by Walid Bitar
DIVIDE
AND
RULE
WALID
BITAR
COACH HOUSE BOOKS
TORONTO
copyright © Walid Bitar, 2012
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication.
Bitar, Walid, 1961–
Divide and rule / Walid Bitar.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-55245-254-7
I. Title.
PS8553.I87755D58 2012 C811′.54 C2012-900236-4
THE POEMS
Mission Creep
The Good Reason
The Hundred-Metre Hurdles
Sound Barrier
Digging a Hole
Contractors
An Immigrant
The Low Volumes
Exact Change
The Wish
Scorched Earth Policy
Grave Robbers
The Unemployed
Shock and Awe
Inner Sanctum
The Collaborators
Tunnel Vision
Pyrrhic Victory
The Picture of Concentration
The Barricade Auction
The Zodiacal Beasts
Grey Matter
Outer Space
Sabotaging the Calendar
The Minotaurs
Habeas Corpus
The Mobs
Learning Curves
Over the Rainbow
Margin of Error
Beneath the Level of Conversation
Accordionist
A Flight of Stairs
False Flag
Atheling
Freedom of Assembly
Waterboarding
Still in the Camera
The Naturalization
Not So the Ocean
Cloak and Dagger
Acknowledgements
About the Author
MISSION CREEP
Big, small and medium-sized,
fish whose schools I didn’t dynamite
the first blockade or two, mission creep
setting in now – flames children burst into,
we elders sit around telling fairytales,
sick of you as you are of us,
patients concealing serious symptoms.
The sun behind you, you could eclipse,
if you were the moon. Words often fail
at the last minute that arrives too early.
Seems you’re currently at a loss for them;
here they are. Listen how? Carefully,
hunger-striker. Sing for my supper,
and you prove the whatchamacallit
would never land on your broad shoulders,
as if it were a parakeet – bolt of lightning,
more like, though that isn’t it either.
I’m at a standstill, not up to scratch,
dependent as pawns are on chessboards –
rooks, kings, queens, the grandmaster’s
THE GOOD REASON
The stratagems of the enemy,
subject of pre-war conversation,
wiped smiles off his and our faces
when reality became unspeakable.
I loved him once – may he rest assured
in a crypt I spent the morning sealing.
I awoke feeling misunderstood,
therefore decided I’d clear my throat,
carve in stone maxims inchoate
when I was in a better position
to mutter something, mean nothing by it.
Now I’m forced to act after I speak
in our circle of mandarins,
some intimating they need a bit extra
to distinguish them from their closest friends
on whom they turn, barbarism feigned.
How did we lose the shared sense of humour
claimed later by each as his own?
There are various versions of events,
the solution conflating them all
before they multiply, the gossip
in both my ears, and out both others.
The good reason: I hired a double
the research shows helps a man grow,
grasping though I am for ideals
formerly held at a lesser distance.
Almost as easy wrestling free
as raising arms high in surrender,
regaling audiences, their feet of clay
not any archetypal model’s,
so I must sculpt them. Rather painful –
mission accomplished with an iron fist.
THE HUNDRED-METRE HURDLES
Hypnotize me, an emancipated
slave compromised by tacit acceptance
of the status quo – may I flow faster
than flash-flood water down the drains
into the sea. Doesn’t look like rain,
background of your still life you’re angry
I sell as a paint-by-numbers set,
or a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Didn’t stick my leg out – you tripped
single-handedly after a few,
a very few, too many. Self-hatred’s
career-threatening. There’s much I owe
you for diverting unbearable pressure.
Wait until you regain consciousness
from a beating I’ll resume administering
and, in the meantime, lick my own wounds,
blisters I prick after state-sponsored walking –
transliterated, the names of athletes
caught clearing hurdles, or knocking them over.
Wouldn’t underestimate this rabble
if I were their coach. I’m of their number,
must compete in our teeming slum.
Trash-talking beggars I grant pardons.
Something I wouldn’t call a conscience
serves me, like Rottweiler or seneschal.
Since I can’t afford either, the sound
of my thinking out loud suffices.
Laugh at it – it becomes the laughter.
SOUND BARRIER
Publically, you claim you’re an ocean
I am surviving in as marine life,
without provoking a rival’s claque,
its main body on a beach frying,
predictable before the sun descends
to an underworld we’re above at war.
I’d rather fight the living. The dead
have had too much time to mull things over,
argue their questions precede statements
I issue, turning my words into answers,
though I speak first – there’s no respect
for simple chronology from the bastards,
their testes crated, and ours in states
required by the counter-revolution,
our ex-employer preaching from the choir,
singing never his primary strength,
glorious, though, compared to splashes
through swamps whose sprites mistook us for ephemera
they’d carelessly created with snaps
of fingers they later realized we’d fractured,
divine punishment a lower sound barrier,
our speech’s value incalculable
as oxygen’s, because regular users
are sometimes the rich, sometimes the poor,
these beasts of burden driving me wild
I fall back on memories I shouldn’t trust,
and don’t expect they’ll break my fall.
DIGGING A HOLE
Heavily censored, how tunnellers live:
as we please, around here, an elite –
in the majority, persons of interest
cultivating for rices and beans.
I jump beautifully out of the way
before a backlash our lower classes
consider a right: holding the noble man’s
feet to a fire he carelessly sets.
Dance, my eldest shall study abroad.
Rather than institutions of higher
learning, I chose water muddied
by my dirty shoes, peered into depths
and started digging a hole, first step
toward destabilizing the planet,
its orbit difficult to disturb,
its hot core solid, or I’d fan the flames.
