Copyright © 2005 Victoria Edwards Tester
___________For more poetry
Victoria Edwards Tester
from Here isthe Rose
Salt Houses
The man who did not recognize my face
walked out like the sea,
carrying the saddest photograph in the world.
I sat down in each of my chairs,
and found nothing broken.
My hands found the bones in my throat,
and I remembered
therewould be nothing to eat in the house.
I saw how he had embedded the air
with carnations of salt.
And I rose and began to make salt houses.
Salt houses, clean carvedand white carnations,
too beautiful for disbelief.
Openyour eyes in salt and wish you were dead.
Bite a carnation,
andknow that inside a child is arranging a row
of forks on a table, andkissing each fork
as he sets it in order.
That a woman who cannot eat is reaching into her chest
and bringingout a small white box.
Opening it in hope of music,
and findingthe bones of her grandmother’s wrists.
But the delicate bones of the wrists
of those who can’t rememberus
are the crystal hinges that guide us through doorways,
and even the salt houses have their windows,
where the light is tooclear to be disturbed by the voice.
And when my child walks sadly in,
I say that the saddest photographin the world
is only a wing tucked under the arm of a stranger.
That his own arm is only the pure curve
that sailed him into theworld.
And if he asks what the opposite of a house is,
Imust say that the doors are not against us,
and find some tinysweetness for the tip of his tongue.
Arequipa, 1988
Suddenly what you have is enough.
A thousand birds could feed on your crumb,
but not one comes.
All around you, the plaza, the streets
filling with people who havecome to fight
for their inheritance.
It is getting dark, and they must have it
before the circling birdsnestle into the purple crevices
of the National Cathedral.
You are not undone by the birds,
you have already seen the light andthe dark down
undersides of their outstretched wings.
You know the choking ascension,
like a candle stuck in thethroat,
and how everyone would have to lay down
afterwards, sickon the public benches.
But tonight the people are refusing to look,
they are lookingforward like soft monuments.
No one accidentally brushes you
with their shoulder, or glances atyour watch.
If they had, you would have held your crumb
out to them.It would have been enough.
Everyone could have gone home,
walking straight.
For Yannis Ritsos, 1989
Last night a friend spoke of you
and the trees in his yard inAthens,
and smiled when he remembered the tree
his oldgodfather had created,
a hybrid, a mandarin whose fruit
was a nearly perfect square,
like nothing else in nature.
The thought of it seemed to give
him strength enough to describeyou
in an unlifted voice:
a radiant man who’d enter a room
in a quiet shirt,
a man who had suffered. He paused,
as if thinking how at night alltrees
are black.
Or as if he gently cupped
one of the square oranges in his hand,
without seeing it.
And in that pause, because you existed,
we were both silent, andhappy.
December
1
My heart is a frozen iron bed frame
in a whitewashed house onCrete.
When my tongue touched the frozen iron,
I knew I would breathequietly until spring.
2
In winter, the dried flowers on the graves
lose theirsecond lives.
I lose mine too, the one I took
from the oven of your hands.
At night your hands wake up talking.
Catholics on one side,
Catholics on the other,
death is only the line between you.
3
You call me Papa
because your mother called you Mama
because herfather called her Papa.
With your left hand you rock
thecradle of a United Arab People’s Republic.
With your right you rocked the child
who would never connect us
with the bridge of his hands.
4
In school they teach my living child
why onions make our eyes water.
At home, he makes a list of everyone
who has forgottenhope.
He wants to give us a second chance.
He crosses out his firstname
and takes his second, Joseph,
he who shall add.
5
I can go to any point on a map of Crete,
but I cannot touch thesilence that comes before
or after the Arabic syllables meaning weare married.
I save my pennies in order to go to Crete.
At night you dig them out of the garden
to pay for electricity andbooks.
Every time I spend a penny to turn on a light
in Houston, a starsays amen!
and shuts down like a factory.
6
Even in the saucepan milk it isn’t evil.
It overflowslike gray pigeons on the stove.
The last penny I have hidden in my pocket
prevents you fromdiscovering
that the bird nest has gone from the chimney,
andthat there is a country in the heart
where marriage is illegal.
7
You’ve gone for more milk,
my husband, my lamp, mybrilliant detective.
My child says, Look, I’ve boiled the Christmas angel.
But I have stayed awake all night conjugating
the Arabic word forto say goodbye quietly.
The War
1
Charles Simic, can you hear me?
I am divorced from the bone of mycountry.
