up, their heads split open.The kind roof repairman allowed us all to learn:
If a man drowns, he will float, not sink.
You didn’t resurface the roof,
So, don’t kick the room, for God’s sake, let it weep.
6
I have the sugar-bearer’s nature. If he writes in Kurdish
He tests himself. He does this on purpose.Like a horseman in various fields of fluency
His tongue gallops fast and loose.Don’t try my words. They are Kurdish: self-made.
If he’s not stupid, if he searches for the irreplaceable,
He will attach himself to meaning. He will findMy room and trade his soul for scraps, for drafts.
When will other poems have the delicacy of mine?
When will rope contest the precision of silk?
7
Mestura, the beautiful, counted as a scholar
She entered my dream tonight winking and teasing.“I have come,” she said, “with such a riddle.
I am yours if you have its answer.
You parse open questions so well that
No one refutes you, not in China or Khata.Scrubbing reveals color in a mirror.
So, this hefty mind exposes Mastoora.A good joke is a funny person’s fate,
But I present my pain for it to be cured.This secret, what is it? Is it Suha, the pearl
Of the sky, that has not been dulled or drilled?An antique store? The spring of shame or survival?
The majestic dome of domes yet to cave?A curtained tent that stands on two poles:
At the apex, a thin, gossamer slit?A Sufi testing his mettle, sliding into his sanctum,
Sheltered, honored, sublime, above?Or the silver of a miser, far from generous,
Shut tight with thrift, like the fists of mullahs?An overturned wine glass, such waves
Of soft crystal, it has chipped?Or a stain of untouched snow?
Bright Qandil, the path of water and wind?Which water and wind? The best breeze for growth,
The sweet headwater at it begins to flow?In that spring, rhubarb has flowered
With its trim stamen.Or it’s a high castle of mirrors,
Or a bud tight with thirst.Or a domed pavilion of intertwined flowers
And spun sugar in the castle garden.Or it’s a castle of marbled, gleaming salt
Cut open for its one drop of water.Or it is a hilltop, sweetly ready,
Such savory soil, no grass has grown.Or it is a treasure chest of pure gold,
Edged in flowers, etched by ManiWho scored it hundreds of times. The curse
On the hoard it hides has yet to be broken.Or an orphan, naked and homeless,
Sunken and stunned: no mother, no father.On her baldhead is a tight, white fez.
To this day it remains in its right place,
Fit and rounded as if made to form,A bit frayed: the fabric so tight and soft.
Or a jewelry box, all beauty and ornament?
A bright pearl of pure water?An ostrich egg newly hatched,
White as a bride’s veil is lightened by grace?Or is it a plump, young cantaloupe, watered with honey,
So pretty and sweet, a slice has been stolen from it?Or is it a witness, should we describe it that way?,
To these silver, young breasts.Or a fruiting watermelon so new its flower hasn’t fallen,
So new, it is unsplit, uncut, like gold sugar pumpkin?
To see how sweet it is,
Cut a bit, small as the eye of the pen.Or, perhaps, it is not like this or like that,
But famous and hidden as the Simurgh and faith.This master of gold and silver that deceives the wise,
What alchemy of red gold does it have?How much trouble have princes spent,
How much blood spilled for that un-spilled blood?Who in this world, servant or king,
Has fucked such a fine, lively virgin?”The madman, when he saw the riddle he must solve,
Rose and said, “I sacrifice pure tears for you.The one for this puzzle must be a brutal specialist
Of strong build who can wound to the bone,Who is firm and tough as the arduous books of the wise,
Who can hide away any study of this secret.He must be fine velvet and prolific as scholars in their prose,
Long and rising as the hands of prayer.If he sleeps, he must remain alert: the flag at satisfaction’s door.
If he rises blind, he must be his own walking stick.
Charismatic among the orders, he shakes with chills and fevers.
A mystic, he behaves like the good people who follow the path.The crown of his head must plead to enter the mihrab.
