Animal Grief

A jackal returns to the border town of Aitaroun,

after a year of phosphorus bombs. June, wasn’t it, 

years ago when we swam in the opal sea of Naqoura, 

also a border town. How strange to be thirty 

and for those words years and ago to bear such weight. 

Do you remember? We had fish. 

Split open pomegranates and lazed into the afternoon. 

On our way home to Beirut, the sky curious like a face,

you said border towns are the most beautiful:

their existence depending on make-believe. 

Like us they inherit illusion, 

then displacement. 

The jackal’s ancestor was the two-million-year-old river dog 

roaming what is now southern Europe. 

A fossil found near Beirut tells us this.

Now its descendant stands in a field after a war that is over,

but not yet. Jackal from the Turkish çakal, 

from the Persian šagāl, this legacy of naming—

or theft. The disappointment of the jackal’s gaze. 

What does it see that we don’t? 

All day I’ve wondered about you,

your orchards, the orange and lemon trees in the heat,

your ache trapped like a root. 

Of all the things I can envy a jackal for—

its instinct to mate for life, 

the shed of its coat from red to tawny dark, 

the trot of its feet, slipping into valleys and forests 

to feign a perfect death—

it is the howl that haunts me. 

The rise and fall of sound as midday descends to night, 

and night becomes chorus. I imagine us on the Naqoura cliff, 

the jackal above. A wail thin as wind. We imitate it.

Hesitant as we’ve been taught to be until 

without warning our lungs yield.

A cry, wild and guttural, 

rips through towns and settlements, 

hurling the language off our chest, 

this room we’ve tucked terror in, 

this terror that knows no borders, 

every stone and trunk hurtling down river valleys,

over gorges, past the falls, we howl and howl and howl

into the livid mouth of the year.