CONTRACTORS
This phony warrior’s armed to the teeth,
our barks and his bites all but synchronized,
the son of a bitch – I mean, of a state
that doesn’t love him, and he doesn’t love.
Dash upstairs – praise to the skies
what might fall on us if it isn’t in them,
yours no future money couldn’t buy,
or, failing that, at least destroy.
Do me this favour and, in exchange,
I’ll mask ingratitude; a disguise
overwhelms the plain truths any day.
It looks like somebody, and so do I,
most at home under another’s name –
not just an alias – in another’s thoughts,
yours for example. They irritate me
a little less than if I had had them.
AN IMMIGRANT
They’re good judges, or they wouldn’t have risen
slowly so far. I wasn’t their pilot;
I was presiding. Did they obey orders?
Didn’t give any. Clinging to power,
I paid for services, expected miracles
and am waiting around with the patience
of a besieger, thus can’t surrender.
I’ll see the light, allow that it’s faint,
suppress a narrow range of emotions
you assumed extinct till informed exotic
jungles they’re from survive in a foreign,
partially peeled banana republic
whose dictator disgusts me personally,
though he and I are both larger than life,
and terrified of death. What does that leave?
I am in a position to compromise,
will spare you grammar in your harsh sentences,
if you solve this puzzle: a mulatto
won’t accept our lovable greenbacks
as proper payment for his petroleum,
demands from us illegal rain checks,
his drought-stricken godforsaken country
mine for crying out loud. I was born there.
Should I, like any immigrant, save my skin?
If you concentrate, pleasure and pain
rise to the levels of happiness
and suffering. I once shovelled manure by day –
by night, this sight for sore eyes: bullshit,
the pure kind, inhuman, not animal,
I’d find a better way to describe,
if that were in my interest. It isn’t.
You’ll never tame me. I was never wild.
THE LOW VOLUMES
A born acrobat’s, your gospel – you leap
whenever caught losing an argument,
frozen in headlights beside the deer,
smash through glass and you’re in the driver’s seat,
suddenly conscious the mysteries of death
are only experienced by survivors.
Some believe in a live-and-let-live
manifesto, our arch-enemies;
they refuse a fight – rather difficult
convincing them there’s a war in progress.
How many of their number must we kill
before they evolve into semblances of us,
throw a few punches at least, right wrongs?
Things look up because of the certainty
with which – look, no hands – my views hold
water as if it were already ice,
my range so wide framing it’s a problem:
proud one moment, and the next vain,
I compromise, pass for vainglorious,
though I’m honest enough to keep changing
the low volumes of my inner voices,
inaudible unless I shut my trap,
turn a blind eye to the justice system,
since it poked the eye out in the first place.
EXACT CHANGE
I wonder how you’ll react tomorrow
when you’re shaken well, and remember
me in your dreams, interpreting for you
as you slept – will you tender thanks?
Anything can happen, yet our days
pass in such a predictable manner
the organized take an interest in –
there is the difference between us and them.
I’ve seen my share of the whole earth on spec –
I want the sum of parts it doesn’t have.
A holy man learns, deflects attention
away from himself and onto a rosary.
A lesser trickster, I pen the odd proverb,
warn my victims, this chivalrous streak
among the improbable side effects
when I split my personality,
an experiment most could do without,
but I have no choice, must continue using
power I, of all people, inherited,
and by which I feel persecuted,
prizing, far more than the collective
weight of an army busting my scales,
the ability of a single detective
I hire to hand me the exact change.
THE WISH
In your last fight to the death, you discovered
it was for death you were willing to die,
a more logical cause than the others,
because you’d grown very tired of life,
free will exercised. You decided
on a necessary course of action,
planted your flag in torrential rain,
then slipped through cracks in drying mud.
Until this storm, artificially lit,
the studios behind your every move,
you did no wrong that wasn’t set right
by the time you rose in the morning,
my punches thrown years before they landed.
While waiting, I put food on the table
in minimum-wage cameos counting raindrops
instead of clouds, which are much easier,
though I forgive everything today.
Thanks for the memories worth less than toys,
and more than candles blown out, the wish
my big secret. I’m birthday boy,
overexcited, forgetting criteria
checked off before balance is regained,
too far down a road back to chaos
out of which my touch of class was created,
as were your silences on the rack,
until the tuning fork vibrated.
Sabbaths, our modest powers-that-be
pass the hat for a little night music.
SCORCHED EARTH POLICY
I can’t beat your ignorance senseless –
it’s an idea, unaware it’s for real,
like wisdom actually. Grant me this much:
I never found the golden mean tempting,
my dates with destiny, marriage arranged,
years bragging about rights to bear arms
ending in some kind of engagement with
&
nbsp; loggers turning roots into a living –
beneath the dignity of our autochtonous
factotums a devious Druid trained
to tread water they couldn’t hop on.
our main chance jumped at, ground hit running.
You’ll never see the forest, for the trees
your points of view excluded don’t exist now,
on account of the scorched earth policy.
GRAVE ROBBERS
It was during my penultimate escape
attempt I determined I was a prisoner
of no beliefs, denied a fair trial,
since I could play either victim or thug,
each working wonders out of his failure
to do the right thing – there’s always the wrong.
Child of the Enlightenment, I let off steam
after confirming the air’s cold enough,
your loudest disciple, hearing voices,
none yours – the thousands you’ve heard
weren’t either. The proof I’m loyal:
I can’t trace where mine come from,
except on rare occasions singers
whose graves we rob return in styles
that whipped both of us into a frenzy
when we were young, and they were lionized,
paid precious metals. Sell their stones.
Hail the virtuosity we’d put behind us.
Hoist their human remains on our shoulders
for this last stage of the decaying process.