3. In gratitude
To my mother
Bernadette McGrath O’Rourke
4. How could this be?
Up That frogs spew water from fictional noses and all I see is you?
My eyes freeze the same scenes the Fuher must have seen so many years ago
Frogs with noses of water and elephants with ivory tusks
Over
on alternating panels of blue, green, red and gold
Canopies hanging gracefully on chains
Latticed metal holding it all back
the
East and West have collapsed into a tourist site
How could this be?
Body
That since you left history has no gravity for me?
The blood runs backwards in my veins
The needle on my compass steadily and aimlessly flutters
Earth runs directionless beneath my feet
I sit in lobbies like this one
Stamped with the irony of time
I am told I am seeing what Alexander must have seen
under the flamboyant Egyptian sun
I retrace a gladiator’s footsteps
And leaping into his cage
Howl into an empty coliseum
I breathlessly hunt Eric the Red
Mock the mummy of Ramses
and stand under Romeo and Juliet’s balcony
cursing all of them for their vanity
Unable to differentiate between history and fiction
I stumble dutifully like a panicked Hajar
weeping over the lost footsteps of prophets
swaddle my son in tears
drink imaginary waters
and gaze numbly onto a gold covered kabah
5. What I do remember
Is how I remember you now
In a foreign city
You never saw or cared about
That has nothing
And everything
To do with you
In a room thousands of others have slept in
Where I have nothing and everything to do with others
I remember how the skin scaled on your forearms
The specks of yellow in your eyes
Your voice on late September air
Your warm smell under the covers in March
And Your sigh
An eagle
A winged lion
Ready to soar above the inane
Your sigh
Summarized the past better than any historian ever could
Up
Over
The
Body
That’s where you told us to linger
I have been wingless too long, mother
Grounded and magnetized by gravity
A Believer in Events.
Up
Over
My
Body
Is where history is waiting to be known and named
How could this be?
That here
Where I know you never were
I miss you most?
6. o Your loss is like
An empty hammock in fall
Still swinging in the breeze
With the memory of your body
Arms hanging languidly
Sustaining the sway
The icy waters of a lake
Blue and bottomless
In early November
Too early to receive the scars of skates
Too late to receive the brown bodies of children
Waiting for another season
The trail of an airplane
In a blue cloudless sky
Absence
Flimsy and lasting
Leaving behind an alphabet that makes no sense
Ingested and chewed
After the sound has gone
7. Rivers
She watches the river
Flowing backwards and forwards
Green, grey, purple
blue spirals of now
A boy
Bound in darkness
Stone eyed
Eyes wide open
To greet the stench of error
A single gunshot The river ran through it
Burning putrid across place
Be it Euphrates
A girl Or nameless water starved creeks
Crouched in a corner All begin and end somewhere
Dry eyed Even Lethe, with all its blessings of forgetfulness, led to Hades.
Eyes wide open
To greet the piercing of air
The river ran through it
8. Fish Eye
The mood ring on her sister’s finger
The bumble bee in her shoe
Her grandmother’s comb digging the scalp of her tangled hair
The rusty nail through her foot
The open legged fall on the red banana bike
The heaviness on her chest under a weight she could not break
Her Anger
Wordless and flamboyant
The codfish
Sacrificed to pride
Dancing its rage against death
On salt beaten wood
She reached out her finger
Touched its open eye
And pushed
The soft surrender of tissue to muscle
The prick of the gurgling bubble of privacy
The membrane of fish eye just under her nails
9. I woke up
To find
That everything was breaking
Fragments of dishes retuning to dust in the kitchen
Water freezing itself on ceilings and floors
Window panes cracking into sand
Wooden doors shredding and half open
For a minute
I was disassembled
Considered calling a plumber
A carpenter
A glassblower
An exorcist
A guru
Falling in love
A philosopher
A poet
A prophet
A child
But then
I crawled back into my placenta
And watched my lover sleeping
His breath in fierce whirlwinds
Inside my womb
10. Pieces
I once made a man Then
Out of pieces One
Of cloth. cold
day
Stitching him together When I had thrown him over shoulders
Over long years He came undone.
