While you search for something

everything makes me search for you

but you slip my pursuit like a phantom.

You mummify my longing with this absence

and leave my bags on the platform.

I abandon this train.

I had hoped you might come to me

but now I unfurl my sails

hoping you will be a wind to take me, perhaps to our port.

Caravans of travelers caught on layover

realize their dreams are shut up in an iron coffin.

I remain on land forgetting departure

knowing the desert is stupefied every year by the burgeoning palms.

Wishing you would come

I postpone age. I postpone my struggle

and let time butcher me in my prime.

No one knows why women die waiting for twilight.

Why men die murderous in their desire.

Yet we live to love, as two strangers long to cross paths on a city bus.

You know that you will come to the platform’s darkness

where my heart appears behind the train’s windows,

and you’ll wave to me in the last seconds.

I cannot step off. I cannot step in.

Eventually we will know what happened between us.

The heart will have no right to beat anymore.

I repine on my seat

and a strangeness passes over me, certifying my solitude,

certifying the many cigarettes I shared, stranded, waiting long with others.

Clouds of smoke filled our room, flying easterly against the westbound trains

and snatching my baggage as required. We agreed, the smoke and I,

to leave love’s memory in the ink-black Tigris.

It is the heart that comes and goes suddenly

no matter its beating now.

No, I will not hunt for your childish face in this billowing smoke.

I will just lay down my head on the shoulder of impossibility

and, after waiting for you, refuse to relinquish departure’s roughness.

translated from Arabic by Francesca Bell & Noor Nader Al Abed