January, the telephone of my blood is ringing.
2
I want to report a murder.
It happened between a pianoand Washington,
an alphabet and Baghdad,
an evil God and abeautiful rat.
It happened between the morning I was
feeling the new breath of children
and the night I spent asking adog
why the stars are important.
3
A famousprofessor mails me an invitation
engraved on a grain of salt.
The grain of salt is the university’s white planet
where therighteous gather, responsible for a census.
4
Children who are interviewed explain
that a child expects to die insunlight,
balancing an egg in a spoon.
The inscription onthe egg
is only Arabic for I am fragile.
5
Today the New Year tried to leap from the roof
of the house. AshWednesday jumped in.
My Orthodox neighbor explains that eventhe end
of unhappiness is forbidden.
6
Summer,I laugh again by accident,
and find myself on my knees on HeightsBlvd. and 9th.
My vision: the sky is falling
on GeneralSchwarzkopf’s bright head.
7
I ask August, the monththat the President hates,
to be as beautiful as ever.
I ask thewind to exchange the thumbs
of the President and Muammar Qaddafi.
8
I laugh again: my son tells me twice about the sea
otter who jumps over the back of a coyote.
I let my householdchatter me silent as evil.
How can I run from joy or the history inmy lungs?
The Circle and the Line
1
Your body is the union of grass blades
and wedding rings.
Darkness secedes from your green republic.
Your spinningdiplomacy makes your opponents fall.
When you stop turning incircles to join them
the potatoes in the garden start crying
because now they are only potatoes.
And the potatobugrejoices.
2
When you stand upright the world getsfatter.
Ethiopia colors itself green as a bird
riding a boatcarved from a melon.
Nothing so full and so light,
Thehair of Abd al Arab is a sail over Africa,
he is standing upright.
When your shoulders are parallel to the horizon,
thecrescent moon takes the shape of wheat
and the bread gives up hidingfrom the teacher.
3
Your body is the union of therare
and the prolific.
Asked to weigh injustices, yourhands
fall to your sides.
Your eyelashes balance themurders
of the child and the ant.
You cry over thesmallness of their bodies,
and the lost fires in their jaws,
andtheir ways of carrying single crumbs
the distances of miracles.
Gold, don’t forgive yourself.
Grass, turn white.
Somalia
1
A green candelabra
whose candles were eaten forbreakfast.
Horse made of sand, blowing
darkness into the eyesof the Italians.
Children so thin you cannot
hear thesound of a bell,
and the horse that doesn’t drink
because helives by sand.
2
The first day we walked into theworld,
we were going to make a world.
But everything hadalready been done.
Only the bees had to work,
and youcried for them, Somalia.
You set a table for your neighbor andthe stranger.
You gave the mountains milk
and the ducksilver.
You covered your eyes with shadows from the Koran.
3
You have seen these seven
thin cows before. Youcall
them by the names of the rich,
their slave names,
andthey always answer.
You are Joseph in the house
of your mother,multiplied
by one million,
opening the book of hunger:
4
The rich have built
their bank on the foundation
of a single grain of rice.
When I prayed the rich dead,
myprayer became a skeleton
crossing the street to Nicaragua
Saying, remember Sandino could carry away
a rainbow between histhumb and forefinger.
5
They told us
when the wind snapped her fingers
everyone wouldlive again.
6
Horse, you are riding,
asbeautiful as revolution.
Let them call you by your name
that israrely spoken,
the one that means impossible to kill.
Good morning, my Romanian broom!
Why does that small boy sit smiling
where someone sat him in the cabbage?
Why does he just sitthere, broom, nibbling
at the yellow hearts of rabbits?
Where do you store your spotless crumbs, broom?
Why is it men feelguilty if they don’t break something?
Why don’t you taxi to theairport,
my broom, and sweep a clean red carpet
for BorisYeltsin?
Why are they breaking the statues of Lenin, broom?
Broom, where are your notebooks?
Why do you drinkCourvoisier?
Why don’t dictators eat from fancier plates?
Romanian, turn off that music.
Journal, Egypt
1
In Egypt, birds sing on
the other side of gray hieroglyphs.
Mychild is crying because he cannot attend
school in a language he canunderstand.
2
Because I have no money,
trees become more beautiful,
the redpomegranate
bends its twin heart towards
the ancient washingmachine
on the balcony.
3
When I arrived I knew
I had to tear the white handkerchief
outof my chest and praise God
for showing me the road does notexist.
Here, our milk is rationed powder
our light is only the dust
that falls on us from Saqqara.
