Dardedel

by Manoucher Parvin

  The husband listens until he can listen no more.

  “Woman” he scolds, “this poverty is my deepest joy.

  This bare way of life is honest and beautiful.

  We can hide nothing when we’re like this …”

  Finally at dawn Professor Pirooz reaches Phoenix,

  His face filthy with sand and sweat.

  He washes in a fountain, in the center of the city,

  While children laugh and mothers glare.

  Refreshed, he hurries to the airport

  And slides his credit card to the freckly girl at the counter.

  “One ticket to New York City, please.”

  “Going home?” she asks.

  “Not home, but where I live,” he answers.

  On the plane he nibbles his precious bag of peanuts,

  Looking down at the slow retreating earth,

  Wondering if his night in the desert had been real or a dream.

  Did he really dardedel with Hafez and Rumi?

  How could it be?

  Jalalad-Din Rumi had lived eight centuries ago, Hafez fully seven,

  When Islam, a hearty vine with beautiful flowers,

  Was spreading across the dark world, bridging East and West.

  How, now, so many centuries later, could they be alive,

  Standing side by side in the Sonora counting stars?

  Of course it was a dream, induced by his exhausted body and mind,

  Or an hallucination induced by intoxicating spores adrift in the air.

  But what about this umbrella? He did not buy this umbrella.

  Hafez fashioned it from his arm, and gave it to him,

  To shade him on his journey beneath the unrelenting sun.

  So it was not a dream, Pirooz realizes, and not an hallucination.

  Hafez and Rumi were really real.

  But why did they reveal themselves to him?

  Was it just the coincidence of their meeting that led them to speak?

  Was that all it was, a random encounter explainable by physical laws?

  Did fate send him there,

  To those two magnificent giants, to save him from himself?

  Did Hafez and Rumi know he was coming?

  Or were they as surprised as he?

  Pirooz cradles the green umbrella—the beautiful umbrella

  With the handle carved from smooth Persian oak.

  The tines are cast from strong Persian brass.

  The canopy is woven of soft Persian silk.

  His life in New York is so hard, so insidiously hideous and absurd.

  He is trapped on an island seething with lost immigrant souls,

  Surrounded by dead rivers carrying dead fish.

  “Welcome stranger,” Mother Liberty says,

  Holding high her torch so the stranger can see,

  “Now forget who and what you were,

  Forget the mountains and the waving poppies,

  Forget your language and your customs,

  Forget your ancestors and your memories and your dreams.

  Conform, repent, melt into the melting pot,

  And dream an American dream.

  You wanted to come, now become what we want you to become.”

  Says Pirooz to himself: “Life is difficult but give it another year!”

  The little bag of peanuts empties much too quickly.

  Pirooz licks the salt from his lips

  And asks the man in the blue suit next to him for paper and a pen.

  The blue-suited man is annoyed by Pirooz’s request,

  Annoyed by Pirooz’s accent,

  Annoyed by the green umbrella poking his elbow.

  But the blue-suited man is a wise traveler,

  Understanding from too many years on airplanes and trains

  That the best way to deal with an annoying stranger

  Is to give him what he wants.

  So he opens his briefcase and hands Pirooz

  An entire tablet and three sharp pencils.

  “Thank you,” says Pirooz with a smile and a tip of his head.

  “Don’t mention it,” says the man,

  Warning Pirooz with his gruff voice

  That the pad and pencils were not a gift but a bribe,

  Warning him that he was not to mention it again,

  Warning him that he was not to mention anything again.

  The blue-suited man closes his eyes and feigns sleep.

  And Professor Pirooz begins to write this poem:

  Death is the last love, the final kiss.

  Death is the last gift, the end of hypocrisy.

  Death is freedom, in numberless forms in limitless times.

  Death is a friend, helping with your vexing chores.

  Death is a bath in honey, sweetening bitter things.

  Death cures all ills, pays your bills, frees you from fear,

  And even brightens the days of your enemies—

  Who seem always to grow in numbers.

  Death is a rose, red and supple in the vase of time,

  Never wilting, never perfuming but sniffed by all.

  Death is a song with an endless beat.

  Death is resurrection, into unknown colors, scents, sights.

  Death is the heaven of heretics, martyrs, and the starved.

  Death is a beginning with no middle to savor, or end to fear.

  Death is a bittersweet chocolate bar that grows in your hand.

  Death is an orgasm that never ends.

  Death is a subterranean star, nourishing worms and baking bones.

  I wish you knew that Death is beautiful, I wish Death knew it, too.

  I wish we sang Happy Deathday just as we sing the birthday song,

  And I wish that Death would let me save a few days of life,

  In reserve, for future use, so that

  I could claim a day every thousand years or so,

  To quench my unrelenting curiosity of what will be,

  To answer my unanswered questions, such as, why …

  As Professor Pirooz writes,

  A flight attendant with red-cherry lips interrupts him,

  Asking, “Macaroni or chicken?”

  He replies: “When it was alive,

  The chicken couldn’t fly this far.

