Poems by Mahsan Ahmadpour

In the most anonymous way there is
we pass along the busiest sidewalk in the city.
Our eyes, though,
like two old acquaintances,
push the crowd aside to reach each other.
We are strangely related —
perhaps we descend from a woman and a man
who, centuries ago,
in a corner of Noah's ark,
while the rain had taken the eyes of the world,
kissed each other.

You and I had got it wrong —
every crossword in the world
had squeezed "you and I" into the same two little letters.

With every look,
every song,
every wander under autumn rain
we came closer,
always one step from something extraordinary
that was never going to happen.

Believe me, it's no one's fault.
Sometimes the sky clouds over,
people take their umbrellas,
and still it doesn't rain.

Believe me, beauty too
can be a sad fate.
Flowers know well
the grief of being broken
by the hands of someone
drunk on the scent of your skin.
Sometimes, following the gaze of beautiful women,
you reach invisible wounds —
the injury of a quiet river
whose chest a thousand boats
have split open on their way.

You look into my eyes
and the whole world stops —
the whole world but the rain stops.

The hunter chasing a deer halts for a moment mid-path.
A tired bus driver jolts awake at a bend.
A mugger leaves his knife in the pocket of yesterday's coat.
The countdown of a prisoner sentenced to death stops when a woman forgives him,
and a mother's heart consents to her daughter's heart beating in another chest.
A little further on, a woman at a mirror comes to believe in the beauty of her own eyes.
A boy passing a half-built building is two steps ahead of a falling brick —
how many of the world's mistakes are mended in that moment! —
a tired clerk, after so long, feels like calling his mother from the office phone,
and love, behind the frozen window of pride, shows its wounded hands for a moment.
You look into my eyes and on the shore someone hears a cry for help,
and a factory manager, greeting his distracted guard, doubts the sad tone of his "I'm fine".

We look into each other's eyes —
as if this moment, this look, were our whole mission in the world,
all that the hands of the two of us can do for it.

In dreams I always know
that walking beside you
there is so much road ahead,
so many places to see,
and that breathing air that carries your scent
is something I wish would last longer.
In my dreams I can feel the earth turning,
and I know
how fast the moon moves
in the sky of two people lost in each other's eyes
with nothing better to talk about.
Some moments, though, seem too big to fit in a person's memory.

Every morning, like someone who spent the whole night drunk,
in disbelief, in a room whose loneliness I can't measure,
its walls covered in lists of musts I don't know the use of,
in a corner of the world where I can't tell where in my life I am,
with no time for the sun to run its hand across my face,
I wake up —
and the truth is a breakfast
that some days, between the rush and the fear of missing the bus,
I forget to eat.

You laughed to say you were fine.
You should have laughed with your eyes closed,
because in your pupils
a thousand women in black
are weeping.
You should have laughed with your lips closed,
because a woman
is hanging from the roof of your mouth.
You should have laughed without breathing,
because the weight of your breath
is gloomier than dusk in a city
where behind every window a man is smoking.

You run from people, from the sun.
You'd like to hide the black of your hair,
your cheeks when they redden with shyness.

I find your kindness behind clumsy indifference,
your simplicity behind words that aren't made of you.

What I love in you seems strange to you;
what you don't love in yourself seems strange to me.

I should stand between you and every mirror.
The picture you can see in these eyes
you won't easily find in a mirror.
Maybe the night is a withdrawn woman like you,
always ashamed of the holes in her chador.

I won't say I feel "bad" without you —
the way I feel when you're not here needs another name,
the way a sky without a sun is called "night".

I love the thought of you,
I love it so much,
but it has never been enough —
the thought of things that could be.

Fate is a merciless wind,
but the dandelion of my smiles
had been blown from the side of your lips.

I denied you,
and once again
the rain took the blame for my sorrow.

Don't love me in this "me too" way —
I'm always the one who loves you first.

How the clouds break into tears
because not once do the blossoms
smile at the sky
without rain.

After you left
it was as if
an economic revolution broke out in what I believe:
the price of every word of love
fell.

I am the night.
You look at the moon,
and the stars,
whenever you say
"beautiful".

