Amman Arithmetic
Where my mind can spend summer afternoons tracing
The jagged homes in all their sandy-colored glory
Count the halo of birds on the eastern hills
Tallying up the kites tangled in the skyline
Reckoning murmurs from the asphalt
Finding sequences in car horns
That blaze through the rocks of seven hills
From the dizzying circles to the Hashemite square
Calculating cab fare
Haggling with merchants in the souk
With their rusty weights on broken scales
Flowers. Fruits. Traffic light bargains
Selling headlines by the bushel
Sparing change for the street beggars
That the policemen give chase to
I want a view of the city from a tall stained window
Where a chorus of minarets casts echoes across the valleys
Bellowing at sixes and sevens
Through the symmetry of tongues
And checkered monochrome stones
Mouthing dialects twisted in long division
The city accumulates over time:
1902 + 1921 + 1948 + 1967 + 1991 + 2003
“Bayader?” says a soliciting bus boy
“Where are you going?,” asks the taxi driver
“Sweileh? Sahab? Badr? I won’t go there.”
So where are you going?
Which hilltop is your canvas?
Which summit is your stage?
Where do you go to bellow your immigrant songs?
The verses of displacement
Choruses laced with resilient blues
The pursuit of new dreams
Abandoned at the river banks of a dry Seil Amman
I want a view of the city from a luminous stage
From a rooftop
From a hillside
From a tall stained window
Where second thoughts are second nature
Where calculating poets write half-measured words
Where the length of an evening spreads across the width of a horizon
Where the lowest common denominator is the least common multiple
Where the whole of a poem
Is greater than the sum of its parts
Or a fraction
Of a story
Of a city

