A Trace of Water

Nothing wrong here,
The world always subdivides on its own:
At your doorstep there are now flowers
with a nameless card attached,
and at my doorstep there is a name
With no flowers
...
Everything takes its destined path

Without effort

And no apology for anything,
no apology for anything.

You know,

I am now completing the scenario
Which we wrote one afternoon
On the blue sofa,
The day the water was spilt on the table

And wet the papers.

I am completing the scenario which fell into my hands

Suddenly,
While cleaning the shelf with icons,
As if I were restoring holes left by lost days

When we were searching for an ending
that would suit everyone.

What curse did we leave proliferating in our beds

All that time?
What coincidence was lurking under the dust

For our unknowing hands
And what wetness remained young and awake
In the hell of solitude?

No need to apologize for anything,
the world always subdivides on its own:
Questions alive,
Flowers dead.

The Neighbor’s Son

There’s no trace of the little boy
Who used to wave to me
From his balcony,
And at whose feet my brutal dog
Liked to sit.

How come, all of a sudden,
A porcelain flower pot
With a curling, undulating sunflower
Took his place?

As of now,
I must start my day
Without his wave,
It was a wave which never changed its direction
In the air,
One, where my passion for staying alive started,
And where meaningless words ended.

In a morning like today,
Submissive and outstretched under the sun
As much as an autistic child,
One may count one’s inheritance in the world:

• A little friend who suddenly disappears,
  In a solitude open to light.
• A sunflower, swaying in the wrong direction.
• A dog, whose diseased skin – as you can see –
  Makes him rub himself, against the neighbor’s wall.

Whereas, I am me,
The person still waving, at the empty space
Which took the shape of the boy.

An Omelette

Take the house keys,
I may not be here when you return.

Before you leave
You should get to know the places of indispensable things:
The watering can,
Which I left hanging on the balcony’s wall
In front of the basil plant,
So it could keep its faith in life.
The reams of paper are here in the drawer
And beside them are all sorts
Of colored pens.
The sauce you like with the omelets
Is there on the shelf,
And beneath you’ll find the honey box
Which I poured one night
On your spine,
And then collected with my tongue.
Take the house keys and go,
Go
With all the charms that God gave
To the treacherous.

San Stefano

This morning I said:
“Hello” to the sea-undertakers
I said to myself:
“They are good men
Who devoted their lives to the service of poetry
And continued to bury the past
So that words may flow.”

Before their arrival,
Every time we passed by it, we used to avoid
Looking at the sea,
Afraid that our hearts would trip over the slippery black rock
Which was a friend with algae and birds,
And which spoiled what was between us and our bodies
In our early teens,
When it taught us how to swim around it
Each morning
To snoop on the female guests of the hotel
Before the bulldozers raised it to heaven,
How to fill our eyes with their shining bodies
On the sand,
And to store in our memory
What we shall recall with our fingers ¹
Once we are alone.

On this rock,
Was my first failure,
When a young woman with grey eyes told me
Her mother was a fashion designer for celebrities,
While I told her about my aunt in the village,
Who raises ducks
In her home courtyard.

This mysterious morning
I was able to reach San Stefano’s black rock on foot
And to see it in its absence,
With no one else
To share the moment.
...
Good morning sea-undertakers!

***

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¹: It means: by way of masturbation.

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Atef Abdel-Aziz is an egyptian poet, critic and architect.