Remembering

"That makes sense", you said, after I told you. I don't know why I remembered it today, five years later, trying not to focus on the couple that was kissing by the fountain. Maybe it is because the man had your eyes, but more likely, it is because memories happen sometimes, in the seeming randomness of this world, to appear at uncalled for moments, like migraines.

Murphy's Law, they call it, and start spewing facts about umbrellas. I remember the time I threw up on your shirt, and you cried, and afterwards, I could never understand how you still wanted me - not till years later, lying in bed and listening to my boyfriend pee.

He peed fast, and afterwards his hands were crawling down my neck, and I could not breathe. I wondered if it would have been like this, with you, if we had tried. I thanked God that we never did.

I thanked God for many things, like flower-petals beaded with rain, and the grey of morning right after sunrise, on cold days. I used to thank God for giving me you. Now I have slid you over, into the asking part of prayers, a silent whisper that the hurt will unglue itself from the crevices beween me, but then, would I dissasemble into fragments: opal-studded clay next to peices of pictures of naked statues, cracks that jut against your fingers when you try to hold the shards?

Is it better to be broken than to be wholly alone?

About Samarra

Today, a teacher of mine brought in an excerpt from an Arabic lexicon, about the word "samarra", to help clarify the Hebrew passage "leil shemurim", night of watching, which can be found in chapter 12 of Exodus. I wrote down the different definitions of the word, and sample sentences, and expanded on them to make them into a poem. I tried to use every definition and sample sentence. I am letting the work simmer, but suspect I may return to it at a certain point, and free it from the rigidities of my self-imposed assignment (ie the need to try to use every definition/sample sentence.)

For the Biblical text: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0212.htm

See verse 42.

Samarra

On a moonless night, in a place of nocturnal confabulation:

He held a conversation, or discourse, by night. He waked, continued awake; he did not sleep. He drank wine.

The cattle pastured by night without a pasture, or dispersed themselves by night.

Verily our camels pastured by night, the whole of its ebony lustre, when your hands held mine beneath the brown sand. We became tawny, brownish, dusky - the color of camels -fast, firm, strong, the beatings of hooves in the night, and a rush of sand against our thighs.

"Sammara", you said, and I asked, "Do you mean me or the camel?", Samarra - swift, excellent, light-footed. Samarra - partner in night-time conversation. Language steals meaning from our kisses.

They passed their night drinking wine.

The cattle pastured upon the herbage, pastured upon herbage by night. He made their milk thin with water. He shot his arrow. He swore by the darkness and by the moon.

"Sammara".

He conversed with him by day. He discoursed with him by night:

Conversation, or discourse, held by night, sipped like tea, curled between your teeth, and your hands are curled over my fingers, which bury into grains finer than the sound of your voice, calling the cattle, lowing, lowing, and a dance I do not understand.

"I will not do it as long as men hold conversation or discourse by nights that shine moonlight on bearded whiskers."

"Sammara."

"As long as the moonless night allows the holding of conversation or discourse in it."

"An unlimited time, or time without end."

But such a one is with, at the abode of forever, always.

The night and the day, (your finger and my thigh), but I will not come to you, ever, while night and day alternate (your body and mine).

The Sammara tree bears small leaves, short thorns, and yellow fruit. Samarra wood covers the houses in the villages of the valley, and once the prince addressed them "Oh people of the Sammara trees", he said, before he blinded his eye with a hot iron. You blinded me with your smile.

He let the camels go, left them to pasture by themselves, by night. Sammara also means to let go of a female slave, and to allow a ship out to sea, as well as daybreak and moonlight. Like a woman, the word has learned to adapt to meanings not its own.

"I will not do it when the moon does not rise nor when it does rise."

"Sammara".

You wrapped me in crimson blankets, and we continued to not sleep. Our lips percussed like the trotting of camels pasturing by night, and our bodies became ships.

On a moonless night, in a place of nocturnal confabulation:

He held a conversation, or discourse, by night. He waked, continued awake; he did not sleep. He drank wine.

The cattle pastured by night without a pasture, or dispersed themselves by night.

Verily our camels pastured by night, the whole of its ebony lustre, when your hands held mine beneath the brown sand. We became tawny, brownish, dusky - the color of camels -fast, firm, strong, the beatings of hooves in the night, and a rush of sand against our thighs.

At a gathering of tale-weavers, in the silence before daybreak, I left them there, engaged in winding conversations.

Party

"You look like a painting", she said, tracing her fingers on the red cotton that clung to my navel. I could feel your eyes tracing my lines. You pressed your fingers into her back. I could see her cleavage slightly when she bent over to feel the cloth against my thighs. Her brown curls bounced between us. "Please don't let them kiss", I thought, "Please don't let them kiss", but she continued to trace me - clinically almost, as if she were scientifically examining romantic roadkill.

I tried to laugh, but the sound was not mine. "Are you ok?" you asked, and I hated you then.

Later, grinding between you, I could feel your thighs, and her legs were curving into mine. The basement was dark, and smelled of sweat mingled with beer - a typical college smell, I guess. The songs were ones I did not know, and the alcohol tasted strange on my tongue.

You came after me when I ran out. "We'll walk you home", you said, and I hated you even more then.

I was a picture framed between your bodies, on a side-street in a crime-filled city, on a night when stars were too afraid to shine.

