Two Nights

1 Night of Electrical Storm 

The night was so multiple it couldn’t possibly end

Electricity-the quick outline of a misshapen animal—
jumped from house to sky and then 
to a third and stranger place beyond our senses

Rain drummed on the roof like a horde 
of garrulous gnomes that hummed and hammered in 
their microscopic messages of nonsense

When the noise thinned down to a single vertical river
I knew: the rain had taken shelter in the waterfall above
You were sad for you love nothing more than rain on the roof

We uttered simple words like blowing long shapes out of glass
to stir the thick phlegm of newly formed silence
Silence of course remained unstirred 

The room filled with a select crowd. Everyone was there:
cripples from the past, supermen from the future (and vice-versa)
icon-faced lessons with disapproving lips. They didn’t say a word

We were suddenly among chipped shadows 
We tried to remain whole by lying very still and
thinking of nothing 

From that third and stranger place 
we were being watched with terrible longing 
the place was later found to be Memory 

When the night ended, it was like the end of an era

2 Night of Poverty 

After the multiple night came the single night
In the single night there was 

A single window and in it

A single outline of a mountain

A single star above the mountain

A watch pushing single-handedly each moment 
towards the window’s edge

And not a single shadow 
Not a single memory
Not a single hope

Yet it was no different from other nights
It was the same window, mountain, star, watch, moments
Even the waterfall was there, minimally

We were no different from ourselves
You — sleeping aridly like a desert 
where I pitched my Bedouin tent
And I — with my worry beads, not minding 

Really there was no reason why 
poverty spilled its gentle acid over that night
burning the beginning into the end

No reason why we found a beggar’s dawn so full of holes 
there was almost nothing left of it