Song of Two Worlds by Alan Lightman
Now, I remember that small sandy town
On the edge of the desert—
The prefect, degrees on his wall, medals,
Adoring children, drove off one day
For no reason and never came back,
Chasing some wild something,
Bitten and struck. And his car
Plumed a dust ball that rolled on the land
Until that too was gone.
All of it left to his wife save a note—
Took only his hat and jangled self.
Was it an ache to know everything,
Even his own misery? Was it his waiting
For all things to end, even his dignity?
Or some kind of creation,
A dark out of light,
Despair out of hope,
Needed completion, obsession?
82
In the darkness of dreams, the night dancer
Appears in my room, smelling of night myrrh
And earth, glides from the curtains,
A shadow in shadows, uncoiling her flickering tongue.
“Lightness and darkness,” she whispers.
“Each has its opposite. Life and the endless nonlife.”
And she lies down beside me. I’m aghast
At how much she has changed. And she touches
My thighs with cool hands, kisses my neck
With cool mouth, gown shroud-like
Envelops me. Floating, I think
Of the smell of my groves,
Ebbing warm eddies and star gazer lilies,
The sound of the wind sweeping the beach—
All I will miss in her unending night.
I can feel myself shrinking. Is it over so soon?
I touch her cool belly,
Her breasts like ice sculptures. I think
Of the heat of the summer. She shines her cold moon
On my body, caressing my creviced dry skin.
She is the ending.
I open my mouth.
I will descend.
Is this some new kind of love?
83
The time of my singing grows shorter and shorter.
I know this by shadows and flesh,
By the size of Abbas’s grandchildren—
Dreams of the future are now in the past,
And I dream of myself as a much younger man.
How should I breathe, in these last breaths of air?
When I see light on the sea, should I say:
This is the light that will always be?
When I see poppies that shiver in wind,
Should I say: This is the wind that will always be,
This is the flower born over again?
Should I imagine that ends are beginnings,
That all of it is as it was the first hour?
Or should I put time on the scale, like Lavoisier:
This much the weight of the ending,
And this much the weight of a life.
This much is wasted,
And this much will count—
So many years lost in these hot afternoons.
It will pass quickly, so quickly, yet here I am
Stirring my tea. Abbas knocks at the door,
Calling me. What can I say in this dwindling time?
84
“Were you calling?”
“No,” says Abbas,
“And you don’t look so good.”
I walk to the piano and play a Malouf,
Song that my mother taught,
Qasida poetry, weaving in slow syncopation.
Abbas closes his eyes, smiles,
Lets his cane fall to the floor.
“Yes,” he says, whispering,
“You still have faith.”
On I play, threading the melodies,
Fragments of verse, off-keyed piano,
While Abbas sways, trembling hands,
Smiling his old man’s smile,
Yellow teeth.
They never wrote to me after I left,
Then or years later,
Not she, or the children—
Was it desertion, or saving my self?
85
It’s Abbas who does not look well,
Wheezing, unsteady, asleep more each day—
Goes to his room to lie down,
Leaving his sandals outside the door.
I take up my pen, turn on a lamp
In the watery light, dusk—
What is this feeling of otherness,
Memory smeared,
Years in diagonal stripes?
Odors roll in from the wet rolling sea,
Abbas’s deep breaths
Keeping time with the clock in the hall,
Olive trees fade in the fading light, dreaming,
And I too fall into bed.
86
I dream of the fields of unplanted people
And wait for my seeding. A hollow wind
Skitters across the bare ground
While a pair of dark birds wings through the air,
Waiting to pluck up the seeds.
To my fellows unborn: We must wait, wait,
Through the flutter of wings,
While the soil is made rich with our waiting.
For we cannot choose
The precise time of our planting, or even
The century. Sleep, in the undreaming
Sleep of the unplanted, the wait without mind
Of the seed.
To all the unborn: Can we feel the millennia
Pass while we wait for our planting?
Can we sense the destructions of cities,
The smoldering of stars? And the hope?
Is there movement and shape
In the space of our eggs?
And when we are born—from the uncounted
Seeds that will sleep on forever—
Will we say: “This is the way it could be—
I might do this, and I might, and I might
Smooth out this crease at this moment,
Or close the blue gate to the garden”?
