Ghazals 3
Yet another set!
One was germinated from the opening line of “How to Continue” by Ashbery, both because it’s a poem I dearly love and have stuck often in my head and because interpolation/intertextuality is a (personally very appealing) recurring tendency across a lot of the ghazal tradition with which I hadn’t really engaged much at all yet.
The other emerged (today) out of my editing an old sequence of poems all having to do with the beach. This one is of a part with those older ones in terms of conceits of repetition, tho it differs inasmuch as it’s about the beach in general and those others are about a specific 100 foot stretch in Michiana. If anything its relationship to its antecedents is that of reflection & interpretation, which strikes me as particularly suited to the ghazal. It is very much a form which encourages & lends itself to abstracted thinking, which I think would be obvious to any even marginally involved reader.
All to say: here’s poems.
9 verses ending “then”
First was the rain, all things were sopped then. Water got everywhere, you couldn’t mop then. But note the orchids from the porch in the morning. Gently do you see them. And the wasps atop, then. And puzzle this, how the buzz-sodden scene was: bidding us shit, or get off the pot then, as a guarded old man sang his heart out opaquely: O there once was a woman, she kept a shop then. And then later came, when antsiness sidled in. So life can just… what? It nagged. Stop then? All in a fading damp, when things seemed so sudden, an odd cruelty, too, incoming: was the soul-as-cop, then. And all became obsessed by the shape of things, and laws. You could see the boundary line to each stray cough. Then you couldn’t help but agonize how—Oh, it was fragile… Fear was an ax-handed farmer; everyone bawked, then. But at the end it was the desert which finally set in, and I was its denizen. I grew the driest crops then.
12 verses ending "on the beach”
There is not much to be said on the beach. The seagulls fly and dogs are dead on the beach. Its a wonder what happens: a litany of commas padded by corpses, brains sun-burnt red on the beach, gnarled schemata, stuffed-in otherwise violences — all these and more (lots!)—which rend, on the beach, conceptually, everything—are not much at all but awful wonder stood next to a ledge on the beach. It’s owed to conceit, not particular substance, that any particulars caught in the mesh on the beach can remain with any differentiation: it’s a terror, how the moments of the beach fluoresce on the beach. And all the hell of laws and of rhetoric to which we’ve been subjected, it could not be less upon the beach. But this is not just a detriment, how overriding the light is. It’s something to relish on the beach that there is this totally different configuration to life there—unblemished—on the beach. But there is another thing you ought to know: you cannot be squeamish on the beach. You can NOT be squeamish there; you can’t be wanting antiseptic. It’s no relief on the beach to what’s unclean. Trust me, I’ve been to beaches quite a lot: there’s only the beach on the beach.