We grew older, Jameel Bouthaina and I, each alone, in two separate eras . . . It is time that does what sun and wind do: it polishes us then kills us whenever the mind bears the heart’s passion, or whenever the heart reaches its wisdom *** Jameel! does she grow old, like you, like me, Bouthaina? *** She grows old, my friend, outside the heart in others’ eyes. But inside me the gazelle bathes in the spring that pours out of her being *** Is that her, or is that her image? *** That’s her, my friend. Her flesh, her blood, and her name. Timeless. She might stop me tomorrow on her road to her yesterday *** Did she love you, Jameel? Or did she like being a metaphor in your songs, a pearl . . . whenever she stared into your nights and welled up, she rose easterly as a moon with a heart of stone? *** It’s love, my friend, our chosen death one passerby marrying the absolute in another . . . No end for me, no beginning for me. No Bouthaina for me or me for Bouthaina. This is love, my friend. I wish I were twenty doors younger than myself *** for the air to be light on me, and for her side-profile *** at night to be clearer than a mole above her navel . . . *** Did you seduce her, Jameel, contrary to what the narrators have said about you, and did she seduce you? *** I married her. We shook the heavens and they streamed milk on our bread. Whenever I came to her my body bloomed flower by flower, and my tomorrow spilled its wine drop by drop into her jugs *** Were you created for her, Jameel, and will you remain for her? *** I was ordered and tutored. I have no concern for my spilled presence like water on her grape skin. And no concern for the immortality that will follow us like shepherd dogs. I am only as Bouthaina created me *** Would you explain love to me, Jameel, to remember it one idea at a time? *** People who know love best are the most perplexed, you must burn, not to know yourself, but to illuminate Bouthaina’s night . . . *** Higher than the night, Jameel flew and broke his crutches. And leaned into my ear and whispered: If you see Bouthaina in another woman, make of death, my friend, a friend. And glitter over there, in Bouthaina’s name, like the nûn in rhyme! _______________________ Translated by Fady Joudah