Or will the uncountable futures be trapped
In the past, choices transfixed in the moment
Of planting, and even before, in the flesh
Of the unplanted seeds?
Was there some choice that I wasted,
Crazed, shattered with insults,
My children begging me, bones
And the breath of me?
Or was there no choice from the start,
Born to a singer and merchant,
To corroding wealth,
Butterfly pinned in a case?
87
Yasmine, Abbas’s daughter, brings baskets
Of eggplants, bread, skewers of chicken and lamb.
Her eyes are Abbas’s eyes, silky dark hair, tall.
“Should he come home?” she asks.
“This is his home.”
Day after day he has stayed in his bed,
Too weak to rise, calling for people
From some other time. I pour tea
In his dry dune of a mouth,
Hold his limp hand, sit
While he sleeps through the day,
Shadows inch over the floor tiles,
Sea heaves of his breath.
88
A fine silt of sand slips over chairs, tables, and floors—
Some desert storm sifting its way through the house
Even with windows shut. Days pass,
Perhaps months, with the voice of the wind,
Shuttered light, food eaten from cans.
89
After he died, minutes after,
I touched him—his skin felt the same,
Scabrous, with heat rising up to my hand,
Even a pinkness. His hair smelled the same,
Odor of apple. I bent to the bed,
Beating my chest.
Waited for what, I don’t know, waited
For time to stop, sound of inf
inity,
Glimpse of my own nothingness,
But all was the same—light from the lamp,
Shoes in their places, the photographs,
Sweets on his dresser, the whisperings,
Footsteps, the beads of the curtain,
And him just as he was—
Except that the life was gone.
Memories, stories all vanished
In seconds. A world in him then, and now nothing.
How did his atoms once talk to me?
Atoms feel pleasure, and thirst?
Minutes ago. And now they’re just atoms,
Material shaped like a person, his face,
Grouped in a mass on the bed.
90
I bathe him as he bathed me years ago,
Rub him with dimpled cloth, lemon and soap,
Wrap him with three turns of a sheet,
Jasmine perfumed.
Abbas, dear Abbas, fare well my old friend—
But I am alone.
In the curved hallway, his daughters are draped in black,
Beating their chests silently.
Husbands sit sharing a pipe, also in black.
Villagers stand on the terrace
Reciting prayers, asking forgiveness.
Gently, I touch his gray stubble, his face—
I’ll keep his worn sandals and cane.
Then to the grave, hole in the earth,
Head facing Mecca,
Three handfuls of soil, fragrance of orange trees—
Remember the basket you taught me to stretch tight,
Remember the letters you wrote me,
Remember the candle at night.
Why did you leave?
91
Moons rise and fall, rise and fall—
Sleepless and weak from not eating,
I sit on my terrace and gaze at the sea,
Follow the curling dark waves,
Dark lung of water to dark lung of sky,
Light of a ship in the night—
And I wait for your shore,
Sound of your breathing,
Your laughter, your prayers.
I talk to myself, answer myself.
Am I alone in this omnibus?
I must speak clearly as if you could hear
Words making sentences, meanings,
And thoughts—fellow traveler who lived
In this ocean of mystery.
I must look at you clearly as if you could see
What I’ve seen: world that destructs
In each second, then reforms itself,
Laws of mechanics and force, numbers
And world without numbers—
A theater of meaning, but what?
What is this crumbling dry villa,
These empty rooms, orange trees and groves,
Paper and pen, memories?
What are these sandals,
Still tinged with your smell?
Tell me one thing that is true.
92
I am bent between something and nothing.
Is this my hand, jumble of stubs
Pulsing with sap—hand, or the thought
Of a hand? Is this a grave of fresh soil?
Grove of my father?
Cracked steps to the sea, windows,
This villa, the rooms of my childhood,
The voice of my mother, footsteps of Abbas?
Might the land be a dream, vanished
In one wakeful moment, like breath,
Like a wrinkle of wind on the sea?
93
Where are you, Abbas?
Is there some essence of flesh that is fleshless,
Some bone that is boneless, a breath
Beneath breathing, a center that has no periphery?
Is there some substance without Newton’s mass?
Is there a world of nonmatter
Within the material world?
