The Inconstant Ones

The Inconstant Ones

The Inconstant Ones

You order for us both. ‘Kaab el-ghizal – gazelle’s horns –               
one for her – one for me – and na’na – mint tea.’               
Your jealousy of the waiter hones my resistance;
our eyes lock. Perhaps in the Jemaa el-Fna
a graceful thief pocketed our unguarded joy          
and bottled it alongside attar, cumin,
antimony and dried-up desert things. Our hands join
but we feel only the sweat between our skin
as we hasten down kissarias, bewitched and blind,
from Bab Ailen to Bab Nkob, not knowing
what lies around the corner or who might lurk behind
sweetmeat stalls and barricades of oranges
waiting to be juiced for several hundred dhirams.
 
Our private terrace overlooks other terraces,         
corrugated roofs partitioned by gutters
from which aerials quiver tender radio signals.
The sun deals shadows in mazy alleys
down which a thirsty mule hurtles drawing a calèche
fuelled by its driver’s rebuke: Balak! Balak!
The medina’s a warren like W.H.’s
‘system of caves and conduits’, that ‘region           
of short distances and definite places’, but lalla,
this isn’t Ischia, it’s Marrakesh,
and although Auden’s Poems lie in my suitcase
we need a surveyor, not a geologist,           
to direct our steps.
            
And I’m not sure it was faultless,
that daily crush of bravery and error,         
yet as I try to imagine how we might have loved
I hear cymbals brush between dancing thumbs,
and the call to prayer shaking swifts from their minaret nests
out over the souk, where we’d bartered for pleasure
not for possession – the price named, but never final.
The small birds soared on those reverberations
so far beyond the city – surrounded by trackless sand
scattered with lost planes and forgotten mail –
and so high, that I missed the moment when they disappeared
            in the heat haze rising from the limestone hills.