Divide and Rule Read online

  DIVIDE

  AND

  RULE

  WALID

  BITAR

  COACH HOUSE BOOKS

  TORONTO

  copyright © Walid Bitar, 2012

  first edition

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also ­acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication.

  Bitar, Walid, 1961–

  Divide and rule / Walid Bitar.

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-254-7

  I. Title.

  PS8553.I87755D58 2012 C811′.54 C2012-900236-4

  THE POEMS

  Mission Creep

  The Good Reason

  The Hundred-Metre Hurdles

  Sound Barrier

  Digging a Hole

  Contractors

  An Immigrant

  The Low Volumes

  Exact Change

  The Wish

  Scorched Earth Policy

  Grave Robbers

  The Unemployed

  Shock and Awe

  Inner Sanctum

  The Collaborators

  Tunnel Vision

  Pyrrhic Victory

  The Picture of Concentration

  The Barricade Auction

  The Zodiacal Beasts

  Grey Matter

  Outer Space

  Sabotaging the Calendar

  The Minotaurs

  Habeas Corpus

  The Mobs

  Learning Curves

  Over the Rainbow

  Margin of Error

  Beneath the Level of Conversation

  Accordionist

  A Flight of Stairs

  False Flag

  Atheling

  Freedom of Assembly

  Waterboarding

  Still in the Camera

  The Naturalization

  Not So the Ocean

  Cloak and Dagger

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  MISSION CREEP

  Big, small and medium-sized,

  fish whose schools I didn’t dynamite

  the first blockade or two, mission creep

  setting in now – flames children burst into,

  we elders sit around telling fairytales,

  sick of you as you are of us,

  patients concealing serious symptoms.

  The sun behind you, you could eclipse,

  if you were the moon. Words often fail

  at the last minute that arrives too early.

  Seems you’re currently at a loss for them;

  here they are. Listen how? Carefully,

  hunger-striker. Sing for my supper,

  and you prove the whatchamacallit

  would never land on your broad shoulders,

  as if it were a parakeet – bolt of lightning,

  more like, though that isn’t it either.

  I’m at a standstill, not up to scratch,

  dependent as pawns are on chessboards –

  rooks, kings, queens, the grandmaster’s

  THE GOOD REASON

  The stratagems of the enemy,

  subject of pre-war conversation,

  wiped smiles off his and our faces

  when reality became unspeakable.

  I loved him once – may he rest assured

  in a crypt I spent the morning sealing.

  I awoke feeling misunderstood,

  therefore decided I’d clear my throat,

  carve in stone maxims inchoate

  when I was in a better position

  to mutter something, mean nothing by it.

  Now I’m forced to act after I speak

  in our circle of mandarins,

  some intimating they need a bit extra

  to distinguish them from their closest friends

  on whom they turn, barbarism feigned.

  How did we lose the shared sense of humour

  claimed later by each as his own?

  There are various versions of events,

  the solution conflating them all

  before they multiply, the gossip

  in both my ears, and out both others.

  The good reason: I hired a double

  the research shows helps a man grow,

  grasping though I am for ideals

  formerly held at a lesser distance.

  Almost as easy wrestling free

  as raising arms high in surrender,

  regaling audiences, their feet of clay

  not any archetypal model’s,

  so I must sculpt them. Rather painful –

  mission accomplished with an iron fist.

  THE HUNDRED-METRE HURDLES

  Hypnotize me, an emancipated

  slave compromised by tacit acceptance

  of the status quo – may I flow faster

  than flash-flood water down the drains

  into the sea. Doesn’t look like rain,

  background of your still life you’re angry

  I sell as a paint-by-numbers set,

  or a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

  Didn’t stick my leg out – you tripped

  single-handedly after a few,

  a very few, too many. Self-hatred’s

  career-threatening. There’s much I owe

  you for diverting unbearable pressure.

  Wait until you regain consciousness

  from a beating I’ll resume administering

  and, in the meantime, lick my own wounds,

  blisters I prick after state-sponsored walking –

  transliterated, the names of athletes

  caught clearing hurdles, or knocking them over.

