Iman Mersal

Trans. by Robyn Creswell

some things escaped me

One day I’ll walk by 
the house I lived in for years
without measuring its distance from all my friends’ houses.
The fat widow who woke me at night with her moans of pleasure
isn’t my neighbor anymore.

I’ll invent methods to make sure I’m not distracted, 
like counting steps,
or biting my lips to enjoy the tender sting,
or I might busy my fingers with ripping apart a whole packet 
of paper handkerchiefs.

I won’t look for sideroads
to help me avoid the pain.
I won’t forbid myself to casually loiter
while training my teeth to chew the cud 
of hatred rising within me.
I’ll try to reconcile myself with the cold hands 
that pushed me toward that house
by remembering how I never
soiled the bathroom’s whiteness
with my distinctive kind of darkness.

No doubt some things escaped me.
These walls never entered my dreams,
so I never wondered what color of paint
would suit the terrible glare.

This house where I lived for years
wasn’t a student dormitory
for me to leave my one good dress
on a nail behind the door,
or hang my old photos with sticky tack.
I wonder if the sentimental quotations
I copied out from Love in the Time of Cholera
have settled there now in a heap of words 
that reads like an absolute farce.

Robyn Creswell is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University and author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton). A former poetry editor of The Paris Review, he currently is an editor-at-large for poetry at Farrar, Straus and Giroux book publishers.

Iman Mersal is among the most celebrated contemporary poets in the Arab world. She is the author of four collections of verse and three works of prose, including How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts, a hybrid of cultural criticism and personal memoir.