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the frost of her spirit congeals on my toenails
& burns like the sunset as twilight ignites her
this raven i summon drinks blood from the barn owl
who nests at my feet, though my passions affright her
she hears the birth cries of my nestling & flees me
though her own birth inside this bare valley incites her
will the stress of her waking fly up from my ankles
while the darkness encircles the moonglow that lights her
a weakness of breathing comes after the darkness
when her body is bared & the years come to blight her
now i read – from the archives anonymous queens and
viziers have sequestered – a parchment that cites her
it summons her fortunes, unfetters her glory,
and foretells how cold bodies did scrape, claw & bite her
when her new voice turns white, when her blue eyes turn yellow
it’s time for the night to come out & delight her
i’ll insist she climbs up to the sky’s humble visage
until heaven is willing to step down & right her
she’s all that the soul can embrace beyond dying,
& it’s all for her love that i dare to requite her
accomplished much had he known a way.
Now all those crumpled days have blown away.
Opportunities like last night's empty
pizza boxes were just thrown away.
Speeding endless circles never making
any progress, his Daytona way.
Beneficent One, could he get
another chance? That was the Jonah way.
Or will this dismal ghazal be Bill's
epitaph when he has flown away?
What else is there left for me to undo? A city
made of bridges, is it delicious with mercy?
As if on a rainbow, this is dust that settles
on the bulbs of your Lite Brite. You are so heavy.
This is a necktie of Golden aura that keeps
your head facing the glow. The lights go on frantically.
It is your one soft moment becoming softer,
You are indivisible. You are a city.
This can turn even the most careful of drivers,
like you Sean, full of youth and distraction, blurry.
You say my dreams they will come, they are in my hand
But tell me, how can I sleep when my heart's in your hand?
The big sky is thick with bluish cloud like the quilt
wrapped round your shoulder, clutched in your hand.
The wanderer walks on paths laid by God
Like a drop of sweat skips down cracks in your hand.
Wandering we, in dream mountains, climb
Peaks of my talk and your talk, my hand in your hand.
The plane flies its path its journey prepared
Your journey's a bird: warm, alive in your hand.
The reader reads in sequence, a line understands
We live in parallel like heart, life line in your hand.
As I begin writing these comments, a light freezing rain is falling. The temperature outside is 34 F., 1 C., with a chilly south wind. Why a weather report? The very seasonal weather, for this latitude, influenced my choice and sequencing of these ghazals. Cold weather means a lot of things.
Two of these ghazals originate in climates much different from mine, Saudia Arabia and Singapore, but there is a tonality, a theme, that brings them into alignment,
David Jalajel's "ghazal for the ghoul maiden" resonates with John Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." It also brings to mind Robert Graves' The White Goddess, which I read many decades ago. Here's a link to a site with brief excerpts from this book. After that, if you're interested, you're on your own. Jalajel's ghazal is rich with overtones to other literature and lore dealing with the ghoul. The Wikipedia article on "ghoul" is a mess, but you might find some suggestions for further exploration there.
Echoing the erotic danger of the maiden with yellow eyes, the threat of freezing love, there is the sense of loss, of what might have been, if only . . . . Those cycles in the third sher occur on all levels from the personal through the social to the cosmic, or at least we humans find them. Another chance? With Bill Batcher, we may hope so.
When I first read Sean Santa's ghazal, I did so with memories of driving on freeways and bridges in the San Francisco bay area, suggested by the first sher. The frantic lights glow without mercy, even in those soft moments. That dusty, artifical rainbow in the second sher is a powerful image. Perhaps one point Robert Graves misses in The White Goddess is that the City also is an avatar of the goddess; her presence is manifested in bridges and lights as well as in wild animals.
And "Ghazal #1" is last, because it caps thematically, tonally, the preceding three ghazals. The sense of impending loss turns to wandering and journeying with some reassurance: held hands, the living warmth of a bird in the hand, the continual shifting of our experience into the dream-world. We live in parallel, like a circuit that will not fail totally when one element fails, as will a circuit in sequence. The ghazal lives also in parallel, its shers not sequential but parallel in meaning and theme.