The Master’s House by Solmaz Sharif

The Master’s House

To wave from the porch

To let go of the grudge

To disrobe

To recall Ethel Rosenberg’s green polka-dotted dress

To call your father and say I’d forgotten how nice everyone in these red states can be

To hear him say Yes, long as you don’t move in next door

To recall every drawn curtain in the apartments you have lived

To find yourself at 33 at a vast expanse with nary a papyrus of guidance, with nary a voice, a muse, a model

To finally admit out loud then I want to go home

To have a dinner party of intellectuals with a bell, long-armed, lightly-tongued, at each setting

To sport your dun gown

To revel in face serums

To be a well-calibrated burn victim to fight the signs of aging

To assure financial health

To be lavender sachets and cedar lining and all the ways the rich might hide their rot

To eye the master’s bone china

To pour diuretic in his coffee and think this erosive to the state

To disrobe when the agent asks you to

To find a spot on any wall to stare into

To develop the ability to leave an entire nation thusly, just by staring at a spot on the wall, as the lead-vested agent names article by article what to remove

To do this in order to do the other thing, the wild thing

To say this is my filmdom, The Master’s House, and I gaze upon it and it is good

To discuss desalinization plants and de terroir

To date briefly a banker, a lapsed Marxist, and hear him on the phone speaking in billions of dollars, its residue over the clear bulbs of his eyes, as he turns to look upon your nudity

To fantasize publishing a poem in the New Yorker eviscerating his little need

To set a bell at each intellectual’s table setting ringing idea after idea, and be the simple-footed help, rushing to say Yes?

To disrobe when the agent asks you to

To find a spot on any wall to stare into

To develop the ability to leave an entire nation thusly, just by staring at a spot on the wall

To say this is my filmdom, The Master’s House

To recall the Settler who from behind his mobile phone said I’m filming you for God

To recall this sad God, God of the mobile phone camera, God of the small black globe and pixelated eye above the blackjack table at Harrah’s and the metal, toothed pit of Qalandia checkpoint the same

To recall the Texan that held the shotgun to your father’s chest, sending him falling backward, pleading, and the words came to him in Farsi

To be jealous of this, his most desperate language

To lament the fact of your lamentations in English, English being your first defeat

To finally admit out loud then I want to go home

To stand outside your grandmother’s house

To know, for example, that in Farsi the present perfect is called the 
relational past, and is used at times to describe a historic event whose effect is still relevant today, transcending the past

To say, for example, Shah dictator bude-ast translates to The Shah was a dictator, but more literally to The Shah is was a dictator

To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes

To walk cemetery after cemetery in these States and nary a gravestone reading Solmaz

To know no nation will be home until one does

To do this in order to do the other thing, the wild thing, though you’ve forgotten what it was