With threads of disillusionment
And needles of despair. Starting with one
Simple thread
A masterful artist He
I was. Unraveled
Himself.
Cross stitching And left me
Double crossing Uncloaked.
And ignoring missed loops.
So full of my master
Full of what he would be
Could be
If I could wear him like a cloak
11. Raised spider veins
Spindle outwards
Under the surface of you
Like leaves of a red maple
Cracking under the autumnal touch of me
Exoskeleton Freckled biceps
balled and hardening
Under the surface of you
Like full pouches in a fat hamsters mouth
Tingling under the icicled taste of me
Rise of bone in knees and elbows
Intruding on symmetry
Under the surface of you
Like loose rocks in a mountain stream
Roaring under the vernal whisper of me
Inhaled breath
Diffusing through chest
Under the surface of you
Like a maddened light loving moth
Circling the midsummer shadow of me
Vein
Muscle
Bone
And breath
Numb from seasons of desire
In an exoskeleton worthy of worship
12. S(K)IN When I loved him he was a citrus,
sometimes sweet as mandarin
and sometimes as tangy as lemon,
in shades of orange and yellow and greenish unhappiness,
I once with a under layer of whitish words
knew that I could peel
a man who could lose his skin if I had patience
When I met him he was deep maroon,
the color of ripe cherries,
a small hard core and tangent fleshiness. But when I last saw him he had turned plum purple,
seeping pulp from the center
But when I trusted him, he turned an apricot yellow,
translucent and gritty. I wonder what skin he now lives inside
Now that the seasons of his country don’t change anymore
And the harvest is delayed indefinitely?
13. Crystalline lover,
liquid vowels
have no effect
on you,
ter freezing into consonants
clipped and claustrophobic
when they are
Mat
poured over you.
Amorphous lover,
fluid rhythms
State of
have no effect
on you,
vaporizing and trickling
down your glass panes
in rivulets of neglect.
The fact of the matter is Stateless Lover
that your matter In the state of this affair
is What does it matter?
stateless,
unbound
by the molecules of belonging
ostracized into
the atoms of an outcast.
The matter to be stated is
that your state
is
matterless,
melting
out of empires and kingdoms,
scooped up with the spoons of scoundrels
and condensed into
a State of forgetfulness.
14. With silver slippers
on hands and feet
crawl the path of the moon on the water
white jasmine buds in your pockets
and loneliness tucked behind your ear
Discrete
No primary colors here
all silvers and purples
greys
charcoals
Discrete
No need to keep reminding me of who we are
no need for your history lessons
and political treatises
its only you and me
in black and white
crawling the path of the moon on water
Do you hear the water under the glass?
In a few hours it will be daylight
and blues and greens
reds and aquas
Will assault us
In this onslaught of daylight
we will stand
and
Sink
15. Halfway up the stairs she pauses to feel the flesh that has replaced her
Indented, vein marked and bruised
Everything downward
Her eyes wide open meet his panicked and forgiving face
On a soundless winter night that engraved lines onto ice caked
windowpanes
His love took away her passion
Without even a photograph
The Fat Woman
She asked him to leave
She reaches the top of the stairs
with Beautiful
and peers into herself in the mirror
Even her eyelids are fat
Hair and her Lovers
Shuttered pinholes in skin
Obscuring her vision
Her feet motionless stumps in sand
With an overwhelming beigeness surrounding her
In the cool water of his anger
And his love enough for the two of them
She left
She walks heavy and begrudging Equatorial moon
Steps suspended between minutes Silent winter ice
Between motion and memory Desert dawn
Up the stairs in the house she was born You have left no marks upon her
Her body naked and motionless under an equatorial moon There is no mistaking it
Receiving skin drawn over bone and muscle There it is
She feels his tears on her neck In the mirror
With his words crumpled The defiant bounce
She asked him to leave She still has beautiful hair
16. Desert
You camouflage me
Your desire over mine
Like a lizard burrowing
Toward life in a dune
Your voice over mine
Like the slither of a snake
A monotonous zigzag
Your Faith over mine
Like the scorching sun
Demanding a chameleon to transform at will
Now that I am camouflaged
Do you care to seek me out?
