After Kaddish

I It’s stranger to think of you, Allen, now that Mahmoud is gone, your glary eyes, your voice like an old record, 1947. It’s 2008, on a sunny winter afternoon, Manhattan. I didn’t sleep last night, thinking of what you might have been reading if you were with me, awake, at 3:39 a.m. I was listening to Leonard Cohen, he seems to be everywhere I go these days, and listening for short intervals to Fairuz and packing for San Francisco, speaking to the phantoms weeping, as you wept when you read “Adonais.” I weep reading Liam Rector and Jason Shinder—“God Bless,” Jason would say, whenever I told him something he liked, or it was just part of his mantra? I weep thinking of Darwish. Have you seen him yet, Allen? Should we be looking for death, or is it Jerusalem? Meanwhile, did I tell you, I can’t find my national anthem. Every time I start singing, the tune disappears. I see a flashback of a thin sheet of light, the American flag I will soon carry. forever on my tongue. Where is the garden that will blossom in the cold, the cities I will dream of finding again, the fantasy of finding India and China while being in Bethlehem, and the trees outside still bare so bare, or is that what forgetting looks like? Who knows where to find solitude—on a broken bed, in the balcony that refuses the wind’s visit, in the crimpling shadow of rooster early in the morning, as I have in the Caribbean, waiting for the message behind the hills. Perhaps death will stop at nothing until it’s trapped in what it worships, it’s like scratching a dream when it’s not looking, it’s like stealing some gray from the sky, or like the swelling of silence in our throats, trying to climb out of black smoke. Skeletons in our minds, it’s a private grief, a private grief, you hear. Now all I have is the time I dreamt I kissed a boy as the Arabic music was playing, the time an Afghan immigrant reminded me of myself when I first took the 7 train to Queens, not knowing yet that nostalgia steals from longing— from the thoughts that keep coming to us; not because we can’t forget but because we don’t want to— as for me, all I want is a gesture from Mahmoud, a touch from a world that listens to what movements say. I practice listening to everything around me—the bird, its cry, the sun, its cry, the echo, the stillness, its music. I keep all that they mean to me and break into what we are unable to be. Death’s stubborn—it never rests. Maybe that’s how it stops suffering. Where have you gone, Allen? To New York or Kolkata—is there joy in those places or fear—what do people there think about as they drink root beer or lassi, as they watch bodies pile up in newspapers— it’s all about money, no one’s looking for soul or secret—the things you think you don’t have— women looking for love, men looking for love except they can’t find the place for it. Did you love, Allen? What is the last thing you remember? The last man in your bed, who was he to you? What can’t darkness prepare you for? What did God forbid, then said yes to? Do you know where to find the cloud trapped in a bark? A red ribbon, and a sigh that asks, “Can you believe?” You don’t have to answer now. The wind blows something that can’t exist—so it’s victorious. And then we start cherishing what can change and changes— the mercy on the tree, the broken arrow, the leaves, the colors that cut air into what it desires most—lost snow— an electrical wire that lights nameless neighborhoods that sing under bridges, and then people stop wearing shoes to feel the earth. Wait— are we grieving? Is that what we are doing, Allen? I can’t do this—I need forever now—tell me eternity exists or that I should call my lover, his kiss is that other dream, sleeping on his lips that other endlessness— no more moon, mind bent, heart strolled dream hanged, face under madness. You understand— in the world we all struggle with Jesus, with what we name Holy Father. Ya Salaam. Shalom. Blessing is what we adore each day. As for Heaven, it’s still undefined—come on, give me a clue. Is it the end or do we keep redeeming—the shadows are near but far enough. I get it—you’re the perfect phantom.