style="font-size:15px;"> The attaché walked me through the Damascus marketplace to a man—a dyer of cloth—who printed his patterns on cloth by hand—buy one before he dies—the attaché said—before you leave this country for the next. The man’s shop was in an alley off the marketplace—there was an open door—the walls were something like adobe—there was a floor also of hard packed earth—dust—dirt—everywhere his jars, brushes, printing blocks, benches, tables barely standing—everywhere the blue the Syrian’s love—the blue of their glassware—the blue of their desire. He sat wrapped in a tunic like the magician—the maker of patterns on cloth—something was said—he smiled—his discolored hands lifted to me blue and definite as words I could understand.
Despondency
There were times alone in my room, I felt the low point of travel. The weariness of understanding the fright of the world, or at least a variableness of it. So much larger than anything I had touched, but saw nonetheless, and could only express it sometimes in discordant images rolling against the other.
One afternoon I cried and had trouble stopping.
There was a muddle flying over the earth. A shard of fear. A distinct withdrawal from the awareness of the enormity of what was below and maybe above. What was the earth but a speeding story that maybe could not stop before it was too late for slowing? The unwrapping of other baggage I carried that would not stay packed.
This summit of one’s self speaking before an assembly about the ordinariness of one’s life because they thought all of America was rich. And to read one’s work and have it interrupted by a professor telling his students the Arabic language was what poetry was, not the plainness of language I was bringing, and yes, yes, that was true, but poetry also carried the plainness of one’s experienced life, and I continued my reading, and when it was over, the students shuffled by my table leaving mementoes and their thanks for what I brought.
Later in my room, I put my hand to my burning forehead, not with sickness, but with recognition of another part of the world. Maybe more than once I had the urge to fall on my knees and beg once more for what had passed.
Presentiment
The engines somewhere were running.
I could not hear them.
But I felt a vibration somewhere deep in the days ahead.
Sometimes when I woke
I felt we were already in the van
moving over the road to the next place on the itinerary—
a slab of unrest
making its way like a strong wind across the world.
Monday, March 28, Private Dinner Hosted by Bohemian Syrian Writers and Dissidents
I met a beautiful man who’d cooked chicken and rice and there was salad and other dishes on the table of his apartment. I hugged him when I left, held my head against his chest too long. We shared a kiss delicious as the meal, and he who said no English, said, stay with me. I couldn’t, of course, you know regrets the next morning, the responsibility of responsible behavior, the diligent heart of a diligent nation.
But I would like to have, and felt brittle as my papers when they dried after I left them on the porch in the morning rain. He still holds me against him as if our ancestors long ago had left one behind when the other started out to reach a new land, because they loved the sea, because they loved travel, because they loved most of all the nomad of the human heart, or the camel-train starting out now toward the stars, because we’re not satisfied, but striving down the ages to hold one another in that separation, that necessary departure, we’re still having to leave.
Ebla, Syria
You stand in a country not your own. The ruins of the oldest city in Syria. The excavations opened in a country whose cravings you begin to understand. The sky as a whole toward whose reason the birds turn as a departure from this earth. How a people stay with you. How your attempts are a varmint in the way things work. Your tactics not solid as these digs, but you feel the blue glassware as you pack the plane that lifts it from the land.
Departure to Another Place
You change countries on a plane with Arabic writing. Your small roll-on luggage upright by your legs without safety regulations you know in your country. But a lunch that is right.
Sometimes I met in different places between classrooms and lunch rooms with students, each trying to say what they thought, what they wanted, asking if there was a way to take them. Later, the letters would arrive from young men with their photographs.
The trip felt like pieces from different puzzles mixed together with pieces missing from each. I picked up desperation. Maybe my own. I felt an insurrection, a rising of impossibilities wedged into hope, though the avenues were not there that would bypass the troubles.
It was freedom they wanted, a word so used in America its power was not as hallowed.
At night, in my room alone, I wanted to stay beside the awful hugeness of the world.
Bedouin Girl Reads about Transportation in Russia
1.
March 31st–April 2nd Jordan
On the road, the three-wheeled trucks overloaded
with people,
the hexagonal side-panels of metal,
silver, red, green,
like strange banners in a cathedral,
an ostrich feather on the grille.
2.
Above Amman, in the mountains, remote, windy, rainy,
a barefoot girl, a Bedouin, reads a schoolbook
the interpreter says is on Russian transportation.
If you told her how reading all that
she’s behind the world’s traffic
as she’s ever been in your western thought.
She’s reading wrong and out of date.
Their trucks would be your junkyard,
and you know how your country’s arrogance
makes you smug and you unwrap it
like a tick as if it’s simply uncontested.
The armed soldiers stand at checkpoints on the shore
where Russia peddles its hype to those who cannot know
the jabals,
wadis,
the windy villages, concrete-walled and cold-floored.
3.