At night an astronaut speaks of the joy of watching the earth,
its soft and lovely blue
when you look at it from the moon.

In the morning the newsreader speaks of the war going on,
of borders full of darkness,
of darkness without borders,
of the red of blood that will never wash from the earth's hands.

And all day
I have nothing to do but keep away
from every road that might bring me closer to you.

One day, poet, you'll end up a saint:
from lips that brought you a thousand kisses
you take nothing but a new poem.

I know you never read to the end
the poem I left on your desk —
the one that held all I had in my heart,
the most poem-like thing my feelings could make,
though I wasn't the best poet in the world.

For you, whose shelves were full of poetry books,
whose ears were full of the most beguiling words of love,
my faint little poems never had anything to say.

When you stared at a view
I put on a blue shawl and waited in front of your gaze,
but a moment later the waves on my shoulders settled back in place —
before eyes used to the grandeur of the sea
I wasn't the loveliest pattern the wind's hands could make.

And a girl singing a few steps away
was never a good reason to turn around
for someone who knew the world's most lasting songs by heart.

The truth is, I'm always like a small pot of chrysanthemums
among the tall, many-coloured stems of other flowers,
the one your well-travelled eyes skip over,
and it's hard for you to believe
that the most beautiful masterpiece in the world could be
a girl with a sad simplicity
you find in a corner of every one of your photos,
smiling only for your eyes.

I was quit,
simply,
like a cigarette,
and after me came a deep breath in a city full of smoke —
I had been standing in the way of that breath.

I've often seen
the city's pianists
behind the wheel,
their fingertips not yet over the habit of playing,
and office secretaries typing without thinking
on the poles of the bus.
Tell me —
what do you do with the habit of stroking my cheeks?

This very dusk
is the saddest thing in the world,
when the day
gathers up its leftovers
from behind the mountains
and thinks
the sky loves its star-stitched dress more.

Damn it!
Turn the lights off —
not seeing is the last painkiller left
that still works.

This time too
I had been thinking of you;
in a trance
I came out of the bath,
my hands patched with blood
and wounds that hold no memory.

I think of you,
and years later
there are many wounds
on my body —
wounds I see later,
wounds that hurt later.

Being a woman
has kept me alive:
a small womb
in my ribcage
pours the blood back into my veins.

Drop by drop, every night,
someone drips into your overflowing
and envies the empty half of every glass.

What story could be sadder?

Cursed with staying alive,
we were fish exiled to dry land,
a torture chamber in our chests,
pain in every breath,
and the rain strangely smelled of home.

You kiss me, and the spell in your eyes
tells me how simple death can be.
From your eyes I learned what words
autumn whispers in a leaf's ear.

What killer comes with poems and kisses
whose victim waits so eagerly at the door,
who kills a person, every time, just enough
that there's life left for the next?

You come as autumn, but without warmth,
so I'll stand stunned by the colour yellow;
you become my most masochistic dream
so I'll be mad about this pain.

It's turning into the only warmth in my world,
this flame of you that stayed with me;
tenderness is so far from your hands
that I miss being hurt.

I said you have every right to leave, but not easily.
Autumn is the fate of leaves.
Small leaves never wish
not to fall,
to hold on,
to face the merciless winter.
What every leaf wants, deep down,
is to be the last leaf —
the last leaf whose parting from the tree's trembling hands
keeps autumn waiting a few minutes longer
and makes it sick of the word "must".

With the most colourless, feverish face I arrive.
I become a drop,
a kiss,
I settle on your forehead;
it wipes me from your skin —
don't be afraid, you were dreaming.

Don't be afraid,
we are your dream,
you are our waking.
It's up to you, night or day,
up to you, sleep or waking.

We are faint stars,
content with the length of a shadow.
It's up to you
whether you weigh us by the night
or by the edge of the sun.

From me to you:
the sun calls the blue home —
you, call home black,
call home "you".

How much we die is up to you.
Lend me a little
of the beating in your chest,
of the warmth of your breath.

No —
you gave no breath,
so I died,
so I became a drop
on the coolness of your veiled face
where, at the crossing of a darkness drawn out into morning,
the kiss of a poem passes over your lips.

