What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?: What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?

Lyric/Resistance

The distance, from gryphons of stone / stuck in place, from the young Muslim woman

The distance, from gryphons of stone

stuck in place, from the young Muslim woman

who grows up in such few square meters

(the star Delta Gruis is fruit topped with cookie dough),

is my punishment.

Bright star, accidental digger,

tell me about the margins of the fronds, other windows,

other screens, other suns: I’d like a stroke or a seizure,

I’d like a six-petaled volcano to be my travel document.

*

All the little people of the monarch’s dance—

we are being invaded by champagne running out—

the invaders are a detachment of villagers whose

Urdu is not quite what you would hope it would be,

but their fetal abnormalities (and other containers) we

hope we can forgive. I tried to enliven my mother

with the help of Voltaire-paper wrappers, the immensity

of wool and mohair, hiding from the Endlösung

that never comes. Winter, winter of stony fish,

winter of debris flickering across the yellow-shafted

face, tell me something about warm waters, tell me

if the house will grow on me when the invaders

become invisible with the sun. What number of copies

of the book is just right? The witness is vague and arch.

*

A sport where you gentlemen-confectioners—

chiefly for knifes and sword blades? no—

for the joy of the stream, for the upholstery,

produce in sums of money amateurs

(predatory water beetles) who share the long long dance.

These are the parts of the language. Death, in my will,

is a chamber without a chair, a fine without heat,

all of us concerned for the smaller evidence (exhaust fumes

of personal sentiment), the umpire’s finger

going up like the stock exchange produced in cans.

The ball resting against the cushion of fuchsia flowers

draping my legs, the size of botanist-mafias (Bob Dylan,

all of the greats), those very sounds, great auks, parish

churches to the tuft-grass apes. The village green (whose

tales are full of humour) deters attack on the major poets in

their 16th-century moods, as we equal diminutive-

invasions, the leap in the park, the leap for the lock of hair.

*

I went to Miami Beach,

molasses shaped to the cornice

of tongue-climate. There,

the ant lions and snake flies

came in from offshore pedicures,

the holiday was a vital area

of psychoanalysis. Dry leaves are

aging. The schlubs (identified

as Homer’s Troy) are members of

the secret police, skeleton-water.

*

I am afraid of:

spraddle, the tartufo-spree

of the Tarim, evaporating,

with not much of a defined bed,

evaporating into pollen sacs,

cartoons. I am afraid of:

thatches of trout lilies,

making me stay away from school.

What is not covered by insurance?

The weeklong wiggle of the hips.

I am afraid of gliders,

I refuse to drop closer to the ground.

After the fall of Jerusalem—

after laissez-passer at the Wailing Wall—

the black river out of gear,

the one who worships idle threats.

*

When my mother—

through the arrows of idle-memory—

became hybrid

back-formation,

of lower rank than the angels,

then I brought bad lack (wryneck)

to translating her ear,

and in the local tango (or polka),

the infection, they said,

was minuscule:

like the dry

monsoon, a simpler sugar.

*

On the order of Janis Joplin: these

feast days (the appalling loss of life I knew

in the third battle) are theater-colonies,

where I cannot take action to prevent accidents,

I cannot, in the evenings, startle with Pop Art,

I cannot be a small sharp blade to stiff leather.