Take Your Glass—and Regret. Poem by Ali Arrabei

"Something is falling apart, " my lover whispers,
as you excavate the moon of all things.
My severed hand drifts into oblivion,
reaching toward your treacherous face—
and finds nothing.
Not your dimmed features,
not your desirable contours—
only herds of regret,
terrified, crossing the river of your voice,
falling behind the door
to weep alone in the garden.
Love sinks its claws into the wreckage—
in torn clouds filling my room,
in the soft grass upon the bed,
in the spider's web,
in my joints,
in my entrails heavy with sorrow, seas, and birds,
in my murderous nails digging into your back,
along the path of the stream toward your mouth,
in the cupboards of absence and the keys to dense weeping,
in all the luggage of betrayal and baggage of rage.
Love burrows into the drizzle,
into the torment of a broken gaze lost in the void,
into the trace of bracelets.
And you turn your back to the war
as it grinds dreams—
just to fix your coarse fingers
arranging my limbs with geometric care.
So you fall—
instead of a shell—
into my blood.
Here you are.
And here is war devouring your voice,
your voice laden with shame and stars,
with all the mistakes of bells and funerals.
I have always been—
with my corpse—waiting for you,
my corpse poisoned by the nonsense of effeminate poets
who write softly about roses
and then kill themselves.
And your crushing pains—your old wild horses—
still run through the forests,
falling like a plague upon the vineyards.
So you pierce my tired eyes,
my deaf heart,
like fire climbing pigeon towers.
I fail to restrain you.
I fail not to love you.
You are alone now—
I know this.
That is how those who come from the mountains of sorrow are:
they leave like drowsiness,
and arrive like a storm.
It astonishes me
that I do not stop you,
do not blind you,
do not kill you.
Because you alone make, from the ceiling of boredom
and the tedium of cages,
a sky fit for forgetting.
Because in the wilderness of fear
you unleash, savagely, the wolves of laughter
behind the gazelles of grief.
Because you dig in every sorrowful language,
searching for the jars of poetry—
and find nothing but me:
curled, trembling in the dark,
small, embracing the night of the great metaphor.
So I love you—
with all your filth and your vermin,
your petty wars and your funerary history,
your sheep, your crows, your candles, and all your taverns.
I am enchanted by water lilies
sprouting in your terrifying skull,
and by the lightning of conscience
that rarely flashes
in the clouds of your ferocity.
I love you writing my exhausted corpse,
about ghosts of death and entrails on asphalt,
as if you were writing
the scent of earth after rain.
I love you writing the trace of love on my wrists,
and the history of betrayal in the joints.
I love the bloody creature rising in you
when you master the use of a rifle
as if it were a spoon.
I love you—because you are my little one,
my little one who draws near to the shadows of trees
and rolls savagely upon my broken back,
like this stray dog we call the world
rolling in the barn of the galaxy.
Because you alone—if only you knew—
when I survive the night,
I say to it lazily:
"Good morning, world."
I love your cruelty dissolving
when tears boil in your heart
and your sorrow runs along the walls.
And because I am all those killed
by the bullets of their own rifles,
and you are the pile of wood
thrown at dawn upon the fire of friends—
I am your stolen bread.
I am your whip,
your glass, your shame, your sorrow, your mouth,
your anger, your fingers, your rare absences,
your cities, your joints, your weakness—
your cannon.
I am the flocks of blue birds
that have ceased singing between your hands.
I am now without a hand,
without a voice, without names, without a mouth, without a shovel,
without entrails.
And you—with all your tools—
dig for love
in my bitter breath.
Here—
take your glass and regret.
Regret everything that has passed.
Release the dogs of your sorrow
behind my rabbits in the fields of wailing.
Let them cling to my breasts,
devour my flesh, chew my ribs—
until I tear your skin
and eat your heart
with the same wild appetite
with which you send your enemies to God.
I love to toy with your polar testicles,
while the muzzle of your gun seals my throat.
Dig in the plains of regret,
in the streets of old fatigue,
in all the hills of sorrowful languages—
you will find no one but me.
I am your language,
your treacherous face,
your desired features.
Dig—
with closed eyes—between my thighs.
I am your grave.