Now follow my trace to the flaring corpses of the stars.
You had seen my fear
of the reign of the sun.
Had you fought beside me
the night would not have fallen,
would not have fallen,
this tired Nosferatu,
worn by years of weeping and thirst,
with eyes that knew your eyes
for kissing,
not for reading.

I didn't read;
nothing was written.
From this thirst
you had sent my heart away
to the blue of a mirage. No, we have no share of the blues.
Shall we take red from your lips, or from blood?
— From death.

From death to death,
with death, toward death.

Death
is an air that sometimes thins.
Loneliness
is an air that sometimes thins.

In the empty cage of this house,
with a window that has flown,
it isn't right
that breath should last
as long as our not-dying.
Tell the first flash of morning
to come,
to let me die.

I was your shadow;
now I'm the dark.

I'm suffocating,
and beauty thickens the sorrow.
Oh, the doves on the barbed wire!
Oh, your scarf
when you're about to leave!

The night is beautiful behind your lit window.
Don't wade into this pond,
don't drift loose
toward the torn sketch of a kiss,
toward the living sequin of an eye —
you've lost!

Do me a favour — in all this grabbing and binding
take my hands too, and carry them off.
I strangely believe in my doubts —
take these two beliefs of mine and carry them off.

No one I'd give my life for,
no look that brings me back to life —
I'm a snowman that's been kicked;
go on, you fan the flames.

Look how the pride of love
sets death's body trembling,
and what fear it puts into winter
as it migrates out of me —

out of this grounded bird,
this one who counts
the whole mission of its wings
as this one thing and nothing more:
to hold you
more warmly.

Autumn is the season when you let only the green ones stay —
the ones still alive,
the ones joined to you that the wind won't carry off.
Don't be afraid, even if you're sure that at the end of these days nothing will stay with you but your roots,
because spring always comes on time, and gives its freshness only to those who don't cling to old things that are no longer theirs.

Autumn is the season of letting go,
the season of not being afraid —
not afraid of letting go of everything you were never meant to keep for ever.

Believe me, trees tremble at first too, at the thought of the changes coming to their days.
They're afraid that without their green spring shirt,
without blossoms,
they won't be beautiful.
But little by little they see how magnificent they are even without the things they cling to and think are all they own in the world.

Trees are beautiful in autumn
because they give their hearts to change and to a new life.
They know that until they let the leaving ones go, there's no room for the arriving ones.

Trees have no calendars; they know better than anyone when it's time to let go.
When it's time, be autumn too — nothing will be taken from you that doesn't add to your beauty.

Climbers go up mountains to see loneliness small from above.
Cyclists pedal to leave loneliness behind.
People go out with friends, chat and laugh, sing and play music so that loneliness falls quiet.
On the road north they overtake loneliness;
in the ring they punch it in the face;
they get lost in books and films and songs so loneliness can't find them.

And you sit at home on a Friday, staring loneliness straight in the eye, and expect it not to crush you?

Their job? Their job was making things beautiful.
Not that they were a hairdresser, or worked with mirrors, or took photographs — no plastering, no rouge and powder.
They worked with their shadow, not their hands.
Whatever their shadow spread over, they made beautiful.
Whatever was tied to them, they made beautiful.
They made their own name beautiful.
They made brown leather jackets beautiful.
They made every colour they wore beautiful.
They'd stand in a photo and the people beside them grew lovelier than ever. They'd lean on a tree and the tree turned greener, the colours clearer. Their hands around your neck — oh, with their hands around your neck you smiled with a geometry neater than ever.
You asked how that's possible?
Did I ever tell you I always disliked the name Bijan? That was long ago, before I read Bijan Elahi, Bijan Najdi, Bijan Jalali. Now I keep wanting to say Bijan. Isn't it a strangely musical word, kind to the ear?
I was saying: the window of my house always faced this street, an ordinary street. But one day they made this street beautiful — the day they came to the window and said, lucky you, to have a window onto such a lovely street! What a neighbourhood! What a tree!
And that same day I saw the ivy on the house across the street let down its hair, the bricks fall into better order, and the street's one old tree — where had it even been? — claim all of spring's beauty. The view beyond the window turned out to be a priceless painting someone had suddenly pulled the curtain from.