Speeding home through a snow-storm,
after a night in the city, my shivering
wife and mother in tow, it occurs to me –
this is not where I should be. Over half
my heart’s still buried in sand, the promised
land of oil and honey where father thought
his fortunes would ignite. This night is black,
too black for clarity, and after the autumn’s
hunting season, the woods outside the cabin
are devoid of deer. For months I heard
the sound of butchery, heard gunshots mark
each hour’s passing while the blurry screen
inside the house related news of death
and misery. Thirty years of sweat and toil
in that curséd desert only for father to hear
a German shout at him: ‘Work, nigger, work!’
This is life in Abu Dhabi, a place renowned
for the biggest this and of course the biggest
that. Oh, sure, they got it all: the Louvre,
the Guggenheim, every last accoutrement
of Western snobbery their oil could buy. As for
the biggest heart? After years of exploitation,
of work camps, beatings, and incarcerations,
they tell you, If you don’t like it, leave. So I left.
Now my father, the old industrious Iranian lion,
his mane reduced to baldness, squats and empties
one bladder of blood after another. It’s cold here;
I hate my life; sometimes I also hate my wife;
but mostly I hate this sad, deluded, friendly country:
the USA, with all its lies and all the kids
it shoots in parks and all the men it chokes
to death for selling cigarettes, and all the speeches,
all the acquittals. Go west, young man, go west
was sound advice once, but is it any longer? I went
as far west as I could, went south and north
and east only to face the same despair. Dawn breaks,
and while I smoke inside my covered porch I see a deer
press its nose against my window; the trees begin to shake
and soothe me with their music, light slips past the blinds:
even hell is often bright enough to keep some hope alive.