Water and air could not spill from its
Emptiness. Sunlight could never reflect
From its surfaces, space without objects
And space without space.
Still, it might redeem—
Lightless and soundless yet
Full of a thing that cannot be named.
Is that where you are?
So fragile would be this invisible world,
Like a ghost without whiteness,
But strong, like the spinnings of spiders,
A gossamer kingdom without towers or walls,
Indestructible,
Large as a cosmos and small as a seed.
Is this the small whisper I hear in my night?
Invisible spurt of invisible blood?
How can I touch it?
I want it to know my small hands.
94
Here on the beach, as the fisherman patches his nets,
Pausing to gaze at the moon on the sea—
Here, as I walk through the garden at dawn—
Here, as the light again slides
Through the shutters, I wonder if it will all happen again:
The primordial explosion, the atoms
Vibrating in decimals, galaxies
Flung into blackness,
Each gesture, each word that is spoken,
My mother’s sweet singing,
The small town and prefect,
The oud player’s pain—
Even now, at this instant, I touch this spined puya—
Will all of it cycle through ends and beginnings,
Repeating, repeating each fragment of time?
I strain to remember the previous world.
Or is it just once,
One small experiment,
Universe shot from a cannon?
Exhausted, the stars will be ashes,
The coastline will slide to the sea,
And this breath will not happen again.
Feel it, it burns and expires.
Who will record what we do and say?
Who will inscribe these pale dunes at dusk?
Pages will crumble like cities,
The pictures and bits will decay,
No one will know.
I must hold these few words in my hand.
95
Should I not go to the boats on their anchors
And listen to waves rolling by, carefully
Listen for something,
Necessity, aim in the aimlessness?
Where is this moment against
The flashed arching of time?
I say to myself: I am not ready to hear
What cannot be heard,
But the sound may be soundless.
And I am not ready for faith,
But the vision may come to the faithless.
I am not ready … but
I will do these few things
And sing out with the cosmic sensorium.
96
I am wakened from sleep by a voice in the night,
Distantly calling—the oud player’s wife
Calling him, cursing him, calling him.
Says she’s been rambling for months,
Town to town—Where is that rotten man?
She looks behind trees, shambles and moans
Like a woman in love.
All I can see is her dark flowing veil,
Night silhouette.
I hear music,
Not oud but piano,
The yearnings, then torrents,
Melodic and sinuous,
Castles of things without size,
Music that lifts me and hallows,
And I am in tears.
And I need to remember
The journey of footfalls and winters,
The soft settling of light in the late afternoon—
Crushed and becalmed
In this music,
Alive, I’m alive,
And I still want this world,
Lurching and sweet.
Where is the oud player’s wi
fe?
I search in the dark.
I must tell her. I call to her:
Listen, your anguish and hope,
It is life.
But she’s gone.
97
Travelers who travel in this slice of time,
Come with me now on this last voyage of flesh,
All of us seeking a closing, completion,
A chime of the bell,
End from beginning,
An end that lives endlessly even in ending.
But there’s no completion in dawns and their blood flush,
Or beatings of hearts charting their hours,
Or chemists who measure their structures and grams,
Or the icebergs that groan
As they split in the sea,
Or the fields of the night-blooming jasmines and lilies,
The blue-flowered flax that is pulled with its roots—
There’s no completion in herons that wade in the water,
Or pheasants that flit in the brush,
Or the drooping persimmon, the black coastal mangrove—
There’s no completion in engines that whirl in the night,
Or the steel girded towers that puncture the sky,
Or the roadbuilder’s concrete and scab slabs,
The clicking and whining of office machines,
Even silence surrounded by noise—
There’s no completion in marriage,
Or unending end of a marriage,
Or waiting for what never comes,
Or this villa that dies by the sea.
There’s no completion in shadows that fall on the terrace,
Or grey winter mornings,
Or beige summer light,
Or the phosphorous glow of the watery algae.
98
Or the book that’s read over and over again,
Or the word that is spoken,
Or painting with hog bristle brush,
Or playing my mother’s piano,
Or writings of Lao-Tzu, Omar Khayyam,
Or the close of the door to the terrace, just so,
Or the close of the shutters at dusk—
Or the infinite digits of pi,
Or equations for gravity,
Perfect ellipse—
Or the bride who unbuttons her rumpled white dress,
Or the family that breaks
On the edge of the desert—
The prefect, degrees on his wall, medals,
Adoring children, drove off one day
For no reason and never came back,
Chasing some wild something,
Bitten and struck. And his car
Plumed a dust ball that rolled on the land
Until that too was gone.
