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The astrolabe directs to itself — always, only — the zahir,
Wherefore the king ordered it thrown into the sea, the zahir.
Ancient attempts to map the world showed the road to perdition,
Seas, mountains, armies, tigers to infinity, the zahir.
A single vein of marble in one of twelve hundred pillars,
The bottom of a well — who knows where you may see the zahir?
For Borges, the zahir was a common coin, twenty centavos,
For Borges' translator, the zahir was Borges — he, the zahir.
Idol or prophet, one may entrance multitudes. In His mercy,
Allah decreed one for each time, for eternity, the zahir.
Perhaps the zahir is the shadow of the Rose, the rending
Of the Veil. Perhaps — what? — lies behind (God, unity?) the zahir?
The more I think, the less I am. What is living — dreaming?
What's poet or muse, or you or me — reality, the zahir?
In his short story "The Zahir," Borges defines the zahir as follows: "In Arabic, 'zahir' means visible, manifest, evident; in that sense, it is one of the ninety-nine names of God; in Muslim countries, the masses use the word for 'beings or things which have the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad.'"
As greater my love for you has grown, the farther away you have moved on, like a tumbling stone,
in free fall from the highest peak where you and I once stood. Close, yet alone, sharing songs sketched in stone.
The stones in the stream are moved by the stream, but the stones are not responsible for the injuries,
or for the woundings they all receive, as it is the stream that pushes one stone against another stone.
Some become attached to injuries they receive, to the suffering that shapes self-identity.
Pebbles separate from the larger mountain and continent they once were part of, the primal stone.
Injuries reshape the stones, wearing off sharp corners until the surface becomes smooth to the stream.
Tiny portions of stone join the stream and in time become part of that thing which unites sea and stone.
The stream is never the same stream twice. The stream is always new, the stone in it forever changing.
Stone disappears as stone in time to become part of the sea, or rejoins primal tectonic stone.
Every summer there is more heat between us,
more tangling, dampening sheet between us.
I stay up all night, yet you refuse to come
home. I count our secrets like sheep between us.
The year I left, I couldn't quit the city —
fourteen blocks of frozen concrete between us.
You never liked bars. I taught you to drink at home.
Eleven shots of Aquavit between us.
The wood stove burned down to cinders overnight.
Floorboards cracked in the drafty creaks between us.
Two babies we couldn't bring ourselves to name:
stillborn confidences we keep between us.
We built snowmen to dress in our worn-out clothes,
the blizzard now softened to sleet between us.
The truth is, I'm lying about everything.
Honesty lies in the two feet between us.
Two days at home, I start to pine for Italy,
Ache to breathe rosemary and thyme in Italy.
Gelato rimmed our mouths as if we were children.
You tasted like orange and lime in Italy.
A picture of us at a restaurant in Venice:
Our fingers forever entwined in Italy.
"The beautiful need something else?" the waiter said.
Anything can become a line in Italy.
Cars zip around the square where Caesar was murdered.
There's no separation of time in Italy.
You climbed stone steps, stooped to gaze down an aqueduct
Where the water once flowed like wine in Italy.
Campo Dei Fiori: we bought white pearl currants,
Ate small tomatoes off the vine in Italy.
The sea lay glinting under Cinque Terre cliffs.
I floated in solace, in brine, in Italy.
I wanted to hold it all, wrap it in linen.
Instead, part of me stayed behind in Italy.
We brought home honey that tasted like the forest.
Do Umbrian bees buzz or whine in Italy?
We took nicknames in half-broken Italian:
Yours was "Piedi." "Dolci" was mine in Italy.
I woke up shaking, groping for what I had forgotten:
a dream's slow shiver lived in my gut. I had forgotten.
I met you in another city, one we didn't love.
Salt Lake City? Boise? Terre Haute? I have forgotten.
How solid you seemed then. That is what I remember most.
We were wired tight, strummed low, hard, taut—I had forgotten.
It's worse than pointless: continents, oceans stretch between us.
Lies are like fish. Those I never caught I have forgotten.
Are you sleeping now? I want to send an apparition,
a haunting, make you want what I thought I had forgotten.
Dayton wasn't big enough to hold all our excuses.
"It's not that I don't love you. It's just . . . " I have forgotten.
Columbia stole a promise. Decatur let one go.
Once I tried to list the vacant lots I had. Forgot ten.
Some nameless restaurant: we smoked at a quiet back table.
We burned, cauterized each other shut — I had forgotten.
Christ — what is left to remember? Excellent question.
Note to self: Ruth, fall out of love. What? I have forgotten.
A Mystery. It boils down to this when you probe the history buried beneath this carved stone.
Mounted on certainty, the armed man rides with purpose, a Lord on his saddle of cold gravéd stone.
A warrior. Battling the disbelief he feels coursing through his veins like a light breeze through the trees.
A horseman who followed others who vowed to lift far away lands from beneath the oppressive stone.
A rider. Forever astride the slowly shifting rage, the tectonic apocalypse his stage.
A reliever, and believer that some distant enemy he can't see threw the injuring stone.
A witness. One who has come to see there are humans hidden behind the icons he had been shown.
A seeker, searching for the source of wordless songs that his heart hears, that sink into his soul like stone.
An actor. Playing out a role he improvises on illusions built from falsehoods, his stage,
A mystery. It boils down to this when you probe the history buried beneath this carved stone.
When I put together an issue of The Ghazal Page, I try to select and sequence the ghazals by some sense of their relationships: themes and/or imagery that reinforce or contrast or complement in some other fasion. This process isn't especially explicit — it is intuitive and spontaneous. Since our minds try to find patterns, once these half-dozen ghazals are put together in this order, we tend to see inter-connections, especially if an editor is making suggestions. Each reader will see his or her own patterns of contrast and likeness.
This set of ghazals begins and ends with mystery: the mystery of the zahir and the mystery of the sculpted warrior. Between these mysteries are others, especially, it seems to me, each ghazal celebrates the zahir: the imagery of people as stones in a stream, tumbled, chipped, worn away; the mysteries of relationship and of place (more stones, more stream, all the zahir). These ghazals are rich with imagery reinforced by their rhythms and sonic structures.
There's much more that could be said about these ghazals' themes, but I leave that to you to discover. Each ghazal is in the Urdu/Persian tradition; each has quite different, and effective, uses of qafiya, radif, and rhythm, including line-length. Do be sure to note how in "The Horseman Ghazal," the first and last lines are identical, with their meanings much changed by the poem that connects them.