17. After Taste
The warm wooly comfort of wine
Festering on the side of your tongue
The morning after
A guilty lover
Who dresses hurriedly before sunrise
The morning after
The sticky leftovers
Clinging like death and surrender
The morning after
The wind over the desert
Stinging and caressing with grains and stone
The morning after
Sweat and blood and memories
Collected in your bellybutton
The morning after
And words
Whispered and screamed
Echoed and silent
Forever freed
And never forgotten
Even in the morning after
18. Do you remember that spring day
When we undid our love?
Placentas
The city wet with birth
The earth crawling under us
As snow and ice metamorphosed?
At night we slept raw and desireless
Naked on the floor
When my first son was born
A nervous nurse dropped the placenta on the floor
After my soundless infant
Had been lifted
White and disinterested
From my body
While I was paralyzed and speechless to reclaim it
When my second son was born
I had plans to crush the placenta into powder
And eat it
But a shocked attendant called me cannibalistic
And righteously placed my placenta
Purple and alive
In a silver metal bowl
When my third son was born For years you have come to me in my dreams
On a rusted bed stained with the lament of war Holding back your hood as you placed an infant in a basket on the Nile
I tenderly guided out my placenta Leading sheep to slaughter in celebration
Its cord thick and hard Carrying frankincense and myrrh to cloak your intentions
And laid it on my stomach You with yours
The silence with which it spoke And me with mine
Has left me motionless ever since Terrified to see us before you
19. The Scent of
I put my nose in the nook of your neck
That private place between bone and voice
a Boy on a
And smell
The world you have brought into me
September
The powder on the underside of a moth’s wing
The succulent white of freshly pulled grass oozing
The dense salty death in a water dog’s pelt
Then
You put your arms around my neck
Evening
Legs around my waist
And hug me
Completely
You
Full of September
Your tough little arms
Thin with muscle and sinew
Your olive skin untainted by living
Your hair that smells only of air
The fine shell of your chest
Pressed against me
Porcelain on glass
You are my placenta
Fragments of self
Lost before you
Returned in your arms
20. After the Children
She can finally hear the voices of traffic outside the window
And imagine other people in cars
are Sleeping
Men and women
Their ringed fingers touching briefly on the spaces between their seats
The house cracking under the weight of comfort
The water dripping from the tap downstairs
The dog barking next door
The sound of fingernails on her scalp massaging away memory
She can finally feel her body
Reshaped by years of giving it to others
Their legs around her waist and bums on hips
Permanently redesigned her waistline
Her body lets go of its duties
Allows the tongues of words to kiss her goodnight
To lick her eyelashes and the soft skin behind her knee joints
In the language of her world and the now of her body
Words and her in stillness
Moving to the moans of sleeping children
Laughter and whimpering
The hiss of air through nostrils
21. Rashidieh In the evenings she visits the graveyards of martyrs
Placing neat configurations of stones,
Not flowers,
On the roof Triangles
After midnight Circles
She can see her wire-connected world clearly. Squares
Antennas, clotheslines, electrical wires The perfect geometry of death
A jungle of connections
Inside the barbed wire barriers And at night
Separating past from present She sits on the roof
Hopes of a future Eyes traveling the antennas
Buried alongside the living Patrolling the alleys below
Barefoot children
Before midday she likes to journey underground Young man with permanent grease stains under their fingernails
To her place of security playing dominoes
A dark damp enclosure of blood, feces and snot Women with marks of childbirth and loss
A memory now Taking in clothes from neighbors’ roofs
Consciously brought into the present
Like the splash of a child jumping into a swimming pool Alone in her bed
She finds herself.
