the mirror that faileth

For anton,

What comes after this Homeric pause?"
…as if this were a lovely dream
in which prisoners of war are relieved
by fairness of their long, immediate night,
as if they now say:
"We mend our wounds with salt"
"We live near our memory"
"We shall try out an ordinary death"
"We wait for resurrection, here, in its home
in the chapter that comes after the last…"

---Darwish

The pause between our lives, our words. 

You drive in the swirling dust storm, the lights clouded out, bags and debris either caught in a vortex or suddenly freed from its gravitational pull and set free on a tangent. The city is transformed and barely recognizable. The same road that you travel on a thousand times now appears like a side-road in some provincial part of a country you've never visited. A few people twist and contort their bodies to avoid being caught up in it. 

Each year the dust adds a layer of greyness to your face. An image fades, the music hisses and I wonder: did I ever know you?

From dust to dust. This is how I speak. 

~~~

An hour before we had sat together with a sense of last things, a group of friends at a farewell dinner. There were succulent legs of lamb, chops, chicken grilled on hot coals. The wives were tired, bored, somber with their plotting eyes. Only the young and unattached spoke with any freedom. Little r and the twins ran around the long tables. Someone asked me: what's A's story? In five minutes? 

T told us of how one wise old villager was asked by the youngsters: "old man, tell us how much food have you eaten in your life". He looked puzzled. "We mean, if you could add it all up how much would it come to?". The old man thought and thought (for he was one to take all questions seriously). His memory is good, his mind agile. "I think," he concluded, "if you put all the chickens and quails and other birds in one room, back to back and on top of one another it would fill this very large room." It is hard to tell whether he or the audience were satisfied with this answer. It is not always easy to add up what we've brought to and taken from this world

~~~

Dust, dust...I think I saw your face, Khayam, in the gaze of a world-weary dog. Something of your ancestor's temperament entered my soul, too, and now I recognize your single pulse which beats irregularly amongst mine, a gold coin with foreign script. There is dust on my hands and in my hair but A brings me only food, no wine to forget. I reach home and look to the mirror of bronze and hidden silver. She pauses and my mind clouds over with sleep and a vortex of dreams take shape, and there I will see myself more clearly...