Song of Two Worlds Read online

And the numbers are wind and rock,

  Even a holiness

  Holding my body, and this might be the way.

  15

  Abbas brings me an orange from the grove,

  Peels it and peppers it,

  Swallows a piece and gives me another.

  I flinch at the bitter and raw,

  Spit out the pulp.

  “I’m out for the pruning,” he says,

  Sweeps up the peel in his pocket.

  “You spend too much time alone.”

  “See if a letter has come,” I ask,

  As I ask every morning,

  My futile and vain prayer for the day.

  He nods his head delicately,

  Touches my arm

  With his veined, mottled hand.

  “Orange pudding I’ll make later this week.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Tuesday.”

  16

  Believer in methods of science, the meters and grams,

  Finder of Fermat’s “least time” before Fermat,

  Practitioner of “Galilean experiments” before Galileo,

  Feigner of madness to escape

  Death by caliph—

  Great al-Haytham,

  Show me your faith.

  You found the way that we see:

  Light starts from beyond the body,

  Then enters the eye,

  Slanting through crystalline humor

  And vitreous gels.

  Light does not streak from the eye,

  As others thought.

  With sight tubes

  And taut string and chambers,

  You found the movement of light—

  Rectilinear, reflection, refraction.

  Mathematical edge of a knife—

  You found the point on a surface

  That connects other points via light,

  Like the point in your mind

  Joined to the point of truth,

  And the one thing

  A hand must hold.

  There, at your table, with rulers, protractors,

  Warm breeze from the gulf, goats crapping—

  Al-Haytham, tell me what I can see—

  Is it this sun in my room?

  17

  Smaller, the room I had decades ago

  When I went to the country across the sea,

  Taking my uncle’s old chemistry books,

  Slide rules and weights.

  Studying science, philosophy, poetry—

  Churches for mosques,

  Trousers for caftans,

  Wood creak of desks, thick-fingered tutors

  And beveled glass, laughter of students,

  Rectangular courtyards of grass—

  I never felt at home.

  18

  In the blue twilight

  I wander my vineyards

  While wind whispers softly,

  The puyas sway sleepily, waiting for night.

  I gaze at the sky

  To admire a hoopoe

  And pink rising moon.

  In the blue twilight, I gaze

  At the bird and the papery moon—

  One throbbing flesh and the other cold dust—

  And I marvel at what harmonies

  Couple the two.

  Electrons in orbits contained by the quantum,

  And atoms conjoined by the dipolar force,

  Gravity balanced by pressure

  And flap of a wing.

  Here, I remember mathematical curves,

  Calculus, I learned it all—

  Each bird bit and moon fracture

  Fixed by the symmetries,

  Airborne and airless, aloft.

  19

  A speck in the distance, across the burnt sand.

  “She’s coming,” Abbas says, “the laundress’s daughter.”

  “Then it’s Wednesday.”

  “In five minutes she’ll be at the gate.”

  “Ten minutes,” I say, holding my thumb out

  To measure her angle. “I reckon

  She’s one thousand meters away.”

  “Your mind is as tight as a sheep’s ass.”

  Ironed caftans and sarwals,

  Our white cotton cloth,

  Even Abbas’s ragged boxers, all clean.

  The laundress’s daughter waits shy

  On the terrace, she’s eighteen or nineteen—

  Abbas counts out coins in her hand

  Without touching. I look from my window,

  A dark strand of hair has just slipped

  From her scarf, rests on her shoulder,

  And somewhere the groan and the love smell,

  My cock vertical, lifetimes ago. Quickly

  She tucks back her hair, turns away,

  Softly says, “Pick up on Monday.”

  20

  Bowl of couscous. I eat

  But I cannot be filled.

  On my table the couscous, an inkwell, a pen.

  And a photograph kept in a drawer—

  Woman I barely remember,

  Prickle of life left only here, in this picture,

  Her days and her nights vanished. What string

  Of knots led to our meeting that day

  On the bridge? What caused her to look

  At me, then look away? Was it the angle

  Of sunlight, the hue of my hair?

  Why did she speak to me?

  How many nights

  Did she sleep in my bed? I’ve forgotten

  The sound of her voice,

  Tilt of her head,

  The calm sea of her hand.

  Sometimes I dream of her, night dancer,

  She drifts past my bed.

  And the others, my children and wife.

  Did I have any choice?

  I want rock and hard edge, gush

  Of my blood in straight lines,

  Matter, inertia, and force,

  Explanation.