She brings her visitors here A body scarred but untouched
Nurses from Denmark, doctors from France, journalists from Sweden Feet swollen from marching
Eager to treat this malady Tongue thick from preaching
Of homelessness and ennui Fingertips moist from their underground journeys
She proudly exhibits the blood stains
Knocks on the concrete When the generators are turned off
And smells its memories on her finger tips Dominoes packed away
Into the evening And the whispers of men and women no longer creep down the
olive vines,
She tells the story of the 40 day siege She sneaks underground
Of how rats were eaten in this very place Closes the hatch over her
Out of desperation Until memory,
She knows the story in three languages Her lover,
And smiles as she tells the tale of terror to the doctors in despair. wakes her at sunrise.
22. Ardha
When he danced
He erased history
Centuries of places
Exile had etched on his body
Dissipated
When his limbs
Reclaimed their country
When he danced
He erased my history
Shadows
Excuses
Ideologies
Shyly slithered backward into my soul
I held Herodotus in my hands
And ripped out his pages
Digging my heels into his alphabet
Then in silence I sat
Weaving the fabric of a foreign alphabet
Into a sweater for my shattered spine
23. Again
Chain Lightning A few seconds of brilliance before alliance
and then invisibility
Cold stone on forehead Such perfect symmetry of Dissolving and Becoming
hands balanced to form a triangle of faith Becoming and Dissolving
(or is it practice?)
And I remember the Sky My face reaches the sacred Stone
that night I smell the scent of Ibrahim
his aged hands cracked from the desert shamals
the murmurs of the Believers perfumed with the waters of Zam Zam
and the smells of their eager bodies and the young Ismael
behind me fingers soft brown and quick
around me smelling of garlic and onion
carrying the scents of India – dripping jasmine and coconut oil then
sweat barely dried from their journeys up through Africa the sticky congealed smell
across Arabia of the sacrifice
still wet on their upper lips not so long ago
carrying with them small grains of sand in the creases between their toes
that ablution could not wash away and I remember
that night
And I remember the light touch of Father’s tobacco-stained fingers
the purplish hews permanent orange traces on my lower back
electricity against moist landscape the coffee and cigarettes of his mouth
every droplet of fog suspended in a moment of arid lucidity open in wonderment
hills of the forefront, usually green, sloping and defiant as we watch
now a backdrop, a purple mass of finger-paint the Sky together
everything a backdrop for
the Sky And now
and the fine lines of silver Bodies Unknown
one embracing the other §against me
for perfection I feel only their silver and purple
disintegrating as the other emerges as my lips are pressed
in brilliance against
The Kabaah
24. Expatriate
Do not be afraid
She is only a woman
Too laden with memory
With place and time
To ever turn you towards her
From across the beach Too burdened with age
She feels the weight of your eyes And self deprecation
To ever return your gaze
Your gaze
Is like the sting of salt water between her toes Yet
The languid lapse of calves and thighs Under the promise of your averted eyes
As waves caress and retreat She is young again
Like your eyes Emerging from the waves like a butterfly from a cocoon
And with the twitch of her wings
Your back is stiff and ashamed you open your arms to the rain
Half turned toward her and half turned toward the east
Half eager to turn around
And face her
Not eye on mouth
Nor eye on breast
A voyeur’s glimpse full of regret and longing
But a full stare
Of you into her
She hears your voice whispering
Like a shamal through the cracks of the Saudi desert
Earth ripping open from within
So deprived of moisture that it has cracked through the core
She dives into the water to hear your voice
To give to it her memories
The morning dew clinging to the oil paint of a clapboarded house
Salty residues of water on earth
25. Allow me to be sentimental and shower you with words
Call me what you like
A fool or a decaying idealist
It’s all the same when the time is right
What are you expecting this to be my dear?
A sonnet, a haiku an ode
Or the nothing that I love to write
Maybe I’ll paint a picture for you of our shared memories
in watercolor, chalk, or ink
But that would get rather complex don’t you think?
Since we both remember different things
Don’t laugh at me now
I’m being quite serious you know
Don’t tell me your loins ache
Or your member is misbehaving
And I’ll promise to tell you the truth
When I find it.
So love
Clash of Civilizations
Are you preparing for the clash of civilizations?
