We Die in Autumn
The day the house cracked,
your skin remained,
and your bones, lodged in my throat,
fasten a small hollow to my memories.
Your voice falls
onto the glass of noon tea.
I died in my shoulders
as many times as you left.
Why, for years,
has the number of your memories
been tied to the roots of my hair?
I love you,
and a small memory has remained
so that you would not leave.
The feeling of home,
with its small walls
and the pearl of your eyes,
claws at the blindness of my own.
Ask me
how, all these years,
without the radiance of my eyes,
I managed
to kill your face
and then keep it alive
in Braille.
I sing your goodbye
to you
with sparrows
whose voices have turned into skin and bone.
And for the days remaining in my house,
I read
the leprous poems
of an انتظار
—of a waiting.
You took your hands away,
but their place
has remained
on the repetition of my thirty-year-old self.
And ah—
the house has brought with it
the next repetition of my death.
After you,
with your hands and your eyes,
I have a dead kind of lovemaking.
I forgive you,
and I will not forget
that a woman is afflicted
by a dead man
whose name is Autumn.
And Autumn has nothing to do
with my poems
when it sees
that with those same poems
I remember
how, in Autumn,
through your pains,
I rained
upon the trunks of trees.
Saba✍️
S