His eye must be sunk in floods of tears.He must never walk in forbidden, scorned paths.
Has his water been purified? How much remains impure?If his head goes down these paths, it’s his death.
His neck bows to your feet. Tire your feet. Come to him.
Walk quickly through the dark paths of survival.The Water of Life, drop by drop, will sustain you.
Who but you could show mercy to me this night?
You with your charm and merciful devotion.So alluring, so worthy of taking and giving,
Veiled and hidden like the morning wind.He rises drunkenly to blind the stalkers.
Make this skewer warm and wet with meat.”
Nali, come on. Don’t blacken paper, slate, or book
With these jokes that shame even the poets.If imagination and dreams, once written, were counted,
Dervishes and slaves would be kinged and kings enslaved.So, dedicate your thoughts and dreams to God’s secret paths, not
The search for pleasure.Don’t be the flag that flaps in desire’s wind.
8
Even armed with the water of life and Jam’s magic mirror,
What a short life you had, weighed by all your many hopes.You collect this world and the other, so
You die, possessing neither.Just yesterday, the world was your dear wife.
She has turned traitor now, sick of you.Yesterday, you spent your tongue bragging of your dignity.
Today you regret it. You have no mouth, no breath.Your life was a single breath worth the whole world.
Die sad: all was wasted, withdrawn in sorrow.Your stomach is a tarp of manure that empties and fills,
Your fasts and your hopes both driven by desire and the belly.Nali, why are you sunk like a cockroach in dung?
You always said you were a moth with his own flame.
9
I didn’t die without you this time, though I can’t take even the next step without you.
My insides are empty, they moan like a ney.
What shelter is this, full of cries, without you?My eyes have closed. They won’t open for anyone’s
Face. Each eyelash is a steel nail without you.Every muscle that can moans. Head to toe,
My body keens without you.I swear by the pure nectar of your arrival
My wine is venom without you.For you, a briar patch is a rose garden without me.
For me, a harvest of roses is briars without you.I see all peoples of all genders, yet
There is no one in this city without you.Until I knew you, I knew others.
Now, each hair of my body is stranger to the next.You left this year, so each day I wish I’d died last year,
Before I was without you.Longing for the tall cedar of your body, Nali’s eyes
Have become two streams, no, rivers, without you.
10
I sacrifice myself for the dust you leave behind, you fine breeze,
You messenger entirely familiar with the city near Shahrazur.Your kindness is hidden. The moving air is a friend.
You, zephyr, carry good news. You are a corner of God’s presence.Oh, shared nature, humid and flowering,
A storm of sight, the heart’s spark, oven-hot.At one time, fresh, you fan the heart.
At one time, a forge, you provoke the reign of pride.You erase and they accept all but the memory of your scent:
The northern dust, the southern hurricanes, the wind’s whistle.It’s all burned: the porch, my patience, my insides.
Nothing is left except at the corner of prayer and patience.I am the sigh’s company, the fellow-traveler of tears.
Have mercy on these sighs and tears.Stand. Do all you can. Like my sighs, run to my lover’s land, to her front door.
Like my tears, be pure as the waters of Shiwazur.Wash away the dust of this earth with that wind.
Be happy, wind and water, to meet: wind is clean and water is the cleanser.This time don’t stop until you reach the spring of Sarchinar,
Its water full of pomegranate and sycamore, flower and pine.A source like the sun, at once in a hundred places, a bright
Eruption, pure light from a stone, a geode.Or it is the reflection of the sky as
Its stars fall in meteoric light.Or it is the source of full blessings from the knowledgeable,
The spring of the light that consumed the burning bush.I said, It would be my own two eyes if Bakrajo
Were sharp, fruitless, warm, salty, and red.Don’t enter the desert of land and dust with amber.
Go through Sulaimani first. It is the garden of gardens.Stay for a time.