  Wouldn’t underestimate this rabble

  if I were their coach. I’m of their number,

  must compete in our teeming slum.

  Trash-talking beggars I grant pardons.

  Something I wouldn’t call a conscience

  serves me, like Rottweiler or seneschal.

  Since I can’t afford either, the sound

  of my thinking out loud suffices.

  Laugh at it – it becomes the laughter.

  SOUND BARRIER

  Publically, you claim you’re an ocean

  I am surviving in as marine life,

  without provoking a rival’s claque,

  its main body on a beach frying,

  predictable before the sun descends

  to an underworld we’re above at war.

  I’d rather fight the living. The dead

  have had too much time to mull things over,

  argue their questions precede statements

  I issue, turning my words into answers,

  though I speak first – there’s no respect

  for simple chronology from the bastards,

  their testes crated, and ours in states

  required by the counter-revolution,

  our ex-employer preaching from the choir,

  singing never his primary strength,

  glorious, though, compared to splashes

  through swamps whose sprites mistook us for ephemera

  they’d carelessly created with snaps

  of fingers they later realized we’d fractured,

  divine punishment a lower sound barrier,

  our speech’s value incalculable

  as oxygen’s, because regular users

  are sometimes the rich, sometimes the poor,

  these beasts of burden driving me wild
/>   till I’m so comfortable in my skin

  I fall back on memories I shouldn’t trust,

  and don’t expect they’ll break my fall.

  DIGGING A HOLE

  Heavily censored, how tunnellers live:

  as we please, around here, an elite –

  in the majority, persons of interest

  cultivating for rices and beans.

  I jump beautifully out of the way

  before a backlash our lower classes

  consider a right: holding the noble man’s

  feet to a fire he carelessly sets.

  Dance, my eldest shall study abroad.

  Rather than institutions of higher

  learning, I chose water muddied

  by my dirty shoes, peered into depths

  and started digging a hole, first step

  toward destabilizing the planet,

  its orbit difficult to disturb,

  its hot core solid, or I’d fan the flames.

  CONTRACTORS

  This phony warrior’s armed to the teeth,

  our barks and his bites all but synchronized,

  the son of a bitch – I mean, of a state

  that doesn’t love him, and he doesn’t love.

  Dash upstairs – praise to the skies

  what might fall on us if it isn’t in them,

  yours no future money couldn’t buy,

  or, failing that, at least destroy.

  Do me this favour and, in exchange,

  I’ll mask ingratitude; a disguise

  overwhelms the plain truths any day.

  It looks like somebody, and so do I,

  most at home under another’s name –

  not just an alias – in another’s thoughts,

  yours for example. They irritate me

  a little less than if I had had them.

  AN IMMIGRANT

  They’re good judges, or they wouldn’t have risen

  slowly so far. I wasn’t their pilot;

  I was presiding. Did they obey orders?

  Didn’t give any. Clinging to power,

  I paid for services, expected miracles

  and am waiting around with the patience

  of a besieger, thus can’t surrender.

  I’ll see the light, allow that it’s faint,

  suppress a narrow range of emotions

  you assumed extinct till informed exotic

  jungles they’re from survive in a foreign,

  partially peeled banana republic

  whose dictator disgusts me personally,

  though he and I are both larger than life,

  and terrified of death. What does that leave?

  I am in a position to compromise,

  will spare you grammar in your harsh sentences,

  if you solve this puzzle: a mulatto

  won’t accept our lovable greenbacks

  as proper payment for his petroleum,

  demands from us illegal rain checks,

  his drought-stricken godforsaken country

  mine for crying out loud. I was born there.

  Should I, like any immigrant, save my skin?

  If you concentrate, pleasure and pain

  rise to the levels of happiness

  and suffering. I once shovelled manure by day –

  by night, this sight for sore eyes: bullshit,

  the pure kind, inhuman, not animal,

  I’d find a better way to describe,

  if that were in my interest. It isn’t.

  You’ll never tame me. I was never wild.

