After Khusro
The winter sun’s dazzling on the paper blinds you
To the words you desire to read.
A poet is only alive as long as his words dance on
The tongues of the adherents.
His words rise from the tomb in which he sleeps, Shining moets moving in widening Circles of arrivals and departures, and the steady fire Of longing. Someone must
Remember these words there, where night has already Fallen as you had in love. In this country of sparsities, short days, and the whiteness Of paper, your tears falling
Into the morning air are merely petitions to the Presences Who are sung and unsung into Being at the corners of streets, the rose-watered tombs, And the underground tunnels
Where simple minded folk leave requests to the djinns for Those they lost. You too write: “Take me again, mad Khusro, to that city by the sea where Loving like singing was painless.”
*This scribble in my mind links up with this one.
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What the Traveler Perhaps Thinks
The windscreen splinters my face
When I gaze into the night
Contained in these desolate towns
Which might be your eyes.
There was a time when everything There was clear, the blue Of the canals was yet to be obscured By the hyacinth,
Incarnadine like the words with which Our tongues marked us, The “no”s and “don’t”s knotting nooses Around those quick days.
What to do? Neither language with its Ribbed chest enough bread Nor our palms’ prayer at the small Of our backs enough warmth
When every room became a desolation. So when with that unsayble Sentence my mouth betrayed you, my wrists Were already handcuffed to pain.
Now exiled from paradise to this place Where the moon doesn’t cast Its shadow, I rove with thirst, my spine Lanced with an airplane’s needle,
As I keep falling, forever falling Like a meteor through your heart.
* A response-poem to this previous poem.
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When Asked A Question, She Said
The world is opaque with frosts.
The clarity I seek pools
in the lakes that never freeze,
tucked in the high mountain valleys.
The traveler has left for the plains.
The summers were brilliant with their rose blooms. Now ice cackles in the bucket. Light sleeps in most days until late, and then sleepwalks
into the grove of chinars in which we swung in ever widening arcs from those truck tires, the traveler and I, the we that the waves of time didn't sustain.
What is matter is also light, is also time, is also those swinging arcs in which this story was spun. On my wrist his glass bangle becomes a rune, a Stonehenge whose significance will be lost
in time. And in time, it will be summer again. And again the garden will be dug and the roses pruned, and again the thorns of memory will be hidden, for a while, by the blooms of forgetting.
Love is the deep wound out of which flow all the rivers that we drink from, here and there, my traveler and I.
Note: Lines quickly scribbled in response to this song, as Gulzar's lyric loops over and over in my ear as I sit in the sun, and muse on such matters of the heart.
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