For Monday I Wait No More

 

For Monday I Wait No More.

november 2001 (Azerbaijan)

jp melville

There is war.

Said.

One does not have to accept war.

Said.

There is war.

Said.

Men die.

Children go hungry.

Dirt grows under the nails.

Bottles get smashed.

Crows roost or pick on the unspeakable.

Rain falls and mud thickens.

Cold cuts into fingers.

Low voices dissolve into dark skies studded with stars.

Wind whispers lonely through rattling dried leaves.

Ragged dogs with ribs showing root in forgotten garbage.

Widowed young women hunger after men’s bodies they cannot have.

Rivers flow sleepily along empty banks.

Rust gathers on steel posts.

Listless smoke curls from cold stove pipes.

A plant tips, dried, the stem snaps, the pod falls slowly,

Slow through an arc of endless time,

Sweeps from standing tall,

The sun and clouds swirling above its drunken toppling,

Speeding ever so more quickly,

Down,

Plummeting down,

Rabid velocity toward impact,

The ground, now screaming ache, desire,

“Come… come… come… oh god come!”

Desperation grasping, clasping, gasping,

The pod growing ever so larger as it races closer,

Closer,

And closer,

Toward impact,

Rabid impact,

Shattering explosion!

Crash!

Aaaaahhh…

One of a thousand seeds falls gently, Gently,

Oh ever so gently,

Into the warmth of urging soil.

War.

What is this thing

Which we call war?

Just today, in Imishli

A man beside me asks:

These foreigners who go early Fridays

Back to Baku

While nationals must stay until 5:00 p.m.?

Only today, in Imishli, I am asked:

Do you like your job

When it is nothing more than U.S. foreign policy?

Only today, in Imishli, someone says:

But you stay

So I tell you

That with Allah’s grace

We will return to Agdam.

The Imishli office grows silent on a Friday evening,

Development workers gone,

Work done,

By clock and by calendar

Workplan, strategic plan

Development work is done.

Yes, to Baku

Three hours away

Brand new donor funded

Automobiles and vans

Hurtling toward Baku

Oil rich

Derrick pocked

Cosmopolitan city of the East

Persia’s canker

Shops

Electric lights

Two, three, towering hotels

Oasis of the rich

Women with curled smiles, cosmetics

Men with cigarettes, mobile phones

And bureaucratic jobs  wet dreams.

And the Imishli office?

Hours away in a flattened plain

Birth of a re-american dream?

God no.

Blood empty even before Friday’s dawn creeps in the sky.

Leaves blow round its corners

Grown silent for the weekend

A town whose weekends have no infinity

No eternity

A black hole to Monday morn.

Monday to Thursday but bodies playing roles

So when Friday morning comes

Souls already gone to Baku

Seeking long weekend

Hurtling toward Baku

Toward the rise of empire

Imishli’s long long gone.

But my frost bit ears are listening

For the man beside me speaks.

This weekend

Several ranting men in Baku where they rent

(Their homes in distant lands)

Banter over what they call

Post-conflict society

Meaning:

The snapshot of time

When the dust settles

Following the last spark of flame

Tearing from a rifle’s barrel

When the air still scintillates with tension

When tension breathes from every word

Impregnating words

Which pass the wet warm lips of every person

Young, old, crippled, passionate

From every breath across the land.

And of these ranting renting men

They wrestle sensuously with computers

In windowless offices

Fingers tapping plastic keys

Fingers tapping business plans

For people they have never known

Of whose daughters they have never dreamed.

They print black ink single spaced reports

Ejaculating slowly

From corporate

Slant eyed labourer made

Boxed, shipped, delivered

Paper ink hungry defecating  machines.

And somewhere

A woman with her lover

His arm squeezed round her shoulders

Drinks whiskey in a bar

Telling stories about her ruined passport

Had wine upon it spilled

She surrounded by English speaking foreigners

All laughing

All in the pit of their stomachs worrying

If ever that should happen

How they too would replace their documents

Their umbilical cords to other places

To wombs far far away,

Far from the hollow echo

Of Baku’s cold, hard, black paved streets

Far from the chilling wind sweeping off the strange platforms

Rising above an oil scented black wet sea

A wind that whips in from the docks

Wrap, wrap, wrapping its stranglehold

Around the ancient limestone buildings

A wind that licks across the barroom’s door

Wherein they suck their cigarettes

And whiskey drinks

And fear the red wine story.

Yet elsewhere

In Baku…

A young man seeks his friends and streets

Black leather coats

Jocular banter

The company of humanity.

Another, not so young

 Rests with his wife and daughter

Reading books

Listening to his family’s

Small stories of the week.

Several women watch tv

With their husbands by their side

Turkish melodramas, love

Or broadcasts of the government.

Others drink tea

Play cards

Smoke

Talk of weddings

Or plan one.

Even others have gone to bed

Faces snuffled into pillows

Digesting

Their first home cooked meal in five days.

That’s this weekend in Baku.

But in Imishli…

Three hours away

The electricity fails to come until nine p.m.

And then with insufficient voltage

To turn the stiff compressors

Of ancient soviet refrigerators.

In Imishli…

The dogs bark

The wood smoke hangs in the air

While the full moon spreads her vapour

Over quiet ground

And children sleep

Buried beneath blankets.

In Imishli…

The hulks of soviet central school heaters

Rust against the night

Thick natural gas pipes sag their shadows over cracked sidewalks

Webs of desperate wires hang from leaning poles

The vacant spaces between walled homes, called streets

A mysterious limbo of emptiness

Only rare single souls with hunched shoulders

Hands sunk in pockets

Passing quickly from secret departure

To even darker destination.

In Imishli…

The world waits for market day

Saturday morning

When the bazaar springs to life

From six in the morning to just after noon

When everyone is out

And the streets are alive

The children poking their noses out from metal doors

The chickens scratching in gutters

The sheep grazing the medians...

And then the afternoon is empty.

The void is there by dusk.

Tension seeps between the cracks.

I listen.

I hear.

War.

The man beside me says:

I will return to Agdam...

For Monday I wait no more.