the rain” (Ibid. 201). The hole in his memory will continue as long as Lmrm, in
her symbolic extension, is not here, leaving him agonized by this endless love:
This ravishing blind love.
This black light in my memory
I cry feverishly under falling rain
I shoot myself at dawn.
(Ibid.)Prior to this courting of suicide and death, he is even more violent in order
to escape a memory of dry and dying sentiments:
I throw a bomb under the train of the night
Loaded with the leaves of an autumn in my memory
I crawl among the dead
Groping my way
In the muddy untilled fields.
(Ibid.)At this intersection of inertia despair returns, imposing an atmosphere of
gloom on an endeavor, which has been well sustained otherwise:
My life’s sun has disappeared
Nobody knows
Love is a blind lonely experience
No one knows another in this exile
All are alone
The world’s heart is made of stone
In this kingdom of exile.
(Ibid. 207)Although Ishtar’s presence evolves in al-Baymtl’s poetry as the only remedy for
the persona’s soul-searching, her disappearance or elusive status only intensifies
the exilic in his poetics. As the Ishtar of mythology (in his “Marthiyyah ilm
Khalll >mwl” / “Elegy to Khalil Hawi,” Ibid. 267), cM’ishah is the objectivecor-
relative of the creative impulse. To put it in other words, she is the poem.
Indeed, in “Love under the Rain,” Ishtar or cM’ishah acts as a catalyst that
holds the poem together, for to give her a female form independent from her
textual function belies her textual presence:
cM’ishah is my name
And my father was a legendary king
Whose kingdom was destroyed by an earthquake
In the third millennium before Christ.
(Ibid. 231)ENVISIONING EXILE