ALLAH
He is and is not not
We see Him and we
see Him not
11/13
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INVENTIONS
The invention of the saw must have
come as a bit of a surprise
What was once a flat piece of metal
was now cutting things in two
The nail may not have been so unusual
but the screw might have raised a few
eyebrows at first until they
invented the screwdriver and everything became
plain as day
Button and buttonhole came as an uncanny
contraption keeping modesty under wraps
While the mirror was no doubt a revelation
and even now seems almost miraculous
reflecting some of the world out of all of the
world back at the beholder who holds it
and less variable than a rushing stream to look
into to fix your hair or adjust a hat just so
The wheel is still brilliant and makes
what now seems so obvious less so if you
think what it must have been like
without it
Suddenly a bit of matter that is shaped to
go on and on indefinitely even
ad infinitum if without obstruction
comes out of whatever it was first made out of
from the things at hand and
presto! A wheelbarrow a
carriage carrying Marie Antoinette and
Louie back to be beheaded
The crowd gathering to watch with
pitchforks in hand while the sharp
blade invented by Monsieur Guillotine
falls at its accelerating pace
11/12
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ETERNAL ENIGMAS
A boat pulls away from the harbor
or is it the harbor pulls away from the boat?
The air flaps around an inert flag
or is it the flag that flaps in the still air?
The murder gets itself committed right before the
man’s eyes or does the man commit it?
The earth turns or is it the turning that
comes first and the earth follows?
A twinkle in the sky might be long after
the star’s dead as we just now see its light
We love a thing or person with all our hearts
or does that love long precede its object?
Time doesn’t seem to be passing
yet my heartbeat tells me it is so
This poem seems to be getting itself written
where before it didn’t even exist
I wonder what the day will bring by Allah
or will what’s brought by Allah bring the day?
A vast tomb is silent
or is silence a vast tomb?
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DEATH CAME IN RATHER SHEEPISHLY
In memoriam Imran Saithna
Death came in rather sheepishly having just
taken someone quite young and in the
flush of life and sat down in front of me in an
overstuffed chair and took off his shoes showing
two identical feet with actually
thousands of toes and somehow between
each toe I saw Sahara sand-dunes as
if from the air and thick Amazonian
jungle with smoke-centered clearings and
people down below with happy children running naked
and every human environment in between
and death said nothing for a while to let me
get used to his presence and on
such short notice
“It’s not what you think at all really
it’s not what anyone thinks
The wise regard it as simply another door
on a straightforward trajectory while the
stupefied are terrified as if they’d be
leaving something sumptuous for something
either blank as paint or as tedious as choir practice
when it’s actually inexpressibly engaging in a
way no one experiences on this side where you’re
sitting now listening to me babble on”
He crossed his legs and I saw at his
knees sets of wing-like flutterings
that extended backwards through the material
furniture and walls into similar but
distinctly different dimensions
And the falling apart and reconstitution of his
face sometimes like a spring day in the
woods and sometimes like a wintry chill at the
arctic top of the world but in all cases
something both familiar and strange
and then he saw me seeing and for a
moment came behind my seeing so that
I saw things here through death’s eyes for a split second
the transparency of interrelated contingencies
the way things come together in a kind of trance
the really drab colors of everything on this side
and our plucking at rainbows
and how young or old is truly only relative with
some of the youngest in years being the oldest
and vice versa and he settled back and
back into the chair through dynasty after
dynasty to Egypt and beyond and I
saw how death was an essential
ingredient to our acceleration onward
and a true disentangling but only at the time
we’re called and not at any other which
only makes entanglings greater
as in suicide or its pseudo-glamorous
perhaps slower but self-destructive variants
“The young man from the car-crash” he
said looking up at me and I saw
great golden canyons open and close in his
eyes
“He was done here and is now on a serious
diplomatic mission having left only
sweet memories behind him which for a time
makes everyone he left behind want to be
more like him
so he’s on two diplomatic missions in fact
there where he can’t be seen
and here in his echoing after-effect
where he can”
1/24 (at Fajr)
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