4
Churches and mosques warm
themselves in the fires of their ownwars.
Once they were made from many bones
but now they onlyremember being the hips of men.
For the hipbones of men
they’vebuilt an afterlife
out of the boat of one thousand thousandlives.
I am glad they are useless now,
useless and so busy,bowing to each other
on their fat furniture.
Then thenewspaper says they are not lazy after all.
This morning in the nameof the holy they killed
Farag Foda, who spoke against theocracy
at the Cairo Book Fair.
5
If you are afraid of thehipbones of men,
at least answer me when I tell you
Christ isnot dead,
he speaks Arabic,
he is a farmer
who came toAl-Qahara without
palm fronds in his hands.
I saw him sixdays ago,
twisting in the street, mouth open.
Now I am six daysold
and nothing shall save me.
6
Sparrow that lives inside everything
under the sun,
you do not abandon us,
we abandon each other.
If I don’t paint the walls of my house white,
If I don’t let my fewpossessions fly out
of my windows,
abandon me, abandon my housein Egypt.
7
Egypt, a brown shutter
closed against the Mediterranean.
Abitter hook, Sadat’s eagle
on a ten-piaster piece.
I live inEgypt dreaming of Crete,
and Egypt offers me more dust
in a tinygreen-patterned cup.
Take a flying leap
into the Nile,
and walk out without your veils,
your black gloves,
your HolyWar against yourself.
If I can learn to hate justice.
Topray while asleep
If I can twist the Koran like a dove
aroundmy neighbor’s neck.
8
All the minarets are made
from the hipbones of men.
But sometimes a living manascends
and the tenderness in his voice
unrolls the green carpetof the world beneath our feet.
9
Where our bed meetshistory
the wall is green with birds,
the alphabet ignites thetree of life.
And I don’t even want the man on the street
who shows me the dust on his feet,
who kisses my left hand twice.
10
I think of the woman who dared
to have four husbands in Egypt.
They cut her in four pieces
and threw her in the Nile.
If anyone finds out, I’ll be divided
by ten, and all of you will gofree,
innocent as commandments walking down mountains,
obeyingthe sound of your own voices.
11
In Egypt, no one will tell me where the Socialists are,
and onehundred thousand people live in the mausoleums
of the cities of thedead.
For twenty-nine days I have pressed my body
against thegreen shutters of a rented room
and thought of the people who wantme afraid
of governments and God.
I have decided to give themmy voice, instead.
12
Your silence is
the black bird inside the white cage of Iran,
the light that doesn’t escape the photograph negative.
Andyour voice? I think it is the nail through the trumpet
of arevolution led by men,
and the red string that fishes from your window tonight
for my shining questions.
Year
They make us the violets and the ashes.
They make us theyellow tongues of fire
singing the trees, and the blackhelicopters.
They make us Paradise and its shadow.
They cover our bed, they open the green cupboard,
they make youstrong, they bring me your liver
in a jar, they send me yourdeath without a telegram.
They won’t make us ghosts.
They tell us to live, and they make a new door.
They give me adistended belly.
They make the yellow wings to cradle our daughter.
They make you afraid, they light you a candle.
They makeyou wear your shoes on your hands
and they like it,
and theymake you strong.
They make us a man and a bear,
they makeus grease and dirt.
We do the dance of work.
They make oneof us fall first.
They make us dust,
and we rise in thecloud of the rabbit
whose ears sacred.
They’ve never liedto us. They carve a new door
in the heart of the hummingbird.
When we knock the dead enter our hands
and I’m not sadanymore, this morning, my love.
They make us strong,
theymake us cover our mouths and smile.
Alphabet
1
We planted our first rose and it grew like a dog.
We planted our favorite books of heaven on earth.
We plantedyour body, cousin to the poncianna.
Your hips like twinbrothers your mother bore for love
and kept hidden in a basket.
We planted my body, the old one I had
kept shining forlove and grass stains.
We planted the painted tin horse whowould never ride
to war,
and the charm that would protectus from friends
who forget
to say blessings over gifts theyenvy.
We planted the brass bells that would chime
whenthe door opened,
and the ten tiny mice of Paradise who leaptfrom tree
to tree,
escaping the hungry birds.
Weplanted a cup of tea whose sugar sank to the bottom.
And thatwas everything.
2
We planted the music box I lostfor fifteen minutes
at the Cairo airport,
we plantedgood-byes, we planted the duck papyrus.