  So how is it that it flies so high now, without wings to flap?”

  “The macaroni then, sir?” asks the attendant.

  “Whatever,” answers Pirooz.

  Pirooz eats his macaroni, and watches the blue-suited man eat his.

  The earth below them is carpeted with cotton clouds and

  The sun is dancing on the airplane’s silver wings.

  Pirooz leans toward the blue-suited man and whispers:

  “I have decided that it is better to be alive and

  Eating macaroni high above the ground,

  Than to be dead and eating my regrets below the ground.”

  The blue-suited man gives Pirooz his fancy pen.

  Though the plane flies faster than the fastest hummingbird,

  The hours inside the plane creep as slowly as the slowest turtle.

  Yawning one yawn after another, Pirooz wishes that God

  Were more generous with His secrets,

  Wishes that instead of letting his inquisitive children

  Struggle for answers with their cumbersome imaginations,

  He would simply appear one day,

  And tell them the hows and whys of Everything,

  So that his children could give up their arguments,

  Their silliness and their superstitions,

  Their hating and their jealousies and their wars.

  Why, Pirooz wonders, yawning and yawning,

  Why didn’t God just make Heaven and leave it at that?

  Why all these planets and stars and unanswered questions?

  Now Pirooz is sound asleep, and dreaming.

  He is alone in a square white room without corners,

  And though the ceiling is
a mile high, he must bow his head.

  The floor is invisible but hard.

  He hears someone knocking at a door on the ceiling,

  A door that a second ago was not there.

  The knock is unobtrusive but compelling—the music of fate.

  Pirooz puts his hand on the golden knob and turns.

  “Professor,” voices say. “May we come in to dardedel some more?”

  Pirooz pulls the door open, saying, “Yes, please! Come in! Come in!”

  But it is not Hafez and Rumi standing there, not as he expected.

  It is a single stranger, floating in a rainbow of light.

  “Guess who?” asks the stranger.

  Being an unbeliever, Pirooz cries out with dread, “Oh, my God! God!”

  “You are forgiven for not believing in me, Pirooz!” says God.

  “Worse is a pretentious believer than a sincere unbeliever.

  So be secure and hear my lamentation,

  And then carry it exactly, Pirooz, to the heart of mankind.”

  “I will,” promises Pirooz. “I will! I will!”

  And so God begins: “You people of this world,

  You puny creatures of mine,

  You undo my doings by all means conceivable,

  Until you are no longer in my image, but an image I never imagined!

  You fly though I gave you no wings.

  You dive deep though I gave you no fins.

  You invent telescopes—to see beyond my intent.

  You invent microscopes—seeing things I wanted hidden.

  You eavesdrop on space, on times and things long gone.

  You force rivers into beds I never approved of.

  And you seed clouds to thunder and cry

  On the barren fields where I sent them to rest.

  You poison the earth and heat the earth,

  Until you have made a hell of earth.

  You kill the unborn I wanted born,

  And force birth upon others against my will.

  You prolong dying for profit, torturing the sick with heartless machines.

  You make vaccines and fabricate atom bombs,

  Confusing my Angel of Death,

  Who in turn pesters me, asking:

  ‘Why have you allowed this creature to kill my plagues,

  While permitting him to make bombs more powerful than me?’

  And I, embarrassed, must answer: ‘Allowed? Permitted?

  Man stopped asking my permission long ago.’”

  God falls silent now, his narrow eyes searching Pirooz’s wide ones.

  Pirooz does not know what to say, or if he should say anything at all.

  Finally he offers this: “What, God, can I say?

  We think of things to do and then we do them.”

  God offers no clue whether this was a good answer or a bad one.

  He simply continues: “You scar the face of the earth

  With boundaries, barbed and deadly, and wage war over them.

  You tramp on the moon’s surface,

  My creation to inspire poets to compose.

  And you remain restless even on the Sabbath Day.

  You extinct what I intend to exist!

  Not only birds and fishes and helpless plants,

  But my prophets, and even Me!

  With this Science of yours, this psychology and philosophy of yours.

  You erode my words in the Holy Books,

  As if I am the mud and you the rain, and not the other way around!”

  Extinct is not a verb, Pirooz thinks,

  But then who is he to question God’s English?

  He does however, question His wisdom:

  “If you didn’t want us to act this way, why did you create us this way?”

  Answers God: “I intentionally willed myself

  Not to know in advance if you would use

  The potential I embodied in you to go against my will.

  I wondered—yes, I wonder, too, if I wish—

  How you, my sole random intelligence,

  Would co-exist with the other things I created.

  But you make peace with nothing, not even yourselves.”

  Pirooz is surprised to hear such a scientific phrase

  Tumble from the Creator’s lips:

  “Random intelligence? What, Almighty God, is that?”

  God, sensing Pirooz’s astonishment, smiles and continues:

  “Man is unpredictable, acting under feuding influences and intentions

  Just like a game of Backgammon, which

  You Persians invented to mirror the human condition,

  Where intelligence and luck, intention and fate, interact.”

