Back to the summer 2009 index
Home Page | 2009 Ghazals | 2008 Ghazals | Prose | Links | Information | Email | Archives
Sit still in the dark room without stretching your body
into the satin promise of clean sleep; count each moment a prayer.
You may whisper words with sibilants, your blood practicing
its red pulse of flesh and hope; every action a hobbled prayer.
Your sighs, the certain breath, other sounds will fade;
this is the barrier edge of prayer.
At the center of an invisible hour, catalogue your virtue,
let your mind explain, a quiet line of prayer.
There is rubble where there were kisses;
each dried tear, a pause tumbling into prayer.
Truth cannot exist without death, without
slipping into the tendrils and creases of prayer.
Your history is not the rind of forever,
but a forecast floating with prayers.
These days are only water and shore;
I will listen as you petition yourself into uncertain prayer.
Crow’s feet belie the age of mirth and other accidents of enjoyment.
The sins of late nights and anguish bear out all too well on our face.
Vices represent the better part of indiscretion: nothing of valor,
of discipline is evident. The jargon of wrinkling speaks openly, often.
Time’s march across the parchment becomes a battle for which we are
unprepared. Battered and weathered, we can only hope for character.
If there were a way to erase the damage, we’d travel across eons.
Then again, we’d not cross any ferryman, pay that terrible toll.
Remembering to uncrinkle the smiling eye, we practice diligence
we once thought unnecessary. A cautious emoting all we can spare.
Dappled with conceit at the onset, it is sweet to make lovers swoon
before a metaphor of bracelets of hair, the sun entering the room.
What honor there is in reliving the past, the two cast as ill-fated,
something the world cannot abide. Given time, we will acquiesce.
Description of union leaves little to imagination: the woman,
too young, the man, her lothario, her impresario, her mitigation.
Youth will flee with valor. Conjoined bodies with man as planet,
female in orbit create a natural order followed for centuries.
The unions brief and flighty, couples gaze into the future
unaware of deity, of the watchers who measure their days.
Dreamy, the tank swirls with this tale’s airy surface.
Along the glass, catfish whiskers skim the surface.
Water churned on the bubbles, blew
perfect O’s to her lips kissing the hushed surface.
Love began like this, long ago, in a pond
where she swam against its smooth surface.
Stones and mud grazed belly to bare belly,
hidden from those who looked below the surface.
Staring at the tank’s natural light, she wants to dive
again, and break this hour’s surface.
She gazes beyond glass, and sees her sleek body
shadowing the catfish’s slippery surface.
The mouth of morning drips hard — suckled of hollow road.
Luly wakes into the maidenhead of hollow road.
Tiny perforations in every dawn of the world —
breathing into blazing — inbred of hollow road.
The world’s outline dissolves faster than thick afternoons;
flatlanders sidle and millipede the hollow road.
Did all the twilight dimensions close into thin string?
Arrows of sharp-lined birds black the thread of hollow road.
Under their limestone beds, lepers burn legs to keep warm —
will tender pieces soften the tread of hollow road?
Diogenes hunts for someone mute and dumb as bone.
Luly arms for the day, turreted of hollow road.
There are mysteries in these ghazals: prayer, sisterhood, middle age, the metaphysics of erotic love, the surfaces under which desire lurks, a hollowness of roads. There are other echoes and resonances in these poems, for instance, to metaphysical poet John Donne's "bracelet of bright hair about the bone." Of course, every reader makes their own resonances from their own experiences, knowledge, imagination. I'm sure you'll find these poems rewarding on that level.