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Babylons, continued--
VII.
Memory is the genealogy I admit
when you ask me to explain
myself. It’s usually more noble than
it ought to be, a kind of ascent,
the firestorm end of a dull day
wasted in sleep and inane
labor, language that confesses
the best case for me before you,
a rhetoric. In turn, I remember
what you’ve said of your past, mark
the impresse acted into the shape
of your body under mine, a mnemonic
for the rising where both
our bodies are who we claim to be
before sinking into forgetfulness.
In this way, destiny is always
manifest: we can lift progress from
misdeeds and misfortunes that otherwise
seem like unrelated circumstance
or bad timing. History is rewritten
so all voices herald the present
before receding as grave
misgivings. Love, memory is what
we present to receive the greater
gift in exchange, what I say
about my lineage to become part
of yours, where we can imagine
no loss occurring in the bitter
division when we’re together,
the colony of our desire in time.
VIII.
Bell’s claim of illustrious descent
gained her access to the most
influential Arabs: as good as a hand
on the tent pole. Bedouin grace
opens doors, parts goathair weave, sets
out the pestle to grind coffee.
He respects the power of holding others
to the table. And the wergild.
At twenty-three she was engaged
to a functionary in the Persian
embassy. In love over Hafiz
and Catullus, translating each in turn.
Her stepmother became nervous:
propriety before passion.
Bell broke it off, consented to wait
for something “surprising and remunerative.”
It didn’t matter she meant to wait
for him, he died one year later,
after a swim in river ice.
In Iraq Bell was called Khatun,
“Lady of the Court.” In London she was called
by Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf—
she spoke to everyone. Henry James told
her at a dinner party that ambiguous
plots drive the nail further into art’s
coffin. A vision with five tongues,
Sadi’s rose blooms at her throat, Bell
knew the cost of carrying dialogue
across thresholds, the price of le mot juste,
the manners “too lovely not to be sad.”
IX.
The manner of clay is its formal account.
I, likewise. Tabs, tabulations, 30,000 tablets
in the lovely hand of Sumerian
scribes. Ledgers of booty, gifts and taxes,
cattle thriving in offspring inventory
in the quotidian style: 1 she-goat
1 gazelle dead 1 fair barley fatted
sheep accepted the year the King of Ur
built the Western Wall the year the deep
sea going ship was built the year the goat
1 lamb for omen the year the year
the city 1 cock was destroyed 1 stag
1 ewe. Premiums for flood and groan
of women’s labor. The body and its walls.
Smuggled past Turkish officials
into European collections, these
figures, beneath men eating clay instead
of bread, speak like the merchant with his thumb
on a scale: profiting from the measure.
These signs, cut, covered over, recut, leave
no marks for the loss in sacrifice—
the price of exchange in the temple,
heart, or home. No room for lyrics
passing. The song of a boat drifts
beyond the Euphrates, sadness lingering
like the old lament of a husband
for his wife dead in childbirth,
“your thwarts are all broken
your mooring rope cut.”
“Pardee! We’re all baked clay with signs.”
X.
“Sir, the noble and interesting
Euphrates is far too celebrated.”
It may afford, Colonel Chesney,
route to England from India;
survey plain for the post-diluvian
seat of mankind; Biblical navigation,
deep channel of nine fathoms; two hundred
to more than a mile wide; expedition
in four volumes, “with nineteen maps and charts,
embellished with many plates, besides
numerous woodcuts.” The river runs
the length of Genesis—Adam
tricked into camping East of Sinjar,
overlooking the plains from where Cain went
to build a city, become a husbandman.
It winds through the exactions and
monopolies bribed out of Turks, passes
the manufacturing city of Job where cold
from the north came in snow and treasures
of hail, rain from the mountains, friends from
the silver and brass mines in the neighborhood.
Chesney marks the fields where Satan walked
to and fro, up and down in them composing
ways to win judgment, where Job’s cattle
grazed before carried off in a raid,
“Here twilight is lengthened. The idolaters
of the day were on hand to fall
upon oxen ploughing in Latitude 37°9’44”.”
XI.
