physical death: “I arise after death/ To be born in unborn cities/ And to die.”^72
Indeed, al-Baymtl’s poet never sounds available or obtainable to the mundane:
The rats of the fields of words
Buried the head of the poet
In a field of ashes
But the poet on the cross of exile
Carried the sun and flew.^73Nevertheless, to think of al-Baymtl’s perpetual poet as another archetypal
construct is to miss the whole significance of his poetic career. If his persona
undergoes a metamorphosis, it is the necessary dynamic alternation between
the temporal and the eternal. The gate to this perpetual change is memory,
which is individual and universal, real and mythical. Al-Baymtl’s achievement
lies in this overwhelming memory that stores the sufferings and miseries of
humankind, along with their deep sources of love, beauty, and attachment to
life. In “I am Born and Burnt in Love,” his speaker says:
I hurl a bomb under the train
The night train in my memory,
Whose freight is autumn leaves
Amongst the dead I crawl
In untilled, murky fields I grope my way
Seeking night guards to help me stop
This blind rapacious love—
This black light in my memory
Under the falling rain
Feverishly crying
I shoot myself at dawn.^74More than these paradigms, registers work differently in the poetry of
al-Baymtland >mwl. Indeed, to study the wording of al-Baymtl’s elegy may well
lead to some conclusions that are different from those of Martínez Montávez.
Al-Baymtl’s mythical figures, proclamations of dissent, views of tradition, and
affiliations in culture and politics, are actively present in such a way as to dis-
lodge >mwl’s allegorical structures of birth, rebirth, and indeterminate stand.
In their stead, we have a positive deterministic view of progression, bound to
lead to change eventually. Hence, the elegized is immortalized only in the title,
for he is fused in the third part, after the act of textual dislocation, into all poets
of similar choice. The very connectives, when, as, and onlyplace him in an ongo-
ing process of sacrifice. Reading >mwl, as if according to Valery’s “Alert
Reading,” al-Baymtlonly tends “to clear imaginative space for [his] own
personal goal,”^75 as Bloom explains in another context. The impersonalized
mention of the poet involves the text in self-effacement, an emptying that is
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS