Ghazal for Unforgetting

What was it he needed to read? There was a book on one
of the shelves. He only remembered the cover was green.

88 keys, 11 octaves. After daily exercises,
the lid came down on a felt runner of green.

The first year is paper, the eighth bronze, the twelfth
silk or linen; the sixteenth, a candlestick silvery-green.

What trees grew in front of our first house? One
shed only flame-colored leaves, the other green.

One arrow struck the girl, the other struck the god. He pursued her,
even as her feet grew roots, her arms leafed over with green.

Near the water, there used to be a house of quarantine. On a short
stretch of road, broken shells in the gravel amid tufts of green.

Should your mind quietly open that side door and leave, what
will you remember of us, of our days greener than green?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Pleas/e: A Meditation

Is it from habit,
this attitude
of supplication?
And is habit therefore
merely another name
for desperation?

Votives line
the metal box, six-
tiered, in the center of which
lies a locked drawer with a slit.
Lit up, their amber flickering
is restless and beautiful.

How faithfully
people come to write
on little slips of paper
their intentions, leave
confessions they cannot entrust
to a human ear: pleas/e.

It is the nuns that collect
the prayers of the faithful,
change the flowers
in the vases, the altar
linens; scrape the hardened
tallow from the metal plates.

As a child I watched them
from the cool of a church pew:
filing out in pairs, kneeling
in the nave then smoothing
the skirts of their habits
down on each side

before prostration.
The name of their convent
stated the vow they’d taken:
perpetual adoration.
They sing hymns, but speak
little. On one side of the chapel

is a door with a window grate.
Deliver a letter, deliver a tray
of eggs so they can pray
for fair weather. You might see
the slender tips of fingers
briefly loosed from a sleeve.

Not a hair escapes
their cotton wimples.
Not a narrative of skin
to clue you in. Did they
dance, turn cartwheels
as children? Did they flash

their legs, wading,
in the sun? Did they have
parents, lovers, who implored
Pleas/e— do not abscond
from this world? Here
they kneel in prayer,

chaste/ning in the folds
of a quiet bell— though I
have known them too
to link their arms like rosaries
in the street, and stand before
an army of advancing tanks.

Hearsay

In the marketplace, all the mouths opened
and each tongue had a version of the story.

In the hive, the work of bees builds a complex
of gold cells: each room a miniature story.

How do you know where it begins, where it ends?
And which part is the middle of the story?

At the city gate, the woodcutter, the brigand, the samurai
and his wife— What will you believe, whose story?

Life of endless variation, life of primordial
desire masked as intention. You know the story.

I’ve tried to live my truths. Tend your own dagger,
your sphere of influence; write your own story.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Loose lips sink ships.