She Says Book

	Introduction
	Words
	In those days - I know now - words declaimed the wind	5
	Words	7
	Where do words come from?	9
	How to find the name of the fisherman who hooked the first word	11
	The prudent man looped his family to his belt	13
	Language at that time opened fire on every noise	15
	What do we know about the alphabets which didn't survive the rising of the waters	17
	The words which spring up on the borders of lips retain their terrors	19
	Words, she says, used to be wolves	21
	Words, she says, are like the rain - everyone knows how to make them	23
	It was there and nowhere else	25
	The rain had few followers at that time	27
	Guilty of repeated forgetfulness	29
	There are words from poor peoples' gardens that crossbreed iron and thorns	31
	She Says
	There were too many women for too few seasons	35
	She says / dig there where a shadow can stand upright	37
	The wind in the fig there quiets down when she speaks	39
	She only opens her door to the winds	41
	Between her two windows is a mirror	43
	Without the wisteria	45
	Drunken bread on the table	47
	On the dark landing of her dreams	49
	The frost that year shattered both the indoors and outdoors	51
	He shakes her so she'll drop the words she stole	53
	Her voice comes back to her from the canary's cage	55
	In her dreams she thinks she is awake	57
	Seated on her doorstep made of deaf stones	59
	She lives in a high room next door to the clouds	61
	Autumn preceded summer by one day	63
	The dead she says	65
	Spitting in the wind brings happiness she says	67
	She carried her load of fog in all kinds of weather	69
	There is winter in her sleep	71
	She says / migrating birds won't replace the road	73
	The dignitary who bent his servant backwards till the storm was extinguished	75
	She says / there is a fire on the moon	77
	She tells her dreams to the angels who inadvertently cross her bed	79
	First / she kills the red hen that traces circles around her field	81
	Her walls and her bones aged together	83
	She puts her ear to the ground to listen to the buried voices clamor	85
	She understands from the plane trees staring in shock at the countryside	87
	She places her hands on the apple tree's hands	89
	She says / the names of the months are closed up in books	91
	Her house is a burial ground for mute objects	93
	Winter is painful to her	95
	It has snowed on her bed since her mirror contested the window	97
	The old woman has the deafened mourning of those who live on stones	99
	God will forgive me for having let the house wander away says the old woman	101
	It took her years to understand the wind's behavior	103
	At that time the earth was so high up	105
	Someone is speaking within the walls	107
	Stretched out close to the tree which breathes beside her	109
	Plowing at night means one less loaf from each furrow she says	111
	Once upon a time she had a book	113
	Her laundry will soak all night beneath the moon which washes hilltops	115
	Between twilight and crumbled bread	117
	From rails buried beneath the rubble	119
	A while odor of woman and declining summer stops them	121
	She opens her door without hesitation to the elm leaf on her threshold	123
	In the night of boxes they give up their linens	125
	The old man who doesn't know how to count	127
	The old man who left his shadow on the tracks	129
	The fire which ravaged the last comet stretched out at the saint's shrine	131
	They say / that he has blood under his fingernails	133
	He told stories the way you peel a fruit	135
	There were tree of them who emerged from the night	137
	The wind she says is only good for tousling the broom-bushes	139
	The children knocked on every door	141
	She says / the earth is so vast	143
	They come from the same slope not the same hill	145
	It sometimes happens that the forest disperses itself	147
	A man is not an island	149
	Storks have been nesting in the church font	151
	The caravan that left the old town of Manama disappeared	153
	She prefers round years	155
	One day she says	157
	Why I Write in French	159