  THE LOW VOLUMES

  A born acrobat’s, your gospel – you leap

  whenever caught losing an argument,

  frozen in headlights beside the deer,

  smash through glass and you’re in the driver’s seat,

  suddenly conscious the mysteries of death

  are only experienced by survivors.

  Some believe in a live-and-let-live

  manifesto, our arch-enemies;

  they refuse a fight – rather difficult

  convincing them there’s a war in progress.

  How many of their number must we kill

  before they evolve into semblances of us,

  throw a few punches at least, right wrongs?

  Things look up because of the certainty

  with which – look, no hands – my views hold

  water as if it were already ice,

  my range so wide framing it’s a problem:

  proud one moment, and the next vain,

  I compromise, pass for vainglorious,

  though I’m honest enough to keep changing

  the low volumes of my inner voices,

  inaudible unless I shut my trap,

  turn a blind eye to the justice system,

  since it poked the eye out in the first place.

  EXACT CHANGE

  I wonder how you’ll react tomorrow

  when you’re shaken well, and remember

  me in your dreams, interpreting for you

  as you slept – will you tender thanks?

  Anything can happen, yet our days

  pass in such a predictable manner

  the organized take an interest in –

  there is the difference between us and them.

  I’ve seen my share of the whole earth on spec –

  I want the sum of parts it doesn’t have.

  A holy man learns, deflects attention

  away from himself and onto a rosary.

  A lesser trickster, I pen the odd proverb,

  warn my victims, this chivalrous streak

  among the improbable side effects

  when I split my personality,

  an experiment most could do without,

  but I have no choice, must continue using

  power I, of all people, inherited,

  and by which I feel persecuted,

  prizing, far more than the collective

  weight of an army busting my scales,

  the ability of a single detective

  I hire to hand me the exact change.

  THE WISH

  In your last fight to the death, you discovered

  it was for death you were willing to die,

  a more logical cause than the others,

  because you’d grown very tired of life,

  free will exercised. You decided

  on a necessary course of action,

  planted your flag in torrential rain,

  then slipped through cracks in drying mud.

  Until this storm, artificially lit,

  the studios behind your every move,

  you did no wrong that wasn’t set right

  by the time you rose in the morning,

  my punches thrown years before they landed.

  While waiting, I put food on the table

  in minimum-wage cameos counting raindrops

  instead of clouds, which are much easier,

  though I forgive everything today.

  Thanks for the memories worth less than toys,

  and more than candles blown out, the wish

  my big secret. I’m birthday boy,

  overexcited, forgetting criteria

  checked off before balance is regained,

  too far down a road back to chaos

  out of which my touch of class was created,

  as were your silences on the rack,

  until the tuning fork vibrated.

  Sabbaths, our modest powers-that-be

  pass the hat for a little night music.

  SCORCHED EARTH POLICY

  I can’t beat your ignorance senseless –

  it’s an idea, unaware it’s for real,

  like wisdom actually. Grant me this much:

  I never found the golden mean tempting,

  my dates with destiny, marriage arranged,

  years bragging about rights to bear arms

  ending in some kind of engagement with

&
nbsp; loggers turning roots into a living –

  beneath the dignity of our autochtonous

  factotums a devious Druid trained

  to tread water they couldn’t hop on.

  our main chance jumped at, ground hit running.

  You’ll never see the forest, for the trees

  your points of view excluded don’t exist now,

  on account of the scorched earth policy.

  GRAVE ROBBERS

  It was during my penultimate escape

  attempt I determined I was a prisoner

  of no beliefs, denied a fair trial,

  since I could play either victim or thug,

  each working wonders out of his failure

  to do the right thing – there’s always the wrong.

  Child of the Enlightenment, I let off steam

  after confirming the air’s cold enough,

  your loudest disciple, hearing voices,

  none yours – the thousands you’ve heard

  weren’t either. The proof I’m loyal:

  I can’t trace where mine come from,

  except on rare occasions singers

  whose graves we rob return in styles

  that whipped both of us into a frenzy

  when we were young, and they were lionized,

  paid precious metals. Sell their stones.

  Hail the virtuosity we’d put behind us.

  Hoist their human remains on our shoulders

  for this last stage of the decaying process.