Letter to Mahmoud Darwish

March 31, 2009 Dear Mahmoud, It's early spring March, and late in the afternoon, so the sunlight is sweetly desired, soft and decadent. Six o'clock, I feel as if the evening is still miles away, and sun beams stroke my keypad like a familiar cat. I have been trying to write to you for days, still thinking about what you said, how to reach you, how to reach me. You are whole and dead, I am struggling, alive. This is the first time since I was a college kid that I have no money. The only resources are my words, and the paper I steal from the office. Twenty years ago, it was BIC pens, now it's access to the company printer and web mail. It solemns me, this lack of external resources, this closeness to an edge I used to think belonged to others, and I push myself to be able to listen. There are many times I feel I belong nowhere, so that this edge confronting me makes me pay attention. You have now passed away; what do you want of me, still sickly alive? Why are there poems calling me to listen, to write, to call them "work"? When my ex-husband, a freedom fighter I had known for decades, left me, I needed a roommate and so I advertised. I received a one line inquiry: "I am from Palestine, do you have a room for me?" As a divorced woman, hounded by the IRS, daughter of a German Jew and Irish immigrant, abandoned by a man who loved war more than me, I thought "in for a penny, in for a pound" and welcomed Abu Nour to my humble home. That has been one of the most comforting decisions I have ever made. Abu Nour came as a scholar, with credentials and backing from an internationally renowned foundation; but more importantly, he came with a photo of his two-year-old daughter. In it, she is held tenderly by her mother and father as she reaches out for the camera--after all, she is two, and wants to hold it, and be the center there, too. At the precise moment when I accepted his security deposit, I was given an entirely a new vision, a grappling hook into a future we all can have, and one I never knew I would love so much. To love someone from Palestine is to say to one's bones "do you mind changing your skeletal configuration, please?" The friends I always counted upon no longer liked me, my family thought I was staying depressed and traumatized from the divorce, and I no longer was asked to dinner. I have learned there are many hungers, and all of them demand their own deep questions. Your bones might reply, "We are not sure you are whole enough to ask this." And so your fundamental structure comes into war with itself. Abu Nour cooks a dish called "upside down stew"--the closest thing to American food I can think of is Shepard's pie; but his is better and on cold New England nights, makes me wonder how anyone in the hot desolate desert of Palestine could dominate the winter so well. It even warms my nervous bones. This is a form of poetry, to me--comparing and sharing food. In his first class in his Ph.D. program, a woman from Israel said "I did not come to America to sit next to the enemy." Abu Nour has spoken with respect to my cats, done the dishes twice without asking, never leaves the toilet seat up and I hate this woman immensely. Even woman to woman, I hate her. Eventually, however, she and Abu Nour become solid friends and teach others how to see each other as real beings, in a loving way. This is a form of poetry to me, when I can let it in, a new form of meeting through word. It turns out, Mahmoud, that I am a person who knows war from the past. I guess this is different from knowing war from the present, and I am sorry, I don't understand that. But I know war and what it does to families, from the past. There are memories, and realities that have not settled in the corners, not become annoying dust bunnies, or even rich ripe loam, from which a healthy future will flourish. They stay in the center, a blind elephant that I try to run from, to evenly escape all that I am, every day. …