Bathe in the musk of young boys’ scalps, virgins’ hair.Its land is amber, its trees agarwood,
Its stones jewels, its streams light.Its evenings all mornings, its seasons all spring,
Its dust all rosewater, its steam all incense.It’s a flat, warm city, in a fine and soft place.
To ward off the evil eye, they call it The City of Shahrazur.Such are its people: all people of knowledge.
They string necklaces yet supervise affairs.Observe the stones and trees.
Ask questions, make inspections, high and low.Has the psyche of Sharshakam Bridge collapsed?
Has the body of the Pirmasur tree become frail?Is Sheikh Habas still dressed in green flags?
Or has he become homeless? A notable naked?Do people gather around Kani Ba?
Or have they become divided over revolution and resurrection?Is Seywan still green and clear as the dome of Sirius?
Or has it become a circle of graves?Does Kaniaskan still belong to the deer?
Or has it become a field for wolves and their howling?Is Awdar Stream still crying with love?
Or has it become a dry Sufi, distant from truth?I wonder: does the Tanjaro still roar? Does it run clear?
Or is it captive to the land, silted?Look closely at the grass inside the khanaka.
Do deer roam or are tame beasts tied up?Around the flowers, is it green?
Misted as lines in the lover’s face?Or is it dry straw, rough as the beard of Kaka Sur?
Is its heart brightened by dear ones?
Or full of stalkers, like hell?Do they clasp hands as elm and cedar?
Or have unlucky, bent-neck Sufis begun to circle?Check on the green trees of the madrasa:
Are their leaves healthy? Or dead?The full pool where my sight lives,
Has it become silted like Shiwazur Stream?Is the courtyard’s edge still a place
For play? Or ground for arrogance?Put an eye on the green and water of the area,
The place where my eyes appear: is it soft or rough?By God, is the plane of faqes still now full
As Judgment Day? Or has it become empty as Salm and Tur?Give my greetings, scented with rose-water, to my room.
What is left? What is gone from the porch, the niche, the room?Is that lovers’ grotto now full of strangers?
Still galloping with lovers? Or galloping now with snakes and ants?My mouth is like the crescent moon. I am thin as imagination.
Do I fall on anyone’s tongue? Cross anyone’s heart?Explaining this exile, an illness,
The heart might become water and cross through the eyes.Will I have the chance, the permission, to return from the liminal or
Is it in my interest to keep myself from returning until the breath of Sur?Make her understand in secret, “Oh, stone-hearted lover,
Nali, longing, sends you his greetings from far off…”
11
The cross-eyed, with their diffuse sight, study reason.
The wise, who know oneness, are ashamed at the suggestion.The true servant by his own admission accepts his destiny.
Now, urgent, active, he seeks a place apart, of his own.The Toothbrush and the Torchwood are both called tree
But this is a friend to the Sunna and that is a willing Abu al-Hab.Fate and destiny are innate, unlike searching in the weeds.
Tobacco’s fate is to burn, the cigarette’s: to kiss the lips.You blame your era that it prefers the slanted to the straight.
You don’t know your right hand serves your left.Like a parrot, your ambitious heart put your neck in greed’s noose.
Like a nightingale, filled with love for the rose, I sing and harmonize.Nali, there’s no mouth like yours, no shoulder at your height,
No couplet as from your mind, the juvenile, the joker.
12
I had a donkey of such stature: able to traverse steep slopes,
With a wide chest, quick hooves, high shoulders, and long ears,With a wide belly, a hinny’s tail, and dark sex.
Singular, he gallops, three strides in one, quick as two winds, braying in six long tones.His mind is a wine glass full to spilling over.
Like the lion, the grazing gazelle, the wild wolf,
He’s never tasted the cudgel.Sweetly-saddled, thin-waisted, monkey-footed,
Round-hoofed, hinny-tailed, enduring, sweating,Blue and turning blue like fresh cinder, and dusted.
