13469760.0023.113Absinthe2377-3456Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan LibraryAnn Arbor, MI13469760.0023.113http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13469760.0023.113Article“Aleppo, Aleppo”“Without Exit”(poetry)Yeramian MaroushPiferMichael27102017231Unscripted: An Armenian Palimpsest2017This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu to use this work in a way not covered by the license. The soil wasn’t mine but it became mine when my grandfathers were buried there. They had come with the dream of the USA from Dikranagerd to here where the sky had sprinkled a glaucous dream in their dreamless, anguished souls where the crimson soil had given birth to wheat, to bread to an unrealized faith in sweet life. The soil wasn’t mine but it became mine when my hani was born here my grandmother who went by Khanum1 (she was renamed Zvart Kasbarian) and at her wedding with a jaundiced smile and arms raised she danced ‘lemune al-lemune’ fervently. The language wasn’t mine but the echo reached my ear from distant Ani, from king Gagik,2 and from our history’s flowing plait: securely woven by many hands, undone by the same nomadic races. But the pain was ours, mine from the beginning: the pain of tortured earth and spilt blood was mine (for both were equal, the same) upon this soil blue in blood and in this tongue I was this place     and this place was mine, just as the forest or the heavens belong to the hind. But the fire came down; heaven renounced her children who remained landless, skyless, and who were lost in a place between reality and the evening news. The place disowned us along with the sky; we, who exalted it upon our shoulders and cared for it by the shade of our eyelashes. The swallows were late for their rendezvous (in the afternoon of every spring at 4 o’clock) with children released from school and the cascading blessing of evening. Heaven was pierced with holes and the swallows don’t understand— why there were no boys of the “wooden square” awaiting them? Or why were their no sellers of zeit and zaatar?3 There was only a petrifying, pregnant silence —silence, as if, a female— ready, at any moment, to birth terror.  Under the pierced sky there was a pierced map where we had stopped, had found a foothold in this place. Over us, the blessings of swallows from whom we learned to sing during our nights around the citadel sweetened by the fragrance of hookahs. In those days, time was our friend: the deep blue of night would smoke with us and would sing duets, ballads of the old knights whose names were engraved on the gates of the citadel: “I neither forget nor remember the future . . .” (the latter, arm-in-arm with time, slipped out of our city, leaving behind dust, oblivion) now, a place, in a pit of the earth, in the presence of forgotten monasteries, we draw breath the tenderness of turtledoves warbling over our shoulders. I kneaded the earth and my hands bled. the brooks bled and the verdure burned but still I kneaded, opening casks of royal, ancient oil, sifting for salt in a lake of tears. Look, there under August’s sun dreams are desiccated, furrow by furrow; rats gnaw on the buds. The mysterious subterranean tunnels of old have consigned the echoing cry of ya-leyl — oh night! — to clay jugs; the toothless mouths of old women have frozen in a curse toward heaven.      Corpses fester there. The gurgling of ponds on the iwan has fallen silent in dread. There’s no soul left who might question the ruins. Our surroundings, strained from the beginning grow tighter, constricting like a noose: it’s impossible to draw even a half-a-breath. And we tear apart the Arabian courtyards of our inner-worlds: the red soil spills forth from the pots, abandoned plants wither. So we rip down garlands, destroy etchings, stairs, looking for the snake who, until now, has been the uğur, the good luck of home. Was he just a fairy-tale told after dark? We are always awake, even now. But— why does the nightmare continue on? The church bell-tower is gone there’s no ringing to rouse us from this longing. Why did we cast down the staff? it was necessary to go far: to seek immortality in the corners of disappearance. We, the vagrant, we search, wandering, for our secrets— why did we cast down the staff? we threw off our shoes and surrendered to oblivion the road to heaven the road that always winds through hell. the pigeons still live together: their numbers grow strong.