I suppose it’s necessary
I have cold coffee, dry toast and some dynamite in my tote bag
Dynamite to fend them off
Dry toast should last a few days though it will be a bit burnt
And cold coffee is thick and I never drink it
You see
I’m sentimental today
So take it all
I don’t need it
I’ll just eat my philosophies
26. Expatriate part II
The landscape of your country already knows me
Its proud cliffs are imprinted
With the footsteps of my childhood feet
That have never touched them
The volcanic springs are heavy with scents of my many repetitive deaths
The underwater forests still resound with the echoes of my fears
lost in their depths
This landscape holds memories of me
That I don’t have of myself
I am wiped blank
And recorded here like etchings on a wrinkled parchment,
I am indecipherable
27. Grravity
I sought you out on my bookshelves You
Fingers lingering over the spines of books As soft as the pads on a newborn’s feet
Looking for the one through which I could enter you Air blown from a saxophone
Raindrops on a windowpane
I dreamt you into life Smoke from a pipe
A fine boned child in a body of armor Strings on an oud
A fine fingered musician dancing to the rhythms of war Drops of sweat on an upper lip
Specks of yellow in the eyes of a cat
I envisioned you in my arms Foam on the crest of a wave
Your eyes rolled back Soft moss on the underside of a boulder
Your raw heart pumping blood into my open veins
You
I sniffed your fears Who I entered at first sight
And leaping over shadows of places and pasts And swam under your twin rivers
I pursued you and howled at the moon Holding my breath all the time
Weeping by your monuments
Your senses electrocuted me Eating greedily from your orchards
Worshipping in your deserts
You, so full of yourselves: Sleeping in your valleys
Worms inside a rusted tin can Until
A school of fish darting here and there Gravity
A bundle of soft kittens sucking Forced
Blind mice in a nest Me
Lizard eggs Out
Petals on a rose Of
Specks of dust in sunlight Your
Patterned threads on cloth Mouth
A flock of geese flying in a V
28. I should have known Arabia
never to love a man in exile Forgive me
He will reinvent you as his country I should have known my place
And carve his memory on your body Not struggled against the gravity of history
Without mercy he will give you the names of his cities, villages, And the black hole of the present.
childhood friends, lovers
Then he will curse your foreignness. Arabia
Show mercy
Arabia And sleep in me
Merciless lover My final exile
Will you ever give me peace? for a woman fated to be exiled
A woman who learned love in your men from exile
Poetry in your misery
Hope in your children
Faith in your prophet?
Arabia
I emerge from your mouth
Pack my lessons into suitcases
Realign my senses to what once was familiar
And swear to rewrite the woman on these pages
29. Writing
The drops fall panicky onto the back porch
And the tar starts to glisten brighter than sunlight
Somewhere the rumble of thunder begins
Like the turning of a page of an old dusty book
Soon it will come crashing at my window
There is nothing to be done
It will sweep in and send my papers scattering
There is nothing to be done
It will knock me to my knees and burst open my seams
There is nothing to be done
It will turn me over like a frying egg
There is nothing to be done
Once I believed the new born comfort in the eye of a suckling kitten
as it drove its claws into its mother’s breast
Was happiness
Once I thought a slither of ice
clinging like slime to a dying leaf
was beauty
Once I thought young hands
clasped like knotted ropes on a crowded street
was truth
Now I don’t.
Now
I just open the window
And with arms outstretched
Invite my melancholy friend
to carry me home
30. A Dying Duck
Neither young nor old
Still and quivering
You limp away from my outstretched hand
Your maimed body
Once limitless and weightless
Now lopsided and ruffled
Dragging itself toward solitude
I feel the hot burden of embarrassment
And turn my head away
Like I did when I saw my grandmother undressing
And my mother dying
31. About the author
Jacqueline O’Rourke has lived in Canada, Africa and the
Middle East. She has pursued various academic interests
and is completing a PhD in contemporary cultural theory.
She has written poetry since childhood and finds
inspiration in the interconnected worlds of art, music,
mysticism and literature. She lives with her sons in Doha,
Qatar. This is her first collection of poetry.
