Ravi Shankar

 

Ghazal Deconstructed

Ravi Shankar

Exile

There's nowhere else I'd rather not be than here, 
But here I am nonetheless, dispossessed,  
Though not quite, because I never owned 
What's been taken from me, never have belonged 
In and to a place, a people, a common history.  
Even as a child when I was slurred in school - 
Towel head, dot boy, camel jockey - 
None of the abuse was precise: only Sikhs 
Wear turbans, widows and young girls bindus, 
Not one species of camel is indigenous to India . . . 
If, as Simone Weil writes, to be rooted 
Is the most important and least recognized need 
Of the human soul, behold: I am an epiphyte. 
I conjure sustenance from thin air and the smell 
Of both camphor and meatloaf equally repel me. 
I've worn a lungi pulled between my legs, 
Done designer drugs while subwoofers throbbed, 
Sipped masala chai steaming from a tin cup, 
Driven a Dodge across the Verrazano in rush hour, 
And always to some degree felt extraneous, 
Like a meteorite happened upon bingo night. 
This alien feeling, honed in aloneness to an edge, 
Uses me to carve an appropriate mask each morning. 
I'm still unsure what effect it has on my 

Ravi Shankar

 

Spangling the Sea

Ruffle and tuck, river fabric wags doggedly towards ocean,
Heaping surface on surface, its cadence a gown.

Perpetually beneath lurks stillness, a calm inseam sewn
By handless needles, distinct from yet part of the sequined

Design that glints iridescent now, then dark as pine.
Between silt and waver live many denizens of the deep:

Zigzagging shiners, freshwater drums, tessellated darters,
Grass carp, a kaleidoscopic plenitude that yaws and rolls

Among root wads and bubble curtains drawn on riparian
Terraces, hinged vertebrae whipping back and forth

In an elastic continuum displacing the fluid milieu,
Enabling them, polarized or not, to scull along in schools.

Nothing in outer space so bizarre as episodes underwater:
The gilled emerge from bouts of massive oviparity

Staged upon plankton columns where some fry turn larval
While the majority never leave the sure rot of egg sleep.

Whether due to snowmelt in mountainous headwater tracts
Or to rainfall from cumulonimbus fancy, for whatever reason

Water appears from serpentine soil and prairie-scrub mosaic,
A small muddy trickle that gains momentum as it swells

And deepens, sweeping along twigs, carcasses, bald tires,
To empty at length into estuaries engulfed by tides

Perpetually born of a body dressed in hastening garb,
Upholstering two-thirds more surface than any ground.

Ravi Shankar

  With visual artist Betye Saar, MacDowell Colony, August 2014

Contraction

Honest self-scrutiny too easily mutinies,

    mutates into false memories

Which find language a receptive host,

Boosted by boastful embellishments.

Self-esteem is raised on wobbly beams,

    seeming seen as stuff enough

To fund the hedge of personality,

Though personally, I cannot forget

Whom I have met and somehow wronged,

    wrung for a jot of fugitive juice,

Trading some ruse for a blot or two,

Labored to braid from transparent diction

Fiction, quick fix, quixotic fixation.

    As the pulse of impulses

Drained through my veins, I tried to live

Twenty lives at once. Now one is plenty.   

 

Dan Chiasson

 

Bloom

Dan Chiasson

Mural, David Teng Olsen, 2017

Through his eyes I see in the dark.                I see through change the static.Night says to day, You do you,                then emerges bright as a peacock,its black drapery embroidery                smiley faces looking vaguely smashed.Day had a state-of-the-art screen                accentuate each pixelated daisy.You could kill the backlit spectacle                and use it as a mirror of the starsor take the comfort on its merits.                Tomorrow will be worse, it cooed.Dave put a feeding tube up where                the sun don't shine, the moongoing, Did you have to? Did you?                then smiling to show it didn't mind.Louis had the breakthrough moment                on what looked to be a pizza slice:It's the cover of your book, he said—                Dad, it's the cover of your pizza book—

Anthony Madrid

from Stepping Crow

Stepping crow. Moon at half mast.

Dawn horse, horse, blanket and mule.

The fool knows something you don’t.

Stepping crow. Both feet in the boat.
Books stacked up, and nowhere to store ‘em.
Decorum is spontaneous order.

Stepping crow. Gone north of the Border.
Magic in motion and magic at rest.
Only divest, no need to announce it.

Stepping crow. Locked in from the outset.
Feet in the boat and we’re already rowing.
I don’t like thinking, I like already knowing.

Anthony Madrid

 

I Shall Sit Atop Olympus

 

 

I SHALL sit atop Olympus; I shall juggle dying worlds.

 

I shall trifle with Great Hatreds and toy with Young Love.

 

 

 

So, let the girl from Rose Apple Tree Island bring her famous box of paints.

 

Let her set to work with her single-haired paintbrush on the living face of the Queen.

