Translation by Elaine Feinstein

English version by Elaine Feinstein,
based on a literal translation from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell

The fish the seller is touting no longer belong to the sea.
I smell salt and lines of washing as I pass the women in black
in front of the hospital, the army store and the family courts.
Is that a repressed sob or a cry?
No matter: two streets more and I’ll climb the steps to you.
Morning promised wickedness, and I believed it.

I have left my identity card on the doormat.
No need of my name. I have washed my head and put it out to dry
on the branch of a tree which a storm will soon uproot –
I am no more than what remains after that,
moving towards you with my eyes tight shut.
It’s not important where I float on this river of forgetting.

Once I herded livestock and wore out my feet to reach the city
and that civil war you escaped, though you still see corpses in your mirror.
Now I am blind and you do not wish to see
as we move towards the moment our paths come together.
Desire is like water. It irrigates and drowns.
We can never grasp it with our fingers.

What happens to my shoulders or the sweat between my breasts doesn’t
frighten me,
I’m not afraid of what my navel remembers, or that birthmark on the neck
nor the old wound on my knee. Nor toenails!
If all our limbs were scattered I would still remain with you,
and every limb of yours would point to me.
My eyes, which have seen everything, look only inward.

The bed sheets are embroidered with roses covered in thorns
and there is no metaphor in writing that.
We are all too human; we do not dream of flight.
Sleeping beside you is like returning to the earth
and your smell is that of the world’s soil,

or a cigarette in the twilight of sleep
on a journey through fog
which those who return from the dead can never describe.