Revenge

(Translated by: Huda Fakhreddine)


a.
The coats are all there,
the winds all there,
footprints deep in the snow all there,
the lamps, houses, last apparitions, all there.
So gather in your tame hands all that they can hold of perfection
and strive so that the scene may be a tamed echo.

b.
An unease, like morning, preoccupies those approaching my end, and I — struggling under a great net — hang place — like a prisoner’s pants — on the line, that delicate line, running from the origin of comedy to your moaning.

c.
The abundance of naught is I and will is my suspicion.

d.
Rage is the sign of night and water a thought ahead of its own completion.

e.
Like a shoe polished,
like a nickel doorknob,
thus is your scream.

Vocabulary:

Day: anger masked in air
Wind: the steps of a word toward its secret
Sound: the ruin of form
Longing: gold scattered on the velvet of the end
Space: the shaper of light
Nothingness: the humor of shadows languishing in their seats
Writing: violence testing the forgotten
Number: the yield of futility
Fruit: the tree’s proof of a past that eludes all proofs
Mask: the moaning of the manifest
Distance: repeated panting
Certainty: a murmuring on the other side
Resurrection: a childhood confirming reason
Gold: a bar fight
Life: a golden bullet
As for you, dweller in endings, don’t wander too long, lest dinner get cold.


(translated by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen from By the Same Traps, By the Foxes Riding the Wind, 1983)