 

 

 

Not for nothing do we maintain this race of bird-eating royal spiders.

 

Each precious abdominal hair follicle has its place in the Cosmetic Scheme.

 

 

 

Behold our palace foreman, wise in the ways of pleasure. He has a belt with a

 

Wheel of revolving dildos, like the lens turret on a microscope.

 

 

 

And when our scientific equipment fails us, we punish it with a hammer!

 

In the case of our most advanced equipment, we have to use a jeweler’s hammer.

 

 

 

In my culture, we know the outsiders by the fact they can’t answer our riddles.

 

“Father’s in the room; his beard is outside” is a ready-to-hand example . . .

 

 

 

But to sharpen his carpenter’s pencil, Madrid al -Katib has no need of a knife.

 

He just sticks it in his mouth and sucks. One suck and it’s sharp as a needle.

Anthony Madrid

It Is with Words as It Is with People

It is with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare.

We call things beautiful, not as such, but because of what they mean.

 

Because we commonly attribute beauty to whatever does us a favor,

We are reduced to puzzled despair whenever actual beauty says no.

 

Indeed, our calling a thing beautiful almost means it is not.

For how can we know it is beautiful until it betrays us?

 

A sage once said “The trouble with these great philosophers

Is their only way of doing honor to an idea is to say the idea is true.”

 

It is the same with words as it is with people: Actual beauty is rare.

Humiliated, we are no longer willing to call the beautiful beautiful . . . 

 

Madrid is reading his poetry to a roomful of unearthed cultural relics.

He compares the white hair on their heads | to the flag that signals surrender.

Anthony Madrid

from Statement. Poetry Society of America

APHORISM: Poets all write what they want, but they don't all write what they want to read.

Now, what would happen if we started teaching people to write what they actually want to read? That's easy. We'd all be ankle-deep in a bog of inert and unoriginal gunk—which is to say: things would be mainly like they are now, the key difference being that the level of pretense would be lower. And would that really be any better?

Yes. Because, the way we do things now, most poets please nobody, not even themselves—whereas, if everyone were taught to write what they themselves wanted to read, then quite a few people, hidden away and operating in harmless isolation, would be getting off on poetry, every day.

In a few exceptional cases—ones similar to my own—a poet would generate masses of immature and irresponsible lyrics, honestly seeking to please nobody but herself, and every last one of those lyrics would be truly delightful to its maker and useless to everyone else except for a few perverts, and the lyrics would find their way to those perverts, and some measure of inoffensive success might be achieved.

At any rate, this is what I intend to teach my students, next time I have any. Do the legwork, find out what you like to read. If what you really like to read is a bunch of descriptions of wieners and kwungamungas, write that. Be as deep as you are—or as shallow. Write about bees. Think hard about Dickinson, her integrity.

Anthony Madrid

 Like a Cloud above a Ravine

Like a cloud above a ravine is the hell you already know:

That sublime work of the imagination by Dante Alighieri. 

But the rain that falls from that cloud is not made up of human souls. 

It rains, and the rain funnels down into the something-other-than-human sewer.

Look how a Chinese writing brush ends in a cone of rigid horsehair. 

Loaded with ink, the cone will flex, will leave a wet trench in the rice paper.

It will leave an attractive trench, and the daylight sucked into the ink 

Will give it a reflective “shine dot” — like looking into an animal’s eye.

Which of you has looked into the looking-up eyes of a hair-trigger fox? 

A backyard fox or a campsite coyote: Daoist, unintelligible, brave  . . .

Which of you knows how not to part the pebble on the beach from its colors? 

The songbird from its social network? the fruit from its multifaceted peel?

Oh, that sugary piece of phosphorus in its form-fitted velvet casing! 

That unappreciated Egyptian sarcophagus meant | to be opened from the inside.

And each seed-bearing fruit has an atmosphere. Each has its several moons,

Has tides (subject to gravity), changing weather, lunar eclipses . . .

But should an arrow suddenly snatch the waiting pomegranate out of your hand, 

If it snatches the cap off your head, recall: its circuit has only begun . . .

For the arrow of the luckless archer returns to the middle of his or her back. 

There, between athletic shoulder blades, is a diploma tube full of arrows.

Is a diploma tube full of arrows, and so | it is time for graduation. 

The genie’s gone back to his bottle; the devils to their fallow hells.

And the Chinese writing brush, and the cloud above the ravine (wherein 

The charged particles have sorted themselves along their up-and-down axis),

And the looking-up eyes of the fox, and the sarcophagus, and the campsite

Are irreducible to a system, are each of them floating over a void.

Truly: “All hells and hierarchies are works of the imagination.” And equally: 

“It is not the part of the Daoist sage to conjure meaningless hells.”

John Ashbery

In sooth, I come here sadly, 

not trembling, not against my will, 
hoping you will set the record straight. 
You can, you know, in a minute 
if the wind is right and no felon intervenes. 

