Niloufar Shidmehr's blog

Somebody Is Calling My Name

I don’t know the meaning of my name. But I know one thing: my name is entirely what I am. Already, I’ve forgotten the name that’s given to me. Maybe if I think harder, I’ll remember it. Yet I feel no urge to look for it: it was like all those things that must have been lost, those that must have been gone and set free in formlessness.
I shaped my new name on my own, though. First, it was simply an insignificant speck of pollen among thousands of other specks, drifting around in the air, searching for the pistil. I waved at that very spec and it floated toward me. “Just don’t forget to water me everyday,” it whispered.
In the beginning, I got confused when someone called me by my name. So much that I even wondered if anybody had called me at all. Was that really MY name? Or could there be someone else who was given that name? Perhaps I was neither that name nor the person behind it. Or, I might be both.
That’s why, once, upon return to myself, when I responded, “Yeah?” the person who’d called me suddenly hesitated and asked me, “Are you really yourself?”
Somehow, my new name sounded familiar to the people in the new place where I’d arrived at the end of a journey of self-discovery. And that was the primary reason for me to get used to that name. Unlike my given name, it didn’t provoke a bundle of interlocking questions whenever I spoke my name:
“Pardon me?”
“What did you say?”
“Can you spell it?”
“What does it mean?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Can you repeat?”
“Hey, that’s beautiful.”
“Well…”
These questions always stunned me and made me feel threatened, for I came to live here free from the people who bombarded me with endless questions. And, as I said, this was the primary reason for getting used to my new name. Yet, I changed my new name countless times, as I found myself used to the boredom of having nothing to puzzle over. In essence, of course, all the names were, well, one: They only changed shape as wine does in different glasses, even glasses of the most contradictory cast.
Once, one of my classmates asked, “Do you know what your name means?”
I didn’t. I inquired why he asked that question.
“It’s pretty,” he answered. “In an ancient story I used to read as a child, it was the name of an intrepid and impulsive woman who had countless lovers. She gambled away their money.”
He looked me squarely in the eye, trying to pull the image of that mythic woman out of my gaze. All of a sudden I felt the image of that woman emerging from the deep, rippling through onto my skin. I turned my head coyly, tossing my hair gently from one shoulder to the other. Astounded, my classmate stepped back.
“That woman… drove her lovers insane… by just tossing her hair… from one shoulder to the other,” he stuttered in surprise.
Then, in a moment of silence and gloom, a soft breeze began to flow and touched my hair. I trembled and my hair floated in the wind. All of a sudden, a thousand dancing hands bloomed out of my shoulders and underarms and lifted me off the ground. My body glided smoothly; my feet moved like fins of a fish; my hair was set loose on a crest of air, unfolding wings and ascending passionately. Then, with millions of blazing, lithe specks that flew around me, I became a sun, rising above the threshold where he stood, astounded and impassioned.
Another day, a young man whom I’d seen a couple of times caught me off guard between two pillars of books in the library. “You know, I found out that your name’s historical,” he confessed. “There is a statue, with your name, that’s been standing at the threshold of an ancient tomb for thousand of years.”
I wait, standing there, perhaps for thousands of centuries, not for thousands of years, and certainly not for this very moment when I find myself listening to him. “It’s as if you’ve looked at me from beyond history,” he twitched.
Standing there, built of stone from head to toe. My eyes, the line of my cheek, even my hair are fixed in a still sketch. My lips are two rocks carved and sealed together. My hands are locked on to my chest. No breeze or wind, not even a storm can give my hair the slightest movement now, or set it free to scatter across my stone shoulders.
Whoever I may be, I know that now I’m the precise and perfect meaning of my name. One might say it is the name of a flower that grows out of the breast of a vestigial wall, as another might find it reminiscent of a cat stretching her body under the sun at noon.
Once again, somebody calls my name. Now, I have no doubt that the name I hear is the one that lives in me. It’s the one that bursts in the vagina of this moment and is attached to the umbilical cord of being, suspended between warmth and cold, question and answer, blood and color, freedom and slavery, as it spins restlessly, awaiting its new birth.

تلخ

مثل یک قایق بی موج
. سنگین نشسته بود. تلخ
اما نه مثل پوسته بادام
.از درون تلخ بود

تا تکانش بدهد
منتظر دریا بود
. نجات نجات می کرد

می گفت مگرمی شود
. . .بدون عشق زنده بود و
.زندگی نمی کرد

صدایش را به نام
تا کسی خانه نبود
.صدا نمی زد
گفتم اگر فقط خودت را
… یک تکانی بدهی وای
...آنکه از درون موج می زند نمی دانی
.بر خشکی هم خوش می رود

تازه داشتم خانوم می‌شدم

اين يه دونه نخود مونده توي دل من
نه ميذاره بزامش نه ميزاد منو

درسته قورتش دادم.
حالا قِل قِل ميخوره اينور و اونور
مث سير و سركه قُل قُل ميجوشه

نه ميپزه. نه ميپزه منو.
نخود آشم ولي لج كرده نميشه.

