On a hill in Carcernish which is in Mesopotamia, which is

Between-The-Rivers,

We dug up the bones and artifacts of ancient strangers,

You and your donkey lugging buckets of water

back and forth over many thousands of years,

While I made notes about absolutely everything, and wrote long letters home.

You watered the mules and camels and nothing was ever

Too petty or tiresome that you couldn’t make mad and

silly fun of it;

everything admired you.

The animals admired you because you had a splendid

disregard for man that even they

could not achieve. And a dark and mighty love

That only they could achieve.

When it was too hot, we swam, and then the river

Released us and found its way back home.

They called you Darkness because your skin was fair;

I gave you a camera and taught you how to explore

the darkness that lived behind light;

You said you would take pictures of the whole world.

Water-bearer, you gave everything and asked nothing

in return. We dreamed that one day

the ghosts of your ancestors would arise

and tell to us wonderful Hittite secrets;

But we did not know what was to come, we had forgotten

that your name meant also

the darkness of water before Creation

Or that you would one day drown in the dark water

Of your own lungs.

I loved you, I believe. It was before the horror.

Naked People

Do you really like naked women? I asked my sculptor

friend.

They express so little.

I’ve never thought twice or even

Once of a naked woman. Does that mean I’m abnormal, or

A unicorn who’s strayed among sheep, and what on earth

Does that mean?

Kurdish ladies with awful thin lips once ripped almost all

my clothes off, outside Carcemish

and giggling, felt me up all over.

I wonder if they found me beautiful. Their jewellery

Was blue and silver. I wore no jewels.

I carved you naked in limestone for the roof of the house

In Carcemish, but your nakedness only made you

more secret and inviolable than before.

For a while I thought the stone would contain you, but

nothing contained you, not even

The bold bright clothes you wore, not even the whole

Width of the sky, and the length of the bright river.

It was as though you assumed

the world for a while;

Then it fell still, naked and chill and wondering.

Excavating in Egypt

Nobody knows how cold the nights can get in a land

Where sun is lord of the morning. It comes at you

like a sword, the cold, and lays its side

along your ribs;

there the flat steel sings

And you shiver under it, waiting for the dawn.

By day in Kafr Ammar we found trinkets of a people

Who lived there before the pharaohs, – odd jewels

and sad little things that could have been

gods, or toys;

whatever they were, one played with them.

By night we grew fearful of these things; as the air

grew more and more chill

we gathered them up and returned to the tents,

smelling of a thousand sweet, pungent spices,

Having wrapped ourselves in the funeral-cloths of the dead.

Solar Wind

I did not choose Arabia.

It chose me.

The shabby money that the desert offered us

Bought lies, bought victory.

But I could drown in your mighty eyes, Ali.

I have not been in the water since Aqaba.

I take baths, though, hot ones, scalding me.

We carried these knapsacks of mighty secrets

which mean war,

the bundles of rotting money,

the green figs, the lies.

My various parts bum one by one

from the elbows to the knees.

I have been burning since the day I was born.

Know me, I dare you, know me.

In the white light of these deserts

The villages predict each other -

They are districts of the mind.

The man who served us sheep and rice at dusk

Was blind.