You will call him tonight and tell him of idiots, and imagine his skin against your skin, caramel and milk melding into each other like your thighs. He will think of your lips, his hands crawling down his pants, fingers moist, his laugh too guttural to be real.

I will sit on sheets of polka-dotted red, pens grating against my fingers, sweat staining my hair, and in my arms, the smell of cinammon, like in those buns I baked him last Friday. "These are delicious", he said, his crumb-filled lips searching for my cheek.

My name will come up in your conversation - casually, of course. A whispered breath in between two sighs. He will respond casually as well - no mention of the mingling of our thighs. Which words will you use to berate me, to poison him a little against me, just a drop of laudanum to the fever you suspect he bears me inside?

But the penicillin of distance has cured our malady. Why do you rely on his rosy cheeks to infect your own? Don't you know that his love for you, like his love for me, will wind up a dirty tissue on a bathroom floor, white stains peeking out from carpets that are shielded by an ever-shutting door.

Leila

"Your poems are too sexual", Leila said, her fingers crawling like spiders up my back. I could feel her nails through my gray flannel shirt. She called it my Harry Potter shirt, because the word "flannel" reminded her of Nicholas Flammel. "I am a big believer in straight people's right to wear flannel", she said, and the words hung like a thread between us, or maybe a necklace - a ruby necklace, her favorite color - red, the color of blood. "It is a feminine color", she said, "not because it has been foisted upon us by a patriarchal society, but because it is the color of the liquid that monthly oozes between our thighs." "That oozes between our thighs monthly", I said, and for a second, I feared that in her anger she would rebutton her starched white shirt, depriving me of the sight of her breasts.

The night she left me I was wearing a chemise of black silk. I waited for her to tell me I was beautiful. "You look so...female", she said, "in the way that those models look female - more like statues than real bodies. I didn't expect you to buy into the patriarchy." "It's not buying into the patriarchy if you're dressing up for a woman". "So you'd let me objectify you?". The silence was thicker than her golden hair. "I am leaving you", she said, and her shadow fell across the sheets of my bed. My hand was on her shadow's back, but her hands were already on her handbag, fishing for my keys.

Whenever I pictured the end, I imagined it like those soap operas on TV: "Carmen, te quero, pero no puedo vivir con tigo mi amor", or something of that sort, followed by incredible breakup sex - most of all I imagined the breakup sex. But here there was only silence. Her hand brushed up against mine when she placed my spare set of keys on the bed, and I could feel her eyes trace the shiver that ran up my spine. "Goodbye." she said softly, and, by a pause at the door, "You've been good to me. Thanks for that."

I listened to the closing of my bedroom door, the opening and closing of my apartment door, the fading echoes of her stilletoed footsteps on my marble hallway - who was she to lecture me about the patriarchy, this woman who waxed every week and wore eyeliner? I felt my anger crawl up my sides. I shrouded myself in my sheets, trying to savor the feel of the cotton against my skin, but all I felt was rage, and that is an emotion that is hard to savor, but even harder to let go of. Like when you know that potato chips will make you sick, but somehow you can't stop yourself from finishing the bag, because there is something so satisfying about their strange saltiness melting in between your teeth.

Potato chips were her favorite food. My new girlfriend, Cary, does not understand why I have banned them from my apartment - she thinks its a health issue. I wonder, if Leila's absence is always present in the form of the lack of potato chips in my cabinet, does that make my relationship with Cary a threesome, or a sham? How do you define monogamy? Isn't it all a holdover from marriage - the hetero-normative paradigm? Marx believed that common property applied to women - because women of course, were property. But here I stand, a common capitalist, wishing for - what, exactly? Not this shared utopian ideal - no, like a good capitalist, I wish for two women I could call mine.

Thinking about Ezekiel 16 and Listening to Regina Spektor

Your legs were marble columns supporting the arch of my back,

the curves of the spaces between our thighs formed diamond shapes on satin sheets;

you picked the sand grains from my cheeks like a virgin picking dandelions in spring,

and the blood stained our bodies, a crimson warmth seeping from my body,

your arms enveloped me like clouds - soft and insubstantial.

I broke the china cooking our first breakfast - an omelette of rotting eggs,

the scent of zahatar invading our nostrils, shards got stuck between my toes,

and I sensed the anger peeking out from between your laughing teeth.

You were younger then, but your beard was still flecked with grey,

whereas his was the color of the sand that sprinkled our first night together;

when I woke up, my golden nose-ring was gone.

But his lips were softer than your satin sheets,

and my thighs were marble pillars to his granite statue,

finely chiseled fingers invading the chasms between me,

and soon my nose-ring was joined by onyx bells and marble earrings.

Your palms left red marks on my cheeks that reminded me of berry-stains, or blood.

"You will soon feel blood", you said, in between mouthfuls of oregano omelette,

sipping from our new set of crystal glasses. I sprinkled flowers on our bed,

but you never came. I could hear you shining your sword.

The nights are colder now; roses have begun to fade in the garden,

and my statue is now a permanent fixture in the museum of a woman

who is studded with diamonds: She has mounted him on the pedestal of a silken bed.

I touch my cheeks, savoring the places where I once felt your fingers,

colder than winter soil, harder than the stones that line the pathway to the garden,

wishing that, like china or crystal, I had the power to shatter,

rather than remain silently whole on satin sheets, where my skin burns

in the absence of your shadow.

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1216.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p62rfWxs6a8