All of it left to his wife save a note—
Took only his hat and jangled self.
Was it an ache to know everything,
Even his own misery? Was it his waiting
For all things to end, even his dignity?
Or some kind of creation,
A dark out of light,
Despair out of hope,
Needed completion, obsession?
82
In the darkness of dreams, the night dancer
Appears in my room, smelling of night myrrh
And earth, glides from the curtains,
A shadow in shadows, uncoiling her flickering tongue.
“Lightness and darkness,” she whispers.
“Each has its opposite. Life and the endless nonlife.”
And she lies down beside me. I’m aghast
At how much she has changed. And she touches
My thighs with cool hands, kisses my neck
With cool mouth, gown shroud-like
Envelops me. Floating, I think
Of the smell of my groves,
Ebbing warm eddies and star gazer lilies,
The sound of the wind sweeping the beach—
All I will miss in her unending night.
I can feel myself shrinking. Is it over so soon?
I touch her cool belly,
Her breasts like ice sculptures. I think
Of the heat of the summer. She shines her cold moon
On my body, caressing my creviced dry skin.
She is the ending.
I open my mouth.
I will descend.
Is this some new kind of love?
83
The time of my singing grows shorter and shorter.
I know this by shadows and flesh,
By the size of Abbas’s grandchildren—
Dreams of the future are now in the past,
And I dream of myself as a much younger man.
How should I breathe, in these last breaths of air?
When I see light on the sea, should I say:
This is the light that will always be?
When I see poppies that shiver in wind,
Should I say: This is the wind that will always be,
This is the flower born over again?
Should I imagine that ends are beginnings,
That all of it is as it was the first hour?
Or should I put time on the scale, like Lavoisier:
This much the weight of the ending,
And this much the weight of a life.
This much is wasted,
And this much will count—
So many years lost in these hot afternoons.
It will pass quickly, so quickly, yet here I am
Stirring my tea. Abbas knocks at the door,
Calling me. What can I say in this dwindling time?
84
“Were you calling?”
“No,” says Abbas,
“And you don’t look so good.”
I walk to the piano and play a Malouf,
Song that my mother taught,
Qasida poetry, weaving in slow syncopation.
Abbas closes his eyes, smiles,
Lets his cane fall to the floor.
“Yes,” he says, whispering,
“You still have faith.”
On I play, threading the melodies,
Fragments of verse, off-keyed piano,
While Abbas sways, trembling hands,
Smiling his old man’s smile,
Yellow teeth.
They never wrote to me after I left,
Then or years later,
Not she, or the children—
Was it desertion, or saving my self?
85
It’s Abbas who does not look well,
Wheezing, unsteady, asleep more each day—
Goes to his room to lie down,
Leaving his sandals outside the door.
I take up my pen, turn on a lamp
In the watery light, dusk—
What is this feeling of otherness,
Memory smeared,
Years in diagonal stripes?
Odors roll in from the wet rolling sea,
Abbas’s deep breaths
Keeping time with the clock in the hall,
Olive trees fade in the fading light, dreaming,
And I too fall into bed.
86
I dream of the fields of unplanted people
And wait for my seeding. A hollow wind
Skitters across the bare ground
While a pair of dark birds wings through the air,
Waiting to pluck up the seeds.
To my fellows unborn: We must wait, wait,
Through the flutter of wings,
While the soil is made rich with our waiting.
For we cannot choose
The precise time of our planting, or even
The century. Sleep, in the undreaming
Sleep of the unplanted, the wait without mind
Of the seed.
To all the unborn: Can we feel the millennia
Pass while we wait for our planting?
Can we sense the destructions of cities,
The smoldering of stars? And the hope?
Is there movement and shape
In the space of our eggs?
And when we are born—from the uncounted
Seeds that will sleep on forever—
Will we say: “This is the way it could be—
I might do this, and I might, and I might
Smooth out this crease at this moment,
Or close the blue gate to the garden”?
