EGYPTIAN RESTAURANT

Now I have dropped a stone in the reflection,
broken the room into a thousand rooms:
a thousand edges of acute refraction
blaze in the mirrors, in whose toss of beams

we sit as under a spray of images,
real where all is fleeting, plural, like
the circling crowd of jewelled ghostly Us.
Here is a stir, a glare, to crush the weak!

- rustle and babble and clang, fearful illusion
of lights and odours, doubling and gone and again,
where the soft-footed waiters tread precision
to terror's edge, and yet are voiced like men.

Crossing and re-crossing, the dark faces,
earth under flower-pots, wetly gape and gleam;
are lost in brightness,  fall in tiny pieces,
move in and out of an appalling womb

as food is built and broken.  Among these
one, who can clutch with bitterness the last 
infirmity, the knowledge that he is:
he droops his shoulders like the fading rest,

stares down the room where it is always raining
- lost in a mist of mirrors as in tears,
cloth over arm, silver and glassware shining
- a mournful waiter among the chandeliers.
		RESTAURANT EL HATI, CAIRO.