In our new bed weplanted the twin daughters of the rose
who had grown like a bear.
We planted our tapestry made in Iran,
we planted thewooden hummingbird that astonished
the Saudi engineer.
Weplanted ten oven-dried figs and an ancient
washing machine.
We planted our legal documents and the eggs
under the figtree.
We planted six new boiled shining glasses
and theyellow bottle that would cure your hepatitis.
We planted awhite eggplant, a potato, an onion.
A bag of rice, a fork, and abook of simple equations.
We planted six tiny hieroglyphicspoons
for you, the guests who would arrive
in a more delicatefuture,
and this alphabet for surviving famine.
Lovers
Do you remember finches happier than mice?
Do you remember theponcianna tree?
We’ve eaten the berries that make us beautiful.
The Egyptian police don’t need our photograph.
Where are thefingerprints on the papyrus of Paradise?
We’re the patterns of oiland dirt.
Will they trace the evidence back to our bodies?
Where’s the airport?
Our encyclopedias are travelling by ship.
Did we forget the tiny caption printed
beneath the dictator’sface?
Did you forget to shave? Did I forget the boiled glasses?
Together, we’re bringing the proof that history
leaps off itsown shadow.
Egypt
1
In the silver shop we visited the man
with the softestvoice in the world.
He was your shadow talking to us.
He wanted to circle your bracelet around my ankle,
and you saidno,
this woman must be freer than rumors or histories.
Hewas in love with Sadat and the tiny piano,
he sold us the smilingduck with the bell in its mouth.
He sold us the sugar bowlthat fit in your palm,
he sent his frowning partner to get thesix
silver spoons cradling the hieroglyphs.
He sat in thewindow, weaving the birds
into the poncianna,
your hands intomine.
2
He composed the dust between Medin-et-Nasr
and Heliopolis.
He wove Bus 36 into the call to prayer,
the flies into thestrawberries, the sickness into the curtains.
Before we left Islapped him, and he smiled sadly, knowing that we would leave Egypt
turned against each other,
that you would cry all night under the fig tree
without a liver,
that I would wake each morning sobbing for money,
throwingyour peasant puppet over the balcony,
that you would walk ten miles to find a place to lay down,
yellow asa river.
3
For me, you searched for the trees of paradise
in everypapyrus in the city.
Your last fifty piasters
bought meone more cup of coffee spiced with cardamom.
For our mattress you took the ancient one
from the Cairo Museum.
The ancient one, the ancient one.
Mahmoud-Khairi
1
I said it, he is an angel and I won’t take it back.
Call methe blind one who can’t find the ladder.
The one who travels East,turning the light black.
2
I can’t tell my love fromyours.
Night asks me a question.
True, I died with theconstellation
of stars in your chest.
I opened a window soyou could lower yourself
into the ashes.
3
Westepped lightly over hell,
kissed two children, closed the window.
In the morning the ten tiny mice flew
out of thetapestry,
breaking all our threads on their way to Paradise.
4
You called me shining love.
Here is the red book, here is the greenbook.
For once, it was enough to open the Holy
and find thepages empty.
5
Russian black bear, you said
Be careful on the bus, they’ll mistakeyou for an atheist.
Throw us out of Alexandria. I’ll gethepatitis.
We’ll never make it across the River of the Dead.
6
Just one more onion
and then a tea out of hibiscus.
We’ll have to lock your son outside,
or he’ll never learnArabic.
These are my hips, these are my knees.
Holdme close and forget the Friday
call to prayer and pray the thief
does not remember—Mahmoud-Khairi.
Thank you Sayeed Mohamet
Thank you Sayeed Mohamet
for calling when I was about to be struckby lightning.
Thank you for waking me up from my dream,
flying my kite over an ocean of military planes.
I poked outthat boy’s right eye with a knife,
and felt much better when I heardyour voice.
Thank you for the story of your miraculousexam,
how the air became a fountain flowing in northern India.
For nine hours you let us all rest.
We were the white shadow onthe wall.
We didn’t want to take up our burdens again,
that waswhat we couldn’t tell you.
Thank you Sayeed Mohamet
forletting me say how soft the ears of the rabbit are.
I wasn’tashamed.
I sat down all day and couldn’t get up again.
Thank you for calling ,it is so true we are sold into forests
andreturn home in our own languages.
When you said goodnight inHouston,
a light went on in Lucknow.
Thank you SayeedMohamet
for saying it is better to laugh at classical Arabic.
For congratulating me on Joseph, my son.
