مختارات من الحب والموت وتغير الفصول

In her 1986 collection Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons,* American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker writes what could be described as a novel-in-verse, telling a first-person story about falling head over heels in love with Rachel, in a breathless romance that throttles through its own track towards heartbreak while the poet’s daily life continues to press and prod on. A child in tow, a teaching job, and life’s other mundane routines clash with the tempo of the exploding romance that takes her to France, to produce a complex eruption of conflicting emotions that make this collection one of the great books of poetry in American literature.

We fell in love with the poems in this collection. But our focus fell on the erotic scenes, which by nature only addresses an aspect of the collection’s complexities. On their own, these selections obscure the cohesiveness of the collection and its plotline. Our selectiveness stemmed from a specific goal – to attempt to create an erotic register in Arabic for the unabashed display of the body (particularly the non-masculine body) with its volatile desires. This is in clear contrast with modern Arabic poetry where frank, unpretentious erotic expression between women has yet to find its major poet. In doing this, we discovered the flexibility of the Arabic language, and the copiousness and precision of its erotic lexicon. We hope the author will forgive us the liberties we took in the interest of our larger aim – to show readers and potential writers who opt for English over Arabic as a “safer” language for the expression of desire that this need not be the preordained nature of things.

*Marilyn Hacker. Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons. W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1986.

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?

Before a face suddenly numinous,

her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate   

again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?   

It’s documented torrents are unloosed

by such events as recently produced

not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,   

one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate.

My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,   

I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless

—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.   

Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,   

sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest

of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

First, I want to make you come in my hand

while I watch you and kiss you, and if you cry,

I'll drink your tears while, with my whole hand, I

hold your drenched loveliness contracting. And

after a breath, I want to make you full

again, and wet. I want to make you come

in my mouth like a storm. No tears now. The sum

of your parts is my whole most beautiful

chart of the constellations - your left breast

in my mouth again. You know you'll have to be

your age. As I lie beside you, cover me

like a gold cloud, hands everywhere, at last

inside me where I trust you, then your tongue

where I need you. I want you to make me come.

Grief, and I want to take it up in you;

joy, and I want to spend it all inside

you; fear, and you are the place I can hide.

Courage is what leaves me brave enough to

turn you around and tell you what to do

to me, after. Rivers, and downstream glide

I; we breathe together. You look, or I'd

get scared, but you're watching while you take me through

the deep part, where I find you, where you need

to know I do know where, know how to drive

the point home. Wit: you get the point and flat

statement of a gift of tongues. I get

up, and you get me down, get lost, you lead

me home, or I take you, and we both arrive.

Who would divorce her lover with a phone

call? You did. Like that, it's finished, done -

or is for you. I'm left with closets of

grief (you moved out your things the next day). I love

you. I want to make the phone call this

time, say, pack your axe, cab uptown, kiss

me, lots. I'll run a bubble bath; we'll sing

in the tub. We worked for love, loved it. Don't sling

that out with Friday's beer cans, or file-card it

in a drawer of anecdotes: "My Last

Six Girlfriends: How a Girl Acquires a Past."

I've got "What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted"

run on a loop, unwanted leitmotif.

Lust, light, love, life all tumbled into grief.

You closed us off like a parenthesis

and left me knowing just enough to miss.