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It's a few dollars' cab ride from hell's half-acre
Traffic can be murder along Spring Garden Road
Walk a brisk thirty minutes from North Street to Work
You can save yourself ten via Spring Garden Road
They cut through the dark and the fog from the harbour
Debris of all kinds washes up Spring Garden Road
Jay plays Westerberg tunes on acoustic guitar
He'll get lunch with the coins around Spring Garden Road
You can shoplift from Taz Records all afternoon
Play that vinyl when you get home from Spring Garden Road
Chase down your new worst-friend for a gram of trouble
Mike makes his living crisscrossing Spring Garden Road
Some high school kids swarmed that guy and nearly killed him
He had trouble walking after Spring Garden Road
Katie will work the late shift at Tim's, eight 'til five
Meet her in the wee morning on Spring Garden Road
You're keyed up at the Marquee and nervy in Hell
For fresh air and a stretch go down Spring Garden Road
You never knew her name, it wasn't yours to learn
Ghosts yearn to rub shoulders across Spring Garden Road
Jill and Jesse hooked up at Reflections last week
First steps are tentative beyond Spring Garden Road
Precise details elude me, the older I get
My memories unravel through Spring Garden Road
Those kids from New Brunswick, I knew them all too well
They lived eight to a flop above Spring Garden Road
Two springs spent idling between bookstores, bars and schools
Years later, Stranach still dreams of Spring Garden Road
—
Spring Garden Road is a major thoroughfare in Halifax, NS.
Fredericton, Spring/08
How shall the silence, singing moral verse,
Claim my heart's defeat, hampering the verse?
The eyes of others, open to our hopes
Sing through jealousy, joined most bloody verse.
They write symphonies still of our despair,
and note every chord correct with the verse.
But I shall attend, another list'ner,
for the song of hate has a golden verse.
What is not hate, not love, knowing the difference?
For the other's hate, holds the lover's verse.
Let us sing our love, lost us in their notes
And let them jealous, for we know our verse.
Heed, ye Foreigner, he who writes this verse —
Mayhaps one day love live in hate composéd verse.
Fearing the thoughts we'd seed with books,
they burn our words. Ink bleeds from books.
To still the voices in his head,
with just his touch, he speeds through books.
Prophets scan the stars at night,
find answers with no need of books.
Lost in the stacks, a grimoire locked tight.
No key could ever have freed that book.
Sclerotic proteins cloud his eyes.
The poet cannot read his books.
The relentless tick of time has unsteadied my foothold — but I am not old.
Of course, I am a bit more cautious about many things, where once I was quite bold.
Not being wise, I've learned all of life's little lessons by failing many tests.
My furor, once fiery and unstable temper, has become a smidge more cold.
If the measure of my life is equal to the length most men now can expect,
Then half my race is run before my course is set — before I have been extolled.
I've survived the white waters of life by letting slip the heavy — and holding
Onto hope, which floats my heart's untold dreams and wants — and worlds I wish to behold.
Here, at middle age, sitting at life's peak, I see a tad further down the road.
I'm discontented with the life I have had, for my exploits are yet untold.
Whenever I think about time and its universal nature
My thoughts fall into the past, present, and the future
Time is the fourth dimension, some people might say
But for me it only exists in my mind not in my rapture
The stars that dance within their ideal rhythms of time
Enjoy their pageant in the mystic heavens of adventure
Time, space, light, and matter as I see within, I found
They are all flexible within their divine cosmic culture
It's the twilight hours that always guide me to my path
In which I walk for my hopes into an unknown venture
Let me touch you to feel your sweet presence, because
The present moment carries only the past in its capture
As 'Darshan' dissolves in the five elements of universe
His soul will disperse forever with his final departure
— Note: In India and Pakistan, the Ghazal is also widely accepted in just a "Monorhyme" form.
I was so sad to see the leaves fall
until I realized they were dancing
I feared the evening shadows
until the firelight set them dancing
though the mountain is giant and moveless
around its head the clouds are dancing
the river is cold and dark in winter
but the sunlight on the ice is dancing
through the endless grass of the prairie
the hot wind of summer goes dancing
in the deep forests that are older than time
the streams come from the heights dancing
the body decays in the black earth
while the soul goes on and on dancing
A sense of time passed, of lost scenes, permeates these six ghazals. "Been Awhile Ghazal" recalls the testaments of François Villon, in their elegies for the losses of life, for the sense of camaraderie with outlaws — those on the fringe of "proper" society. Villon wrote two Testaments, making appropriate but often obscure bequests to people he knew. Stranach doesn't make bequests, so his ghazal is not a Testament, just testimony. In Robert Maxwell's ghazal, love and hate tangle syntactically. In contrast to Matthew Stranach's poem, the imagery is all play of thought through abstract words. "Verse" becomes a term of indefinite signification. In Stranach's poem, we recognize the incidents and people, though we have not experienced them. In Maxwell's, the lines sing opposites into transpositions.
Verses end up in books on shelves. As in the first two ghazals, loss is focal in J. E. Stanley's "Bookshelf": the grimoire is "locked tight," like the poet's failing eyes. The Romantics, some of them, like Emerson, wanted to read the world like a book. Does a starry sky scan? Each sher is a shelf, stocked not with books but with words, images, rhythms. I've just finished Ram Dass's Still Here, a book about aging and dying. While I don't agree with some of his core beliefs, I found it very useful in gaining perspective on my own aging. David Quentin Dauthier's ghazal speaks of the changes that accompany middle age, not old. Stil . . . . As in the earlier poems, a sense of loss hovers behind the images.
What brings us loss? Time. Darshan Dhaliwal looks to time, however, for something more than loss: the heavens, hopes, touch, love. Ram Dass, in Still Here, speaks of the importance of touch. Perhaps the touch of the "stars' dance" raises us out of time's insistence. How better to transcend time than to dance? Tiel Aisha Ansari sings of the dancing that grows out of the loss in the seasons, in shadows, in forests and streams, in the decaying body. I would paraphrase this ghazal as "dance is loss transcended," while acknowledging that no paraphrase of a poem is worth much.