Your love has taught me, my dear,
The worst of habits
It has taught me to fill up my glass
A thousand times per night
And to sample the treatment of druggists
To knock at the diviners' door
It has taught me— I now leave my home
To comb the roadside flagstones
And I stalk your visage
In the rain, and in the lights of cars
I stalk your specter
Even... even...
In sheets of advertisements...
Your love has taught me...
How I've been love-lost in my own face—for hours
Searching for a gypsy poem,
That every gypsy girl might envy
Searching for a face—a voice—
Your love is all the faces and all the voices.
Your love has made me enter, my dear
Cities of sorrows
Before you, I had not entered
Cities of sorrows—
I had never known—
That a tear was a person
That a person without sadness
Is the memory of a person...
Your love has taught me...
To behave like kids,
To draw your face—
With chalk upon the walls
And on the sails of fishermen's crafts
Upon the church bells,
And the crosses.
Your love has taught me...
How love alters the turning of time—
It has taught me that when I love,
The earth holds back its spinning
Your love has taught me things...
That were never part of the accounting
So I read the stories of children—
I entered the palaces of the jinn kings
I dreamed that the daughter of the sultan
Married me—
Those eyes of hers... purer than the gulf waters
Those lips of hers... more luscious than a pomegranate's bloom
And I dreamed that I safeguarded her
Like the knights,
I dreamed that I gifted her,
With strands of pearl and coral
Your love has taught me, my dear, what delirium is
It has taught me how life goes on,
With the sultan's daughter never coming.
Your love has taught me...
How I love you in all things
In the naked tree
In the desiccated, yellow leaves
In the rainy weather—in the storms
In the smallest of cafes—
In which we, of an evening, drank our black coffee
Your love has taught me to seek refuge
In nameless hotels
In nameless churches
In nameless cafes
Your love has taught me...
How the night distends with strangers' sorrows
It has taught me... how to see Beirut:
A woman... a madame of seductions
A woman, wearing each and every night
The finest garments she possesses
Sprinkling perfume on her breasts
For the sailors—and the princes—
Your love has taught me...
To weep for lack of crying
It has taught me how sadness sleeps
Like a young boy with severed feet
On the streets of Rūsha and Ḥamrā'
Your love has taught me... how to be sad.
And I have needed, for ages
A woman to make me sad
A woman in whose arms I could weep
Like a sparrow,
A woman— to gather up my pieces—
Like shards of shattered crystal