At this point, suppose our deepest concerns
might be eased by a cycle of speeches given
while, on our knees, we face each other and
argue in turn. Would it do to call the other
a heretic as the proposition? Are
dualism and megalomania the only
legitimate recourse to our troubles,
purity and self-pity? Did Cain strike because
Abel had too much time on his hands,
because Cain continually dug, stopping to imagine
a city in smoke which refused to rise?
Is our property stolen only by idolaters
from the desert, mountains, across the river?
You always said what’s outside doesn’t
matter—but see, when inside, somebody’s
usually knocking on the door with bad
news, or the telephone rings. Could sex
be the one act without interruption
before dying? Suppose it means something
to say, “This did we habitually.”
Perhaps the danger that enters sleep
wears your face behind the diabolic mask,
an accusation settled when you let
it lie comfortably in bed, stilled by
the calling for air, asking nought but
skin from skin, words from words, before
a high pressure storm intervenes,
or the voice behind, that, although
overwhelming and desirable, defers
the questions before you finish your turn.
XII.
Ishtar’s in the dark, like an author
unable to live outside the domain
of her characters, unable to find
the way between reproduction and feminine
desire, war and the company of other
women. As a result, irrigation
ditches are dug, grain is warehoused, her
shepherd is sent down for ransom.
The daughter of Sin sleeps on a slab
breathing clay, until a transvestite
juggles in hell and revives her. For that,
he’s condemned to eat bread baked in ashes,
drink water out of a jug—urban life
as a banishment. When Ishtar descends,
like a Platonic character, she moves by
commands masked as dialogue.
Gertrude Bell’s at the fourth gate
without her breastplate, Marcia’s at the third
sans girdle of birth-stones. There could
be a character at each threshold, leaving
a trail of adornment, naked in the house
from which no light comes forth, star dust
settled on door and lock. Not that it’s true,
nor does it count—“the courtier in his
chamber/the lady in her court.” Yet,
if she, who is male in the morning
and female at night, leaves the man
who saves her life by dancing in a dress,
could their roles be arranged so that when
she’s gone he misses a lover, not mate to his matter?
XIII.
“Only I shall read no more letters
from you yourself to me myself no
more in the mornings on Half Moon Street,”
C.H.M. Doughty-Wylie (his intimates
called him Dick) to Gertrude Bell in nineteen
thirteen. “The man whom she loved,” we are
authorized to state in nineteen sixty-one.
“Show me something of your mind,” he
begged. Married to “quite a pleasant little
wife” with no children. Shot through the head
at Gallipoli. “Wretched spinsterhood,”
relates Bell’s biographer. “Shallow
cup,” Bell intones, “desire.” She hands over
a body mangled by dogs for Dick to
exorcise, “Remember him in your
prayers.” He was buried where he fell.
The affair unconsummated. Military
officials wondered whether to march
toward Baghdad. When Bell heard, she made
her way to Hampstead, then the Middle East,
“this sorrow at the back of everything.”
Behind intelligence reports on Arab
tribes and sheiks, back of their lineages
she drew by heart, the place-names, family-
names, back in Mesopotamia,
waiting for Turks to attack the canal.
Sorrow in the language “a charming little man”
brought from Syria and with whom
she exchanges parts each morning,
“constantly held up for a familiar word.”
XIV.
The voice weakens around words of the same
family, struggles past lines of mutual
descent. Translation is failure
in correspondence. It counts debits.
Sleep offers the dream of acquisition
and point, upon awakening, to leave
on the way to common sense. We
continue traveling by night
with no pause to orient or repair
the conversation that started without us.
Either we missed the call to prayer or
don’t understand, unable to find
a niche in the wall that marks the direction
to face. Letters get mixed and arrive
too late to prevent the drama
from beginning; so characters read backwards
to discover when fate crossed the curve
of their fear and followed in pursuance
relentlessly. We grow dizzy at the advent
of retrograde motion displacing
our site at the center: a small room
where lovers argue and end in bed to face
opposing sides, an azimuth
between them. If they watched their house
turn above trees silvered in ice,
its walls framed in chains of glass that
throw back light in periodic waves, they
could tell time. Then to say the nothing
behind, “What does that mean?” seems unimportant
because it takes up space in the window.
[Babylons concludes in Samizdat No.2.]
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