  21

  Newton, thin as a mathematical line,

  Aquiline nose, fierce-eyed and secretive—

  You kept a notebook of questions,

  The dip of your quill in an ink of oak galls.

  You sought the gods’ hidden knowledge,

  Sketched in that notebook your pictures

  Of pendulums, levers—

  You pondered the sloping of curves,

  Tangents and lines—

  Toyed with your series of numbers

  That marched on forever like waves of the sea—

  Thought of all motion as tiny infinities,

  Fluxions and calculus.

  You found equations that govern

  The comets, the path of the moon, gravity,

  Curve of the stream in my bath.

  You split the colors of light.

  “All can be known.”

  You ate from the Forbidden Tree,

  Then planted new trees.

  Modern Prometheus, you stole

  The gods’ fire and gave it to men.

  Suspicious recluse,

  You grasped the gears

  Of the galactic clock.

  You made the mortal immortal.

  Tell me one thing that is true.

  22

  What is the measure of circle and arc?

  Magical digits of pi—

  Here, the first seven hundred and eighty-six,

  Sacred sum of the letters of Basmalah:

  3.141592653589793238462643383279

  502884197169399375105820974944

  592307816406286208998628034825

  342117067982148086513282306647

  093844609550582231725359408128

  481117450284102701938521105559

  644622948954930381964428810975

  665933446128475648233786783165

  271201909145648566923460348610

  454326648213393607260249141273

  724587006606315588174881520920

  962829254091715364367892590360

  011330530548820
466521384146951

  941511609433057270365759591953

  092186117381932611793105118548

  074462379962749567351885752724

  891227938183011949129833673362

  440656643086021394946395224737

  190702179860943702770539217176

  293176752384674818467669405132

  000568127145263560827785771342

  757789609173637178721468440901

  224953430146549585371050792279

  689258923542019956112129021960

  864034418159813629774771309960

  518707211349999998372978049951

  05973

  23

  Great Newton, you hid in your rooms,

  Outcast like me,

  Careless of meals, stockings untied,

  Drinker of rosewater, olive oil, beeswax—

  You found the force

  Between planets and sun,

  Pattern of cosmic attraction,

  Heard clearly the music of spheres.

  You gauged the distance to stars

  And the vast rooms of space,

  Which were naught to the space of your mind.

  You struck the door of the universe.

  What raging night seized you

  And screamed that the world

  Must be number and rule?

  24

  Bang goes the clock in the hall,

  Zinging the air, slicing hours

  To minutes, the minutes to seconds,

  Precisely the strokes of the world—

  Just as the clock towers chimed

  While I walked through the streets

  Of Montparnasse

  Foolishly wearing a fez—

  Beside me my children and wife, white-skinned,

  Untouched by the stares.

  25

  I am a fragment

  Hurtling through space

  While the breeze of the universe

  Ruffles my hair.

  Evening. I gaze

  Through my telescope,

  Searching the colors of stars.

  Some are the hues of goats’ wool,

  Some ochre olive,

  Or pink bougainvillea.

  In chasms of space

  I see stars born from gases,

  Great thrumming furnaces oozing their heat,

  Convective motions, electron opacities—

  And elsewhere stars dying,

  Cold cinders

  Or giant explosions, eruptions of light,

  Cities consumed in a nuclear blast,

  Billions of years dimmed in a second.

  I have learned

  That the heavens are violent and fragile

  And doomed to destruction,

  Just as this thimble the earth.

  All in the cosmos is failing,

  And nothing remains,

  And we measure the hour of the stars,

  As I measure one morning’s light.

  Here, in the glass of this eyepiece.

  26

  Morning. I offer to go with Abbas to the market,

  He gestures me back, hobbles away with his cane,

  Faster than men with good legs.

  Alone, I take my warm bath, small clouds of froth,

  Scent of my olive oil soap. Dressed in my work clothes

  I go to the garden—the primrose,

  Verbenas, the ghost flowers, globemallows,

  Fragile blue bells of phacelia. Stooping on knee

  In the sandy soil, pinching the deadheads,

  Spent fabric falls down to the ground, translucent

  Like skin. Some of the flowers are dying and past,

  But I leave them to live three days more.

  27

  The village magician appears in my garden,

  An ancient man gnarled as an olive tree,

  Wearing a filthy frayed sheet trailing

  Like nightmarish bridal gown—

  Holds out his hand for some coins,

  And I give him white ghost flowers.

  Magician, you sprinkle stray granules of iron

  On your sheet and exclaim at the intricate patterns,

  But there is far greater power than this.