  As God falls silent, as if for eternity,

  Pirooz fidgets and says: “Surely you knew we might be trouble.”

  God answers him: “The universe is my self-realization.

  I created the Random Intelligence—The creature you call Man—

  To foreclose any thought of Me as an absolute despot,

  Who consults no one and pre-determines everything,

  Preempting any question or criticism forever.

  So, in short, Man is a serendipitous response to my creation.”

  “May I say something foolish?” asks Pirooz.

  God is amused: “No one has stopped your foolishness yet, Pirooz!

  Say as many foolish things as you like!”

  Pirooz feels himself blushing. “Just a couple will do, starting with this:

  Why is every creature you make a lemon?”

  “A lemon?” asks God.

  Pirooz explains himself: “What I mean is this,

  Everything you make seems to have a defect or two.”

  “No one is perfect,” answers God solemnly.

  Pirooz is sympathetic toward this imperfect, dardedelling God,

  Saying, “Perhaps you, Almighty God,

  Should create a supervisor, and report your failures to him,

  So that someday only those lemons

  Intended to be lemons will be lemons!”

  God falls into His unbounded silence,

  So Pirooz continues: “So what do you intend to do to us,

  Or with us, those of us who are upsetting your grand designs?”

  Now God does reply, His voice as sharp as the thunderbolts

  That boom and bash outside the hollow shells of airplanes:

  “I will take care of you, one by one,

  Or better yet, let you do it for me!”

  Pirooz shakes his head, mystified:

  “So many people love you, God, so much!

  Will you ever show them that you love them back a little, too?”

  Pirooz is awakened by a silence as big as the universe,

  And he whispers to himself,

  “I must wake up before I can never wake up!”

  3 The Desert Dances

  The sun rises, and the Sonora sleeps.

  Every animal sleeps, every plant sleeps.

  The bats, bugs, rodents and reptiles sleep.

  Even the great saguaros Rumi and Hafez sleep.

  After a long and blistering day

  The sun yawns, rolls over, and falls asleep,

  And the poets reawaken and resume counting stars.

  Rumi soon realizes he is counting alone.

  “Hafez Jaan—my dearest Hafez—what is wrong?

  There isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

  Confesses Hafez: “But there is a cloud in my heart, I fear,

  A cloud named Pirooz.”

  Rumi’s cactus head nods. “Yes, it is a miracle how he came to us,

  To two saguaros who are not saguaros at all!

  I’m glad he found us, glad we saved him from himself.”

  Hafez adds: “So am I, but I am also sad.”

  Without reaching out, Rumi pats Hafez on the back.

  “But that was last night, and these stars are begging

  To be counted tonight—so count with me, Hafez! Co
unt!”

  But Hafez does not count, cannot count.

  “After longing for so long, I have been touched by life again,

  From the saddened lips of Pirooz.

  How surprising, how enrapturing, how intoxicating!

  I dare to hope, Rumi Jaan, I dare to dream,

  But I think God wants me to taste life again!”

  Rumi, who first as a mortal man, and now as an immortal spirit,

  Has striven to find his bliss in the paradise of serenity,

  Feels impatience rising up his solid cactus stalk.

  “But Pirooz sang a song of death, not life.

  His mind was a ship with a torn sail,

  His soul was whipped by wolfish waves of dissimulation,

  His destination was the port of annihilation,

  And the foreigner within him lashed him like the Caspian winds.

  Did you hear how he struggled with the accents

  In his voice, his feelings, his thoughts, and his resolve?

  Thank God we need not struggle with so many accents.

  Thank God you and I are dead!”

  The sap running in Rumi’s veins is suddenly sweet:

  “Yet you are right, Hafez Jaan,

  Though Pirooz in his distress could not tell a rose from a thorn,

  He dardedeled with us, loved us, showed us great respect.”

  Hafez stares down at the empty sand,

  Remembering the frail mortal who visited them the night before,

  Remembering the frail mortal he once was himself,

  Remembering exactly how he looked as a boy,

  As a grown man, and as a man grown old, and now as a cactus.

  He says to Rumi: “I don’t blame Pirooz for not knowing

  Who he is, where he is, or what he must do, or be.

  I was once such a man myself,

  And this old poem of mine is my proof:

  Neither in life nor in death did I ever learn

  Whence I came from, or where I am now.

  I bemoan with pain and regret

  That my own state is still unknown to me.”

  Rumi tries to lighten Hafez’s heart with a joke:

  “Just when I am getting used to you as a cactus,

  You turn into a Pirooz!”

  As Hafez laughs, his melancholy deepens:

  “No, no, I am not a Pirooz.

  For all my rebelliousness and all my spunk,

  Pirooz is much braver with his life than I ever was.

  He left his city for a new city—Tehran for New York.

  He left his country for a new country—Iran for America—

  And fought injustice whenever he could.

  I, however, spent all of my seventy years in Shiraz,

  Endlessly walking the same streets, drinking from the same wells.