Or will the uncountable futures be trapped
In the past, choices transfixed in the moment
Of planting, and even before, in the flesh
Of the unplanted seeds?
Was there some choice that I wasted,
Crazed, shattered with insults,
My children begging me, bones
And the breath of me?
Or was there no choice from the start,
Born to a singer and merchant,
To corroding wealth,
Butterfly pinned in a case?
87
Yasmine, Abbas’s daughter, brings baskets
Of eggplants, bread, skewers of chicken and lamb.
Her eyes are Abbas’s eyes, silky dark hair, tall.
“Should he come home?” she asks.
“This is his home.”
Day after day he has stayed in his bed,
Too weak to rise, calling for people
From some other time. I pour tea
In his dry dune of a mouth,
Hold his limp hand, sit
While he sleeps through the day,
Shadows inch over the floor tiles,
Sea heaves of his breath.
88
A fine silt of sand slips over chairs, tables, and floors—
Some desert storm sifting its way through the house
Even with windows shut. Days pass,
Perhaps months, with the voice of the wind,
Shuttered light, food eaten from cans.
89
After he died, minutes after,
I touched him—his skin felt the same,
Scabrous, with heat rising up to my hand,
Even a pinkness. His hair smelled the same,
Odor of apple. I bent to the bed,
Beating my chest.
Waited for what, I don’t know, waited
For time to stop, sound of inf
Glimpse of my own nothingness,
But all was the same—light from the lamp,
Shoes in their places, the photographs,
Sweets on his dresser, the whisperings,
Footsteps, the beads of the curtain,
And him just as he was—
Except that the life was gone.
Memories, stories all vanished
In seconds. A world in him then, and now nothing.
How did his atoms once talk to me?
Atoms feel pleasure, and thirst?
Minutes ago. And now they’re just atoms,
Material shaped like a person, his face,
Grouped in a mass on the bed.
90
I bathe him as he bathed me years ago,
Rub him with dimpled cloth, lemon and soap,
Wrap him with three turns of a sheet,
Jasmine perfumed.
Abbas, dear Abbas, fare well my old friend—
But I am alone.
In the curved hallway, his daughters are draped in black,
Beating their chests silently.
Husbands sit sharing a pipe, also in black.
Villagers stand on the terrace
Reciting prayers, asking forgiveness.
Gently, I touch his gray stubble, his face—
I’ll keep his worn sandals and cane.
Then to the grave, hole in the earth,
Head facing Mecca,
Three handfuls of soil, fragrance of orange trees—
Remember the basket you taught me to stretch tight,
Remember the letters you wrote me,
Remember the candle at night.
Why did you leave?
91
Moons rise and fall, rise and fall—
Sleepless and weak from not eating,
I sit on my terrace and gaze at the sea,
Follow the curling dark waves,
Dark lung of water to dark lung of sky,
Light of a ship in the night—
And I wait for your shore,
Sound of your breathing,
Your laughter, your prayers.
I talk to myself, answer myself.
Am I alone in this omnibus?
I must speak clearly as if you could hear
Words making sentences, meanings,
And thoughts—fellow traveler who lived
In this ocean of mystery.
I must look at you clearly as if you could see
What I’ve seen: world that destructs
In each second, then reforms itself,
Laws of mechanics and force, numbers
And world without numbers—
A theater of meaning, but what?
What is this crumbling dry villa,
These empty rooms, orange trees and groves,
Paper and pen, memories?
What are these sandals,
Still tinged with your smell?
Tell me one thing that is true.
92
I am bent between something and nothing.
Is this my hand, jumble of stubs
Pulsing with sap—hand, or the thought
Of a hand? Is this a grave of fresh soil?
Grove of my father?
Cracked steps to the sea, windows,
This villa, the rooms of my childhood,
The voice of my mother, footsteps of Abbas?
Might the land be a dream, vanished
In one wakeful moment, like breath,
Like a wrinkle of wind on the sea?
93
Where are you, Abbas?
Is there some essence of flesh that is fleshless,
Some bone that is boneless, a breath
Beneath breathing, a center that has no periphery?
Is there some substance without Newton’s mass?
Is there a world of nonmatter
Within the material world?
Water and air could not spill from its
Emptiness. Sunlight could never reflect
From its surfaces, space without objects
And space without space.
