The Foreigner
by Amir Or
He wakes
up on scorching sand between wall and square,
in front
of him the convoy halts, as in front of a forgotten memory:
is he only
a mark on the road, is he a signpost or a diary,
was he
left here, on a three-way junction,
for a moment
or for ever? The body tht stiffened, didn't die;
behold,
he's not alone. Figures without shadow and reflection
carry him
to be burnt
on a pile
of fire-wood, dung and libation oil, under a heap of flowers.
Is this
a man or a fish?
will he
live or, with the pallbearers, pass through
a gate revolving
over a spinning abyss,
over the
unseen axis between chasm and fountain? -
HIs hands,
feet and neck are fixed in their posture,
in this
one step, in which he walked beyond the gaze,
and vanished
inside his shadow. His gills froze in the last breath,
his yellow
shadow, remained behind him,
cast like
a monk's cloak depleted of content,
a foothold
for any passerby on pits along the path
which runs
through huts and peddlers' stalls' the shadow, the figure, the attire
are fixed
in a reflection, like an icon burnt by fire,
which he
left here in a lover's eyes, rising from a mirror-world on a wall of the
house,
and in
the capering of puddle-creatures
between rain and light.
Now, in
a figure without a body, he awakens between the hands
of the
eternal gravediggers, carried like loot. The funeral paces
in slow
silence like a dense liquid, congealing;
the wailing
women are not seen, but their voices rise in lament: Oh! Oh! Oh!
The congregation
is submerged not entirely cut
from of the dark,
dragging
behind the pallbearers like a long-shadow-wake or foam
trailing
a crab's movement on a shore. He wakes up, places his legs
on the
ground he dind't fathom, that again he didn't remember, he attempts a movement
like a calf
standing of four for the first time, to be licked by his mother's tongue.
The pallbearers
are deterred from him, even though no stir is seen
to a hasty
eye, but crawls inside his limbs like the growth of a branch.
He is deserted
on the sand, on a square in front of a wall,
and as an
era passes he finally stands; his shadow grows on the wall,
opens onto
the square, he pulls from above toward him the limbs of absence,
sends his
hands to all the behind. Now as he recalls,
he hesitates
to touch what brought him here, the magnitude that fell from him
like one
thought. Slowly he loosens himself
from the
spasm of death; slowly he looks toward reflection and shadow
that he
left behind: a wife and two daughters, a boy of five,
and an
old mother that's still standing, like an echo that returned to a voice
on the river
bank where the ashes were scattered
where Narcissus
had drowned.
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