For saying it isbetter to have boys than girls.
Because girls are so extraordinary.
For saying how you engineered your self,
belong to yourself, love your self.
Thank you for not calling again.
Thank you for taking my copy of Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
I hope that hecalls you,
and that one small bell in Urdu sounds like Victoria.
Old Book
Rabbit, get me a chair
so I can sit with my back to the sea.
Rabbit, get me a map and a pair of binoculars.
Rabbit, goback to Egypt,
be careful not to cause any earthquakes.
Get me that boiled glass I forgot in the sink.
Bring me enoughwood for a vegetable cart and a coffin.
Go to the forest andfind me music played
on a rubber band.
Go to the gasstation, bring me one part jasmine,
two parts alcohol.
Nail a calendar above my stove, rabbit.
Take a nap, don’t bother meon Wednesdays.
Rabbit, please open my skull like a flower
so I can read this bookin peace.
The Right and the Left
We invented the chair in honor
of the five dancing spiders
inside Joseph’s body who will sing on July 23
until the end ofall birthdays!
____________
Once we discovered money,
stealing from each other like twinbrothers,
sleeping inside the cash register.
We were ugly children, we were beautiful thieves.
Together, we returned the afterbirth,
and the River of the Dead.
____________
Now we’re the size of grief,
smaller than passports and too big togo to Sweden.
We’re late for our flight to a Socialist country.
____________
Listen: for two years we were
a woman and aman meeting at a border
where it is forbidden to speak.
Whenever we touched, barbed wire dissolved into stanzas.
So we married on the Day of the Fools,
smuggling our lust into thechurch!
We leaf through books without illumination.
We covered entire forests when I closed your eyelids.
______________
We’re five birds who passed through customs
without moving our wings!
That’s how we came back from Egypt,
not saying a word about theillegal newspaper.
You thanked me for being a quiet revolutionary,
and then you went to live with your mother.
____________
On the bus the man from India says I am a peacock
and my hands arelike the peacock’s feet:
if they weren’t so ugly I couldn’t be so real.
____________
My hands, we’re alone!
Thank God we carryhappy ancestors in our blood.
Coyote
Here is the sound that will save
your life, my love.
The one that will whisper behind your knees
when they chase you into the valley where the stars
are a rabbityou carry inside your shirt.
Here is the child who will sit on your shoulders
in Cairo andHouston and Guatemala,
or wherever you walk denouncing the owners.
Here is the light that will forsake the eyes
of your enemies whoaren’t born yet,
and your enemies who are still hardening
to gold in their chairs.
Here is the touch erasing thenight
I said it is better to die
than to live with so muchdeliberate death.
Here is the dark that will save yourlife,
when the candles have been eaten.
When even the painted tin horse has ridden to war.
When you arealone and the tiny
clay cathedral of Santa Rosa de Lima hasforgotten you
were always a rose.
And here is the rose.
Return
Do the prizes go to the valiant?
Is the wind stripped of hershirts?
When I spit did you ask the wind to carry it?
Did youvisit the crystal dining rooms
where the valiant sit?
Were they shining like their forks
when they interrogated ourroosters?
Our hammers?
The insides of our guitars?
Didthey paint the old cages?
Did they clear the tables and wash the olddocuments?
Did they try the little try of the valiant?
Will theyarrive in beautiful empty ships?
Did the wind steal back her four shirts?
Did you drink tea
when you went to the mountains?
Victoria Edwards Tester has taught English in Peru, worked as ajournalist in Egypt and as a photographer at the Mexico-U.S. border. Shestudied literature, creative writing and art history at the Universityof Houston, where she was a fervent activist against the Gulf War, andwas also a border rights activist who collected and translated bordercrossing stories. She abandoned her doctoral studies in 1994 to live amore reclusive life in the mountains of New Mexico. Her book Miraclesof Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press) won the 2003 WILLALiterary Award in Poetry, an award given to those books that, in thespirit of Willa Cather, best portray the lives of women in theSouthwest. She is also the author of a memoir Dying in the City ofFlowers (Five Star Press), which recounts her harrowing search for heryoung child in Peru. Now she has recently written, at the request of aHollywood director, a screenplay whose haunting story is set at theMexico-U.S. border. At present she is grateful to be at work finishingtwo long projects: a book of stories told in the voices of fifteen womenof historical New Mexico, and a film about the Irish Famine, which willbe translated into Irish Gaelic. She sometimes teaches creativewriting, independently, or through the Extended University Program atWestern New Mexico University.