Glint and glinting like the holy, without a speck of dandruff,Hooves of jade lost in feathered wool,
Eyes like rubies or two lanterns, gleaming into the night.Long-eared, loaded down, and saddled high,
He outsteps the caparisoned horse.More lively and aware than the short-eared who are only good for labor,
He’s content at satisfaction’s door, satisfied with hay and brambles.A patient and enduring traveler, uncomplaining.
He was a clever one, able to thieve along the road,
He had better manners than hundreds of crazed kids.Fasting eternally by day, but without intention,
Awake for the night prayer without praying,I was very happy when in his own tongue he said,
“Oh, Nali,
We’re both animals, you a short-ear and I a long-ear.”
13
His beard, in its width and length, serves as two faces.
It’s obvious. His grows his beard long and wide to deceive.
The morning wind laughed with the rose’s mouth.
The nightingale flew away.A lover needs distance from a faithless lover.
I’m in love with Truth’s creation.
I sacrifice myself for Power’s color:Fair eyes, blue beauty marks, white cheeks, black hair.
The caravan’s captain had a heavy head on the Silk Road,
Loaded as he was with her wisps of hair, two threads heavy with amber and musk.Falling to the coins jingling along her silver belt: her ringlets.
These rings and rings permit my secrets,
They guard the hoard like dragons.The Sufi, cloistered, naked, and broke, is made greedy
By heaven’s countless beauty marks and matchless ruby kisses.On the surface and below, on the slate of truth and metaphor,
On the secrets of the pen, no one is left but Nali.
14
Hold your breath. Stop its coming and going, this
Wind that has aged you with each breeze.Your life is cash to buy renown and God’s Satisfaction
But you spend it on profit and luxury and infamy.I am amazed by you, liver. My slack heart has held
You over this fire for a while and you’ve yet to roast.This universe is a woman, the planet a distaff, each orbit: grief’s spindle.
She spins the dark roots of your existence. Still you are unraveled.The heavens meet, time spins, and the sky’s hook catches
The thread of your existence, spinning and spinning.Still, you survive. Is the world a bar? You are woozy in its cups,
Singed by its song, stunned and tipsy in its glass.Now, your life and its amusements are bitter, bitter.
I swear on your death, you eat the bitterness of bitterness.Desire to see land and ocean has set your life on fire.
You are only one link in soil’s chain, one drop of frozen water.If you are soil, soil a hem. If not, you are dust in the wind.
If you are water, refract. If not, you are foam on the sea.The scraps of the universe have not become the coffin’s camphor.
Stand. Tonight gives its chance: the universe is still cobalt, you still live.Serve the supper of contrition, so your body won’t be the tablecloth.
Break the glass teacup, so you do not break.Until you circle the Ka’aba, a traveler on its paths,
You will remain as you are, ignorant of your ignorance.Men are servants and this world is foreign to those who aren’t conscious.
Even the persistent petitioner doesn’t know how to name the unknown Thing,That Which has no equal, belongs to no species or nature,
Beyond discovery or certainty,Untouched by certainty and those who recite Hadith.
It’s worse than ignorance: you can’t attain the knowledge you lack.
This old ThingWon’t confirm the speech of one who talks or narrates.
In the Quran, the hidden and sealed “I fear no one”
Won’t be explained by two hundred Discoveries and Beythawi.Revealed by the Quran, by the light of “Read with the eyes,”
Even with Discoveries and Beythawi, it’s still obscure.When your place is worship, what’s “high”? What’s “low”?
If you love to instill, what’s Barzanji? What’s Barawi?
Don’t call for pure pedigree in a putrid carcass.
If you are a Said, what is Barzanji, what is Piriayi, what is Barawi?
Come, Nali, I’ll tell you a joke: they assume
That were all the world yours, still you’d keen and need.
The translations are by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse. In a few instances, I have made minor adjustments to the wording of her translations, but full credit for translating the collection belongs to her.
No comments:
Post a Comment