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Your gaze is a speculative reality,
A gradual from an unknown monastery.
Zerodimensionally, it perforates air,
Opening without opening somewhere very.
Disease me. Be for me as I am your disease,
Sack the City of God with love-dysentery.
Their conference, even on the moon, leaves all unchanged.
Professing, they forget to practice, heresy.
Outside opens from within, making all woman,
Whoring world perfectly like the Virgin Mary.
Inside opens from without, manning everything,
Erecting it as infinite commentary.
Nicola's vision crashes right through the windshield,
Thrown by distracting eyes, a fresh fatality.
Before the fall of the mind over the eyes, you've seen us.
Still blooming through the crowd, the mutant genus.
Gazing into peach smog sunset, you hold yourself close —
the soft ticking of ipods, the emptiness between us.
A stain swamps the X-ray, his voice under rubble.
With the void, our thoughts struggle, fail to screen us.
Who's a man but a half-time score in a contest of layers?
The blunt carapace and the softer skin are both the penis.
The border's too thin to be seen. Scars will do for proof,
bound up with a word to make "them" obscene — us.
Her lips on my temple! I'm gone, I'm this embrace,
no names, no labels or selves to demean us.
Our thoughts, they're shadows; what throws them has flown.
From the sky, they look down, bemused they have been us.
Yet when will the magnolia buds flare through the fog?
From the breast of our desk-jobs they will wean us.
Take off those robes, these habits, lie prone.
Who are you to name this the Mound of Venus?
O, poet, you speak like your bones are unique.
The first person will always also mean Us.
What is so compelling as the eyes of a child?
Crossing the green line of innocence, the eyes of a child
Cluster bombs scatter willfully across the schoolyard
Bring a deadly game of hopscotch to the eyes of a child
Grains of white desert sand sift through broken fingers
Measure time until bullets silence the whys of a child
Ancient tongues proclaim the death knell of olive trees
Pomegranates bleed through the milky sighs of a child
The village tailor sews bones together again and again
Baskets of figs bring moon-silver delight to the eyes of a child
The pregnant white mare canters across the village square
Her steaming nostrils caress the wind-tossed sighs of a child
Hold tight the ancient house key, the well worn walking stick
Leather sandals stir the dust but cannot mute the cries of a child
The crescent moon sheds silent grace upon the village ruins
And you, Esther, are lost in the questioning eyes of a child
People drift into and out of my life
like leaves adrift are caught in back waters.
Some leaves leave, moved on by unseen currents,
others sink beneath the slack waters.
A few wash away in sudden whirlpools,
as passions stir up their own black waters.
Relationships fail to grow and thrive,
when the seeds land on soils which lack waters.
I will grieve their absence, in the fullness of time,
when I face my solitude in tea, and in tea-black waters.
How much the metaphor of seeing is entangled in our ways of knowing: I can't see that, do you see my point? I'll see that and raise you; after all, most of us want a vision, or to see through things, or to be seen, that is, known for and as we are. The look, the gaze, can objectify but can caress as well. When the language takes on some opacity, as it does in Nicola Masciandaro's ghazal, the reading becomes a puzzle and then — one hopes — a pleasure. The rhymes Nicola has chosen help create a sense of disorientation. To rhyme two words suggests some sort of relationship between them. When the rhymes bridge the disjunct shers of a ghazal, that suggested connection carries a disruption as well. The reader's response completes the poem's significance.
Does the repetition of the radif also suggest relationships between its varying contexts? Andy Jackson's simple radif, "us," allows a great variety of connections, reflections, and shifts. Of the ten shers, three have the radif as the second syllable of a word which has the qafiya ("-een") as its first. The significance of this network of connections lies in the reader's freedom to respond to the cues of image and phrase the poet provides. The repetition of the ghazal form actually allows for creating a variety, often subtle, of meanings.
The first two shers of Elaine G. Schwartz's "Gaza" would lead one to thing the radif is "the eyes of a child," without a qafiya. Reading further, one discovers that the qafiya is "-ies." (That vowel has too many spellings in English to be easily represented. But you hear it.) There are eight shers in this ghazal, with "eyes" occuring four times. Is this repetition of the same word in the qafiya a flaw?
That's for the reader to decide. Each reader brings expectations to a poem. The delight is in the way the poet meets those expectations, sometimes by doing something unexpected. For this reader, the repetition effectively associates the "eyes of a child" with the "whys," "sighs," and "cries" of a child. With its rich imagery and constant return to the child's gaze, Elaine's ghazal foregrounds the human dimension of what too often seems "merely" political.
The first three ghazals in this issue deal with people and their relationships, expressed through the gaze. Chris Green's ghazal puts personal relationships in a context of flow and change, which is where they always are. The over-all tone of grief and absence also seems appropriate to conclude this set of ghazals. Readers bring their own experiences into the encounter with a poem; those experiences help shape the significance of that poem for that reader. In this case, I respond strongly to the images of flow and current and debris, with many associations from my own absorption in gazing at a stream. Other readers will have their own responses and associations.