صورتم لك شده.
اين يه دونه نخود قلمبه شده
توي دلم، آبرومو برده.
يهو همچين قيلي ميلي ميره وسط پاهام
كه بيخودي ريسه ميرم
يه وقت انقد قر ميريزه تو پهلوم
كه منم قرم ميگيره
آخر سر دعواش كردم
پريد‌ تو چشم، كورشم
اگه دروغ بگم.
من تازه خانوم شده بودم
سبزي ها رو مث مادر و مادربزرگم
ريز ريز خرد ميكردم. يك دفعه نخود
ريگ شد افتاد تو كفشم
حالاست كه پا برهنه راه برم.
اين يه دونه نخود گلوله شده سفت
تو سينه م. شيرم ولي نميشه
فشارش كه مي دم مي پره تو
گلوم. نفسمو مي بره، بعد يهو
مي ره كف پام خنده مو هوا مي ياره
لبم كه تب خال زد
پاهام كه تو خواب گرفت
گرد شدم
فالگيره بيخود نگفت
اي خانوم جون
تو خانوم نميشي
يه دونه نخود داري تو دلت
يه دونه فلفل سيا
هاي بله، يه دونه نخود
اندازه يه دنيا
21 دسامبر 2003

Cool Me

When I am on fire
I’d like my clothes off
I sit by the window
where bird songs
cool me.

If I were a tree
the birds would come
rest in my hair
chatter so much
I’d forget my sorrow.

When squirrels creep
between my legs
stroke my nipples
with their fleecy tails
forget I crave a man.

Yes, when my heart swells
with grief, there is always a bird
that can, with the touch
of its beak,
crack me open.

Hunger

It’s becoming slimmer and slimmer!

We ate enormously.
We ate everything.
We were nice hungry people.

When our plates
were as empty
as our eyes, we looked at each other
and smiled vigorously.

It’s growing thinner and thinner!

We ate spaciously
We were beautiful hungry people,
living in a beautiful stuffed world,
We ate everything:
meat and skin
roots and cartilage
clocks and joints
nails and stuff
genitals and information
hair and leaves
sky and bones
stars and water
space and air

bones and music
peelings and pits
seeds and tongues
bowls and galaxies
roots and leaves
earth and teeth
viscera and weapons
soil and images
eyes, livers, and words

And black holes
And black holes

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then, when there was
nothing left, only us,
we slept together
and laughed gluttonously.

It’s becoming skinner and skinnier
just because we are awfully good hungry people:
prettier and hungrier than ever.
We need to eat, need to be happy;
We need to smile
to show our sharp beautiful teeth.

Wave My Flag There

The snow on my monitor
is hot. I can’t roll it into a ball
or slip it under your shirt.
Nor can I slide my fingers,
between your moustache and lower lip
as you let out a laugh
at the other end of the Net,
where your camera catches my image.

Do the world’s mountains remain
high and hard to climb, though the world
is now a small village? you type your new poem.

My monitor is tiled with the mountain
on whose lap sits Tehran,
frowning. I cut your icon, naked,
from the chat window, sink it
in a heap of snow. You continue,

Will there again be a day
when we climb a mountain?
Your head cocks off-screen.
My speaker crackles with your voice.
I listen as I search for the images
of mountains—the Alamkoh,
the first one our hiking group
started with; the Andes and the Himalayas
we never got to.

There will be a day, I am sure, when we’ll find
ourselves together, on a mountain top,
I whisper, close my eyes to keep your picture
ascending, alone in the cold, windy bowl
of my eyelids. I try to see Cypress
each day before class, I say when I see
your eyes blur like a lake on the Sabalan
beneath the drizzling rain.

You try to smile, but the corner of your lip
twitches suddenly. I hold on to the arms
of my swivel chair, sit firmly, recite
your last poem: It takes a long time
to get there, but you know I will return.
My ankles are sore from the journey,
but I know I will come back.
Show me the way; blow our songs
into the wind. It will be my last breath
in the desolate air of this mountain.

So finally, you smile.
Yes—smile. Sit back secure and straight
like the flag we hoisted on the Tochal,
sway your body the way you did
when you held me in your arms,

and, there, wave my flag.