by Maria Abou Abdallah
This poem is basically about being intrigued by, and falling in love with, someone from a completely different neighborhood of Beirut, and weighing all the societal complications and risks that come with that. Because it is so difficult and complicated, these individuals necessarily get to know each other in nooks and corners of the city, making one pay attention to beautiful things about Beirut one would otherwise not realise.
(NOTE: The title of this poem alludes to people “literally dying on a balcony…grandmothers, etc.” It actually refers to “a specific balcony that an ex-boyfriend of mine saw where apparently some people had been messing around with a Ouija board and were then haunted and chased by spirits, leading some of them to actually jump off the balcony.” We were discussing how closely the title relates to the poem, and Maria began re-thinking the title. I suggested that perhaps this poem also is about her, at 19 years old, dying on this balcony as well – being pushed past nineteen, growing up. Anyway, the title stayed, and it seems fitting.)
_________________
Lui, he sits across from
me with a local beer btirfa3 el
ras. My head rests
against the graffiti
of three-minute
testimonies, the only wall
I have against the slow intrigue
Of choice at nineteen.
My pupils dilate,
fixate on the shadows
those eyelashes cast on those
cheekbones, and the past
is brought back in candor
conversation. It is here
to make its presence known
in swirls of deeply inhaled and
relinquished cigarette smoke.
His pupils dilate, and with
focus lost and eyebrows
locked he stares,
with an unfamiliarity
reserved for looking at
orphaned children,
at a past
that made uncomfortable
the dream of coming home
to just take a nap
next to someone who
raises the dead in
you and for whom you
don’t need to tear abstractions
apart. Slamming down
years of cobwebbed cynicism and
maps of shadowed
self-handicapping nooks,
corners of comfort, I
say nothing works that way.
But then there is the
silent glare with which I
am met and I know, in that
moment, that I
will soon be taught how
to lie, how
to curl words around my
tongue and throw a
flaming cigarette at an apathetic
concrete sidewalk because this
truly hurts no
one, flaming
cigarettes that are
only accepted from
him, him and his
double-standard euphemisms.
With the extinction of
his smiles it was made
clear that upon the
materialization
of my mischief he
would stretch us to pained
blood-red-eyed insomniac
ends as proof that he
with his black stallion normalcy
crushing hoofs was always
bad enough for us both.
For a few moments under a
feeble sun, the end and its
threat are pushed up two-hundred
eroded steps that cut
between whispering
walls, cocooned from a mess of
noise and stains, stares
and acid rain, to end
up on the other
side where I say I’ve never
been as I clutch that
angle in a solid
arm that belongs to him.
Unable to yet foresee the dark
hurricanes of his unwavering
pride rooted in his
ancient inner city
pedigree, a soft,
soft hand accepts the weight of
his, the cloth before the
chloroform, and
over frozen sips of beer he
tells me of all the people who
died on his balcony, how their
veins dilated with
reason in the
heat of the dancing
flames of street
lamps and brake lights
igniting the wicks of bombs
they’d never drop, for wars
they could never win.
_________________
I met Maria at our first Wednesdays of the month open-mic poetry nights, a few years back when we held them at the Blue Note (currently held at Cafe Younes). She stood out to me because she reads her poems with conviction, a soft full voice with which she pleasantly manifests their melodies. And though she talks about accentuating beauty in her poems, do not mistaken her for a sunny writer, as her poems are often marked with the dark – which I’m often attracted to. Now that she’s in Melbourne studying social psychology, we only see her when she pops in to Lebanon, where she spent most of her life, and swings by to read us a poem from her reservoir. I asked her why she writes; maybe it’s an easy question, but I think not often an easy answer.
Many photographers say that they take photos to preserve snippets of time, to preserve the images and impressions that come with them. I write to bring attention to the mundane as there’s a lot of beauty in the world but we keep expecting glorious things to fall out of the sky with magnificient light so that we consider them to be beautiful. As cliche as it sounds, there is also beauty in sadness and in pain, in day-to-day bravery, in emotions both complex and simple, not just in great loves with music swelling in the background and William Blake’s pastures (although love is a common theme for my writing, of course). I try to be fair to the world and life…it’s not all good, it’s not all bad either.
So I write to preserve moments, impressions, smells, details, thoughts, feelings, associations between all of these things, encounters…mine and other people’s…and I try to write so that, for example in the case of this poem, people are transported to these moments, and are able to smell, see, hear, taste, think, and feel them. I also write about the antithesis of most Hollywood movies: loose ends. I write so that time is slowed down in a poem and because maybe there is poetry in the little things…even spilling a porcelain cup of coffee and watching it cracking on the floor…well there can be, if you want it.
