So I had this here rebate card from Verizon. Fiddy bucks.
That would buy alotta kitty litter. Toilet paper. Cheese.
So did I spend it on household urgencies (and yes, in this household, cheese is a requirement)?
Hah. No.
With that card in my frosty little mitts, I headed for the Strand and feasted on books. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, The Mapmakers, The Failure of Political Islam, and two books of poetry: Kay Ryan’s The Niagara River, and Agha Shahid Ali’s The Veiled Suite.
Thassright: I scored the collected poems of Ali.
Jealous, aren’t you?
I did, regretfully, put back Mary Oliver’s Thirst, her meditation on the death of her longtime partner, Molly Malone Cook; another day, I said.
Still, I’m very happy with the Ali. I haven’t had a chance, really, to do more than scan the pages; what follows, then, is one I simply plucked out.
And then I cheat, and add another, a ghazal, for no other reason that the repetition which nonetheless moves you as well as returning you to where you have and hadn’t been before, moves me and returns me to where I have and hadn’t been before.
Yes, there’s a telephone in each poem, but what binds them is more the tone: the lighting upon the humorous and then the tragic, the surface slice and the deep thrust to something below.
*Sigh* I may have to add a Friday ghazal in addition to the regular Friday poem, lest I ignore all other poets in my lust for Ali.
From Bell Telephone Hours
5.
Today, talk is cheap.
Call somebody.
I called Information Desk, Heaven,
and asked, “When is Doomsday?”
I was put on hold.
Through the hallelujahs of seraphs,
I heard the idle gossip of angels,
their wings beating rumours
of revolts in Heaven.
The I heard flames, wings burning,
then only hallelujahs.
I prayed, “Angel of Love,
please pick up the phone.”
But it was the Angel of Death.
I said, “Tell me, Tell me,
when is Doomsday?”
He answered, “God is busy.
He never answers the living.
He has no answers for the dead.
Don’t ever call again collect.”
~~~
Here’s what Ali himself had to say on the ghazal:
The ghazal can be traced back to seventh-century Arabia. In its canonical Persian (Farsi) form, arrived at in the eleventh century, it is composed of autonomous or semi-autonomous couplets that are united by a strict scheme of rhyme, refrain, and line length. The opening couplet sets up the schemes by having it in both lines, and then the schemes occurs only in the second line of every succeeding couplet—i.e., the first line (same length) of every succeeding couplet sets up a suspense, and the second line (same length but with the rhyme and refrain—the rhyme immediately preceding the refrain) delivers on that suspense by amplifying, dramatizing, imploding, exploding.
See how he runs. . . .
Of It All
I say This, after all, is the trick of it all
when suddenly you say “Arabic of it all.”
After Algebra there was Geometry—and then Calculus—
But I’d already failed the arithmetic of it all.
White men across the U.S. love their wives’ curries—
I say O No! to the turmeric of it all.
“Suicide represents. . . a privileged moment. . . .”
Then what keeps you—and me—from being sick of it all?
The telephones work, but I’m still cut off from you.
We star in America, fast epic of it all.
What shapes galaxies and keeps them from flying apart?
There’s that missing mass, the black magic of it all.
What makes yours the rarest edition is just this:
it’s bound in human skin, final fabric of it all.
I’m smashed, fine Enemy, in your isolate mirror.
Why the diamond display then—in public—of it all?
Before the palaver ends, hear the sparrows’ songs,
the quick quick quick, O the quick of it all.
For the suicidally beautiful, autumn now starts.
Their fathers’ heroes, boys gallop, kick off it all.
The sudden storm swept its ice across the great plains.
How did you find me, then, in the thick of it all?
Across the world one aches for New York, but to long
for New York in New York’s most tragic of it all.
For Shahid too the night went “quickly as it came”—
After that, old friend, came the music of it all.
(for Anthony Lacavaro)
AbsurdBeats 