Back to 2008 Ghazals
Back to Special Summer Issue index
Home Page | 2008 Ghazals | 2007 Ghazals | Prose | Links | Information | Email | Archives
Where presenting a work transcends its performance
The spectacle is always spoken accentually.
So bass guitars begin to build
The most self-indulgent standard tune.
And to bring new possibilities to the Montpelier Codex
It´s hosted with an ethos of harried normality.
So vocal and chamber variety offerings
Are bathed by patented embedded lights.
And a self-destructive spectacle of dance
Is the media exploiting its multiplicity.
So microtonal motets for ten thousand gurus
Summon their arguments for altering scores.
And to reflect the community it´s formally restricted
To patrons with optimal patterns of synergy.
So locked in this silent circle of warfare
Air guitars create the truth.
My love is too quick from our soiree tonight.
Lost and gone and gone away tonight.
Even the smoke has left the ashes.
Alone and cold, from red to grey tonight.
From my embrace my mistress springs.
Oh that she would not stray tonight.
Perhaps a song, an espresso or two?
We´ll stay up late and play tonight.
Can my weak words amuse your heart?
Laugh! Perhaps you´ll stay tonight.
I´ll use the fanciest mot I have.
Perhaps I´ll get my way tonight.
I reproach you love, for whom I long
My pleas are a host in array tonight.
If only you knew, you would cleave unto me.
Though I may deploy a cliché tonight.
Would that I were a troubadour.
I would bind my lady with a lay tonight.
Return to me, and fill my arms once more.
May Jared´s poor verse speed you from delay tonight.
Saharan whales from under the ground
Are runes telling tales from under the ground.
Shorn bones arch up like sculpted dunes
Or giant sea snails from under the ground.
Fins, ribs and jaws entreat the sky
Like ivory sails from under the ground.
Breaking the sand, white serpents writhe
And flick up their tails from under the ground.
Throughout the night, these dry tongues lick
At salt-crusted shales from under the ground.
Each bleary dawn, bleached voices call
A face that unveils from under the ground.
The seas they'd ploughed with monstrous grace
Now pound out fierce gales from under the ground.
She is prepared to split your life asunder for the goal.
Her lawyer's reputation might go under for the goal.
His wish to count the stars consumes his thoughts, yet his desires
Surrender to his blinding sense of wonder for the goal.
Don't think your bankroll's steep enough to keep you high and dry.
It's not enough to merely be a funder for the goal.
Longships scour the coasts we'd scorched with prayers and steeped in stones,
Axes, swords and spears invoking plunder for the goal.
The campaign trail is lonely, but the brass band plays in time
With royal pomp and presidential thunder for the goal.
The storm clouds paint the field with shades of wet and shades of clay
In which our nation's players blindly blunder for the goal.
The icebreaker flaunts furrows of iron. Its hull ploughs on
And hammers the ocean. The pole's now for swimming, not posing in furs.
Bears and foxes flee south to where the ice holds on.
The air's for Olympus. The mountain robs Mars of his sky,
His destiny. His days slow down. Water works
Its ways underground. The atmosphere clenched in the ice holds on.
Canada's erecting columns at sea. Ships must now pay
Penance for this heat. Crude blood boils from wounds
Spearing the flesh of this final artery to which the ice holds on.
Heaven throws its gauntlet down. Growth consumes
The changing tides. It's a challenge for polyps harvesting the Sun
When the sea heaves. Circling the Earth, the ice holds on.
The gulfstream runs to a recess now. The abandoned coasts
Crawl to their dens while Greenland envisions valleys of honey.
London remembers it's the ides of March, but the ice holds on.
Our ending dream: Fire kisses the frosty wreath
Of Saturn's rings. It's a last dance for Dione and Iapetus —
A midsummer's air. Oberon still loves Titania. The ice holds on.
No — I hear them fall quite near with black enamel
wax-tipped thuds, envying my ambivalence,
ambivalent passively, their ribcages hollowed from wax.
Male idols on rooftops unencumbered with dragging
Hell beneath their feet, their masks are plastic mockeries
of exposure, fluid and dark and hollowed from wax.
They loathe and are listless, obscure what's beneath,
and attend to those few above their heads. They disguise
their mock pessimism in a hatred that's hollowed from wax.
They are ignorant of roughly what has gone, and to what
is vulgar, false, and wrong, and though their only fault
is to overlook, they foresee a sunrise hollowed from wax.
I lose them here, unlike you, and will elude them
for years to come. They will change: they always do
all they can to stand there in a stillness hollowed from wax.
But I can hear them plodding down their earth
of spongy Hell, so when it all congeals and falls together,
they'll pity you — slave to a heaven hollowed from wax.
Sun Jul 6 10:04:33 2008
"Critical Mass" is an experiment in accentual meter in the ghazal. I recommend that you read Dana Gioia's explanation of accentual meter (if you need an introduction to it) and then read this ghazal carefully to see how the meter works in it. Note also Jalajel's use of alliteration in this poem. The meter of "Critical Mass" reflects and informs its musical imagery.
"Basilosaurus" reminds me somehow of the paintings of Yves Tanguy. In my late teenage years, I was much taken with Surrealism, including Tanguy (or Tanguey). I don't mean to say this ghazal is surrealist, although the unexpected, unfamiliar juxtaposition of the whale and the desert does have a certain surreal resonance. "The Goal" plays changes on our power struggles, our efforts to reach the goal in various areas, from personal to political. For me, the last two shers throw a political frame around the whole ghazal.
In "The Ice" and "Aquiescence," Jalajel takes up Robert Bly's innovative three-line sher for the ghazal. In my review of The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, I said that the poems three-line "couplets" were not ghazals, at least in form. These two ghazals by David Jalajel force me to rethink that judgment. Although nonconformist, these two poems do embody the ghazal spirit, with leaps between shers, with the radif casting reflections between the shers. The three lines allow for a density of image that enriches the poem.
Separation. Loneliness. Loss. Longing. All the components of the blues. Appeals. Pleas, even. A blue ghazal, indeed.