Poetry
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Poem Khaled Mattawa Dew on the grass and carnations in your steps. I see you walking green fields, the angel on your shoulder loquacious. Your hands in your dress pockets, you forget it's afternoon because you are amused. Beyond the fence young women risk their reputations on love among the palm groves. Night comes to the paths draped in solitude. I follow your silence. My secret on a river drifts. |
Pastoral Khaled Mattawa
We talk like strangers. This is how we bring back that first seduction. You tell a story. Your face wears an old diffidence. And because your story is new to me, I become new to you. You look between sentences, surprised, at the stranger that I am to you, surprised by what you tell. The story ends, its words inscribed over our old words. We seek each other and we behold our selves meeting among the crowds we have become.
After Celan Khaled Mattawa
The morning shies from my touch. We are still strangers. Leaves turn to face the sun, shiver and talk. I avoid the mirror and its enigmatic song. The road is Thursday. It is busy hoping, believing everything it carries. My mind visits her almost naked, leisurely reading. We glance at each other. We talk fruits and cold water sand and a child's lost shoe. We love each other like tumbleweed and rock we walk like needle and thread we gather each other again and again like the moon and his bundle of old fronds. We stand apart now no one paying us any mind. Our gossiping friends have stopped calling. Now we are caught between old letters bagged in closets and green thorny shoots like newly born stones heavy and surprising. It's time time stops. It's time we simply linger.
As I am to you, a North American Khaled Mattawa
moving truck stuck in the snow, the woman next door leaving. Sure there's relish to the thought of unpacking.... it's mine in a better perspective because a number of things make today. I have just a song from the sand dunes of Indiana. Do you? In the summer surprises, in that being makes me yours. Up at the farm though, plow horses and outhouses were a heritage, our names on the same page. I know the process, together in Connecticut, overwhelmed by the amount of work involved. A new appreciation arises, a journal of hair to pull everyone should get a grasp of. The moment is spending the day, two restless teenagers beholden to the whiteness before them. Contemplate the cat into the snow to see her reaction. Times take to scrubbing the grout in my showers. I shovel the snow off the roof because there is a danger in us. Attend at last and stop. Wishes for a good new year.
Khaled Mattawa's Zodiac of Echoes will be released by Ausable Press in September. His first book, Ismailia Eclipse appeared in 1996. Mattawa has also translated three volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, the latest of which, Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef, has been awarded the PEN USA poetry in translation prize. Mattawa is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA translation grant, the Alfred Hodder fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
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