Still, it might redeem—
Lightless and soundless yet
Full of a thing that cannot be named.
Is that where you are?
So fragile would be this invisible world,
Like a ghost without whiteness,
But strong, like the spinnings of spiders,
A gossamer kingdom without towers or walls,
Indestructible,
Large as a cosmos and small as a seed.
Is this the small whisper I hear in my night?
Invisible spurt of invisible blood?
How can I touch it?
I want it to know my small hands.
94
Here on the beach, as the fisherman patches his nets,
Pausing to gaze at the moon on the sea—
Here, as I walk through the garden at dawn—
Here, as the light again slides
Through the shutters, I wonder if it will all happen again:
The primordial explosion, the atoms
Vibrating in decimals, galaxies
Flung into blackness,
Each gesture, each word that is spoken,
My mother’s sweet singing,
The small town and prefect,
The oud player’s pain—
Even now, at this instant, I touch this spined puya—
Will all of it cycle through ends and beginnings,
Repeating, repeating each fragment of time?
I strain to remember the previous world.
Or is it just once,
One small experiment,
Universe shot from a cannon?
Exhausted, the stars will be ashes,
The coastline will slide to the sea,
And this breath will not happen again.
Feel it, it burns and expires.
Who will record what we do and say?
Who will inscribe these pale dunes at dusk?
Pages will crumble like cities,
The pictures and bits will decay,
No one will know.
I must hold these few words in my hand.
95
Should I not go to the boats on their anchors
And listen to waves rolling by, carefully
Listen for something,
Necessity, aim in the aimlessness?
Where is this moment against
The flashed arching of time?
I say to myself: I am not ready to hear
What cannot be heard,
But the sound may be soundless.
And I am not ready for faith,
But the vision may come to the faithless.
I am not ready … but
I will do these few things
And sing out with the cosmic sensorium.
96
I am wakened from sleep by a voice in the night,
Distantly calling—the oud player’s wife
Calling him, cursing him, calling him.
Says she’s been rambling for months,
Town to town—Where is that rotten man?
She looks behind trees, shambles and moans
Like a woman in love.
All I can see is her dark flowing veil,
Night silhouette.
I hear music,
Not oud but piano,
The yearnings, then torrents,
Melodic and sinuous,
Castles of things without size,
Music that lifts me and hallows,
And I am in tears.
And I need to remember
The journey of footfalls and winters,
The soft settling of light in the late afternoon—
Crushed and becalmed
In this music,
Alive, I’m alive,
And I still want this world,
Lurching and sweet.
Where is the oud player’s wi
I search in the dark.
I must tell her. I call to her:
Listen, your anguish and hope,
It is life.
But she’s gone.
97
Travelers who travel in this slice of time,
Come with me now on this last voyage of flesh,
All of us seeking a closing, completion,
A chime of the bell,
End from beginning,
An end that lives endlessly even in ending.
But there’s no completion in dawns and their blood flush,
Or beatings of hearts charting their hours,
Or chemists who measure their structures and grams,
Or the icebergs that groan
As they split in the sea,
Or the fields of the night-blooming jasmines and lilies,
The blue-flowered flax that is pulled with its roots—
There’s no completion in herons that wade in the water,
Or pheasants that flit in the brush,
Or the drooping persimmon, the black coastal mangrove—
There’s no completion in engines that whirl in the night,
Or the steel girded towers that puncture the sky,
Or the roadbuilder’s concrete and scab slabs,
The clicking and whining of office machines,
Even silence surrounded by noise—
There’s no completion in marriage,
Or unending end of a marriage,
Or waiting for what never comes,
Or this villa that dies by the sea.
There’s no completion in shadows that fall on the terrace,
Or grey winter mornings,
Or beige summer light,
Or the phosphorous glow of the watery algae.
98
Or the book that’s read over and over again,
Or the word that is spoken,
Or painting with hog bristle brush,
Or playing my mother’s piano,
Or writings of Lao-Tzu, Omar Khayyam,
Or the close of the door to the terrace, just so,
Or the close of the shutters at dusk—
Or the infinite digits of pi,
Or equations for gravity,
Perfect ellipse—
Or the bride who unbuttons her rumpled white dress,
Or the family that breaks