You Can Be the Last Leaf

I repeat the stories I know by heart.
Love hangs me in the closet
with a thread of tobacco and perfume.

You Can Be the Last Leaf gathers new and selected poems by Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat in translation from Arabic by Fady Joudah. Unfulfilled desires of many stripes haunt these verses, and Abu Al-Hayyat often describes an emotional inner world in physical terms: “My hand takes off the woman’s face / and hangs it by the door.” As Joudah notes in his foreword, in these poems “the exteriors of the self are mounted on a carousel along with other selves.”

Among the varied longings that find expression in this work are those of “the butcher / who wanted to be a violinist” but possessed the wrong kind of hands, and of the lover in “Trash” whose timing is off (“[w]hy did I love you / in February and not in March”) because his beloved would rather take in the fragrances of spring—a blooming wild rosebush or a neighbor’s jasmine—than pursue a romance she associates with the smell of the garbage on her doorstep. In “Psychology News,” we observe again the idea of a mask, this time in the context of unrequited love: 

Neither foundation nor green smiles helped me
to resemble other women.
I am an apricot
that did not reach your mouth.

Elsewhere, a speaker laments: “You didn’t open your longing’s door / wide enough for the yellow creatures in my blood / to enter.” 

While many of the desires the poet gives voice to feel universal, Joudah explains that for Abu Al-Hayyat, who “lives in Arabic and resides in Jerusalem,” the terror of existing under occupation dramatically raises the stakes of all unmet expectations. “I am therefore / they point their rifles at me,” writes Abu Al-Hayyat. Still, many of these poems are also deeply, darkly funny, perhaps because, as we read in one poem, “Laughter / is the excess knowledge no one takes seriously.” 

In You Can Be the Last Leaf words are a form of worldbuilding that also allows for magical thinking: 

In a text, I can build a house
with windows and balconies
that overlook galaxies and stars