These separations these ignorant ones make, especially
foreigners, charting the language so God
is ungreat, so the extravagances of god get caught
not occurring for the pause occurring inaccurately:
all that girl I worked with knew was that the Bible
could be only approached by her as though it were
a ring toss, an inarticulation in its wholeness
that must gain wholeness by some pasting is done
by random openings, by Numbers now being appealed
to, then Mark. Or Deuteronomy and Exodus: wherever
the damned thing opens to. I tell her I do the same thing
with the Qur'an, which is true partially, partially
untrue (for I don't tell her it's the Qur'an—how
can I tell her that? that beyond her ken, all com-
plexity lost to her, she stuck in some behavior is, and
that alone, correct to her.) My body breaks itself, my
misgivings: for there is more untruth to me: that nothing
I chart charts.
And then there are these prayings over food
in some other language at the restaurant and my asking
to use the phone to try to save my marriage from me, you
always faithful, you there so I can show off in front of the
Vietnamese restaurateur by speaking into the phone Indonesian
to you: Indonesian then a few words of English about when
you will come here, will you come here?, the kápan lebih
than the will you: lebih more, more lebih; give me more
grace, more remembrance of God than the baby prayers
I wake up into every morning—about my little feet being
guided by You up to Thee, my feet barely working now, now
some stretch beyond which the arch equipped them—
a design problem, problem of structure. What, I ask
the foreign podiatrist, are feet such as these—feet such
as mine—designed for? why their structure? (Was there a
purpose my structure was structured thus for? is what
I want to know: some acknowledgment from someone: that
I am of supreme value, not merely a collection of
collapsing capabilities.)
But there must be some cohesion,
my glancing at the book beside me, a tale of houses iced
with frosting, a Christmasy feeling to Yemeni structures,
grand brown gingerbread faces: stories I attempt to get closer
to Yemen by reading must have been some meaning to my
having driven into the mosque yard those few years back, no
bad intent other than collecting a prayer time calendar
to indicate dates and times for the upcoming Ramadhan (nothing
wrong with it except my husband disapproves all appeals to God,
to Allah, I call It, when, waking, God sounds awkward, an incon-
venient syllable, a grossness, so my tongue shifts to Allah, two
waves of the tongue, an up and down movement, released
statement, suspended before the initial touch, then the release
into air, surrender of appointment, surrendered intent. The
imam there in winter, pulling the children out into the yard,
oak tree yet standing (It is before his coup: the ripping of the oak
tree out, the razing of the garden acreage of vegetables and goats
going around its perimeter, all the doings of the Palestinian Omar:
all replaced by a river of black asphalt, white drawings of lines
demarking spaces to attendees to park in.
Why meet the Yemeni imam
if it was only to witness his going away, fallacious though I may
consider his parking lot project (his greatest achievement in this
God-forsaken town he immediately upon seeing said the Muslims
here were not doing what they should in: all demarcation of the
building absent so no one would even know it was a mosque
passing—just a white, barren couple of buildings, just.) I seek
refuge, I say, coming out of sleep, your white pocked back to me,
both of us entering age, in Allah, from Satan the rejected. Then
feel the body of the cat, sensitive to my waking, mount my chest,
expect I will arise soon and bathe and dress and take my work
to the Vietnamese place and breathe in, prayerfully, the entire
project before us.
was supposed to be the fear you must never feel.
The Vietnamese doctor in the black suit and red tie
on Saturday morning seeing patients, saying
there may be things wrong with what you're taking,
and me just around the bend from atheism, if taking
what doctors give out is faith. God, she said, is
between you and God. Like the time I was angry at the black
kid and was brutalized so badly for my mistake
it felt I had touched a hot stove so that the Indian
man who came to the door asked
was something wrong. Wrong?
Wrong. The knotty pine bedroom I didn't appreciate enough.
Oakland I didn't appreciate enough. Ought to have:
Look where I've ended up.
All these things
and these angers
and sittings alone
in some coffee shop
being other than who I am
and misplaced modifiers
and incorrect relations—a general wrongness:
that gonging sound: wrong.
Oh, Father, where were you wrong?
Those steps in Macao—I left a dress
in one of the shops there, with the request
it be a pattern to use for the white cloth I’d brought from the U.S.,
then left and tried to describe
what steps my friend should go up
so she could retrieve it—the original,
the copy. But there were so many stairs
so many flights in the town
that she could never find the place.
What is the purpose of this—
am I become a non-believer?
There, churched,
mosqued, more accurately,
nothing but flies moving through, touching my knees—
(the cloth covering my knees, that is—
nothing visible
allowed in a mosque).