  Pattern of forces:

  Magnetic that spring from electric,

  Electric that flow from magnetic,

  Symmetrical, right and left hand reversed,

  Folded together and twisting through space

  In a vibrating wave of pure energy.

  Pattern of atoms:

  The tiny cathedrals,

  Like Chartres, Sainte-Chapelle,

  Framed by electrical force

  And Planck’s number.

  Electrons that spin on their axes

  Like magical tops, fixed in their energies,

  Notes of a scale.

  Electrons that weave in their willowy

  Arcs, ordering the union of atoms

  To make flawless crystals and glass, to make

  Every jot of amoebas and stars,

  Each of my breaths in this instant.

  And this is a thing I believe.

  28

  Years ago, in my studies,

  I would dive down for days

  Without sleeping or food

  In a feast of ideas, books, conversation,

  A thrash in my mind, how to consume the world,

  Blasting and tilting life,

  Reciting my verses, test tubes and flame,

  Measuring movements of planets,

  Diagrams, algebra, history and empire,

  Ethics and dualism—all of it swallowed

  In great heaving gulps, brain rush,

  Intent on being chemist or poet.

  29

  I sit in my chair reading physics,

  Old song on the radio,

  Soft so it won’t wake Abbas,

  Sound of the sea, headdress of stars.

  At the moment of midnight,

  I embark on a journey inside myself,

  Marco Polo of organ and vein,

  My own body a miniature realm

  Of the Great Kublai Khan.

  What is this thing that I am,

  Forces and loss?

  Liver and lung, masterworks,

  Hormones and nerves, the conductors

  Of symphonies. Cells,

  The skilled singular players—

  I go deeper, am caught in a chemical sea

  And electrical storms small as molecules.

  Deeper, the chromosomes,

  Text of my body, the ladder and rung,

  Three billion steps folded thousands of times,

  Going nowhere yet leading to all.

  Helical molecule twisting at fifty degrees,

  Constant in all living things,

  Constancy fighting the inconstant stars.

  30

  Take this equation.

  It measures the strength of a bridge

  Like the bridge to Zafir’s house in the sand—

  Mandate with xs and ys for the load,

  For the tensile strength, gravity,

  Forces of molecules, torquing and strain.

  Purity. Capsule of number and form,

  Irrefutable. Ask and it answers.

  Solving equation,

  A linked chain of logical steps,

  Square roots and integrals, tangents and sines.

  I stand on the bridge—

  Pure sines, derivatives

  Dazzle the air, sing in their hard arcs,

  Lift and parade, certain,

  Impervious to boom and blast,

  Free of emotion,

  Concrete from concrete

  And mountain from number,

  Its sureness, my sureness.

  31

  My birth no one remembers—

  The cries of my mother, my father

  Away for his business,

  No record of who first said “God” to me,

  Who rubbed the date on my mouth,

&nbsp
; Pattern of light through arched windows,

  The scents in the air—uncles and aunts

  Have no memory.

  But the birth of the cosmos—the heat

  And the densities follow equations,

  The temperature 1.5 × 1010 degrees at one second.

  Twelve billion years

  In the past, all began:

  Time formed from nothingness,

  Space formed from nothingness,

  Universe born by some chance, or not,

  Moment of ripe probabilities,

  One of uncountable eggs.

  And then the explosion,

  The energies opening space

  And the boiling of light

  In the Bang without eye without ear.

  And this is a cosmos of endings,

  Billions of years in the future

  As gauged by the mass and the speed

  And the clock of the flight of the galaxies.

  Billions of years in the future,

  The galaxies, caught in the ocean of space,

  Sail apart as the cosmos expands

  And the density dwindles to nothing.

  Th e stars spend their energies,

  Light fades and dims,

  And the galaxies ghost ships

  Adrift on an infinite sea,

  With no heat, with no life.

  But the numbers remain.

  32

  Mother would come to me late in the night,

  After her concert,

  Humming some song she had sung—

  Hair down and barefoot,

  Her fingertips brushing my cheek

  Smelling of jasmine and sandalwood.

  Hers was the breath that could flow in the night

  Through the hallways with flickering light,

  Voice that said, “Certainty.”

  She forgave everything—

  Money I squandered,

  My fidgeting poetry, years living abroad,

  Wedding a foreigner,

  Children she never knew,

  Return in despair—

  Loathing my father,

  Even that she forgave.

  And she sat with me during the night,

  Stroking my brow, while I listened

  To waves of the sea—

  You are the question and I am the answer,

  Your comfort, so breathe with me,

  I am the sea that rolls over you,