Approximate Ghazal ~ Speaking of Rain
[A]
Damn my awkwardness on encountering your beauty, always too much
To bear. Dear, to hear what I wanted to say tonight, listen to the nightly rain.
You keep vanishing, yet return as dark memory occasionally returns when I see a face framed in the window of a train, barreling down into heavy rain.
Your eyes always open within mine, as certain dark Lilies slowly push their heads out into this spring rain.
[B] To caress your hair with these crude hands, to cradle your body of stars In a language, which is only spoken between a field of grass and the rain!
When will my body hum with music, that slap of water against stone? Only when I can hear your quick laughter, always flaming in the rain!
Who has played Holi in your alley today? Who is she who has colored you today? And whose handprints cover your eyes, Sashi? Surely these are not that of rain!
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Sonnet Exercise - 1
We rode bicycles down Hijili Road swept by rain.
It was that season when young men take to wing.
It is that day today, my friend, to account for gain
And loss again. In which column goes this thing:
Emptiness felt as pain? My eyes watch the pane
Beyond which an anoraked postman is walking,
In the distance, up and down this foreign lane.
Will you send letters that remind me of talking
All night? That remind me of how we both ached
For transcendence, as trains snaked underneath
A copula of fireflies, stars? No! These many breached
Years won’t allow you rush in, your head beneath
A wet newspaper, to tell me where you have been.
No! Nor can I tell you all the horrors I have seen.
Notes: The rhyme scheme has been figured out:ababcdcdefefgg. Now it's time to understand iambic meter.
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Approximate Sestina
Train tracks curve into the rain
And their end stands the flower
That I handed to you in a distant fall.
Since then I have been divided into days
And nights, and rain’s persistent music
Always shrouds my distant city.
Stopping on bridges spanning this city Today I watch it fall as it falls always, this rain. What do you play on the radio now? What music Has taken my seat? And at your window what flower Blooms, under my chimes? Those days Spent with you, remain hidden in bureaus, except in fall
When maple trees, for days seem to reenact our fall From love or what passed for it, in all those cities Spread across disparate continents and days. Only then I reread your letters: this written to rain, This one written, you said, in the shade of a flower, And this just after you had stopped spinning to music.
Yesterday I was listening to Bach’s music, Fugues you felt were too mournful for a happy fall. I gave you his tapes instead of flowers As I left, after that short visit to your city, Driving away into heavy rain. I must tell you I have been driving for days
And still there is no clarity about those days We spent together. So I keep taking flowers To this high grave, to this coffin of rain, Which holds all the crazy plans we made that fall. Now, I will not visit those mountain cities. Now, I will not listen to prayer flags’ music.
But this is not what I constantly miss; it is music Of your laughter echoing down corridors of days. So what remains to be said of this city In which you are absent? I see no flowers. It is that season again: fall. Cellos fill with rain.
Ominous radio silence. No music In these dark rooms. And today No tears. Only rain, only rain.
<i>Notes:
This poem was begun years ago, when the obsessiveness of a sestina seemed appropriate for the welter of emotions I was then enduring. Perhaps those emotions weren’t as intense as I imagined them to be, or perhaps they were too overpowering, for me to sit down and write verse. So this poem had to wait till today, for some kind of completion, when an early morning thunderstorm woke me up to the dialect of rain flowing through gutters.
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