And we sit and you tell me how crazy I am. 
I shall petition the other board members 
but am afraid nothing will ever come right. 
It has been going on too long for this to happen, 
yet it was right to go, to go on as it did, 
even if there was a strangeness in the rightness 
that no one can see now. They see the night 
in its undress, plaits unplaited, brushed, 
the sound of the surf churning on distant rocks, 
can think only about how heavenly it would have been 
if it had all happened later of differently. 

Now, according to some sources, 
new golfing trends are a commodity, 
along with silence, and sweetness. 
Doucement, doucement . . . 

And when the sweetness is adjusted, 
why, we’ll know more than some do now. 
That is all I can offer you,  
my lost, my beloved one.

Nin Andrews

Poets on Poets

                                notes from AWP

—I’m pretending not to see him so I can eat my lunch.
—But who reads that shit? About as true to life as a
   velvet grape.
—I think he judges poetry with his dick. And poets, too.
—What’s the scoop on her? Is that her husband, or is he
   just hanging out in her hotel room for the duration?
—Personally I prefer not to think about his dick.
—His latest work, especially the poems about his dead father,
   begin to sound human.
—Think of it as a conductor’s baton.
—Granted, she wins all the prizes, but talk about grandiose.
—The latest inductee into the goddess cult. Like back in the
   sixties when sex and war were the metaphors for
   consciousness-raising.
—I bet they’re really confessional, and she’s a total
   pervert too.
—He knows how to network, who to climb, and when.
   Timing is everything.
—Insomnia, maybe chronic fatigue syndrome. I think it’s
   just frayed nerves.
—I always admired your work but can’t figure why it’s been
   so marginalized.
—You want my phone number?
—The illusion of the narrative appears in your work, but
   there’s really a thread of the unspoken narrative, right?
—Are you married? Do you have children?
—Never even answered my inquiries, the pompous bastard.
—That’s really sweet. Thank you.
—I think I have a blindspot when it comes to his work.
—Must be great to get away.
—I don’t know why they don’t just fire the asshole.
—Reminds me of a gilt frame with no picture inside.
—She’s eloquent enough, a nice cocktail poet.
—Did you see what he was wearing?
—She says it’s none of my business what she writes.
—Poetry is a private affair. A kind of masturbation. An
   endless self-portrait.
—So what if he is another excellent specimen of the dead
   father poets.
—Where are the dead mother poets?
—I like the way you think,
—Yet another vapid, beautiful wind-blown babe-poet for
   the cover of APR.
—Let’s go out for a beer somewhere.
—I sure wouldn’t want to live in his skin.
—A local dive would be nice.
—The way I see it, you’re better off not getting famous
   too soon.
—I never even send out my work.

Agha Shadid Ali

Did we run out of things or just a name for you?
Above us the sun doubles its acclaim for you.

Negative sun or negative shade pulled from the ground …

and the image brought in one ornate frame for you.

At my every word they cry, “Who the hell are you?”
What would you reply if they thus sent Fame to you?

What a noise the sentences make writing themselves—
Here’s every word that we used as a flame for you.

I remember your wine in my springtime of sorrow.
Now the world lies broken. Is it the same for you?

Because in this dialect the eyes are crossed or quartz,
A STATUE A RAZOR A FACT I exclaim for you?

A Ghazal for Michael Palmer

The birthplace of written language is bombed to nothing.

How neat, dear America, is this game for you?

The angel of history wears all expressions at once.
What will you do? Look, his wings are aflame for you.

On a visitor’s card words are arranged in a row—
Who was I? Who am I? I’ve brought my claim. For you.

A pity I don’t know if you’re guilty of something!
I would-without your knowing-take the blame for you.

Still for many days the rain will continue to fall …
A voice will say, “God, I’m burning in shame for You.”

Something like smoke rises from the snuffed-out distance …
Whose house did that fire find which once came for you?

God’s dropped the scales. Whose wings will cover me, Michael?
Don’t pronounce the sentence Shahid overcame for you.

Dan Beachy-Quick

The Jeweler's Solstice, His Madness

I know you, smaller than Circumference
Of Bone—smaller than Orbit—than Silver

Flask in Pocket—more delicate than Mints
On Tongue shrinking into Sweet Breath from Sour.

I know the Summer-stained streets must fill, twice—
With Milk, with Flood—of Moon—and Blight.

I know how the Forest leads its Shallow life
First, to splendor—Jade, Ruby—then Right

Of Dismissal. The Heir, I know. The Emperor
Of Laced Bone made Outlaws of Wrists, Ribs,

Liquor, Hands? Name me: Relief. A Jeweler—
Fashions Clasps to stall a season. Earring Stubs . . .

Now dark Blood pulses through the white Wrist's Gate—
Must forge—from Winter—How—its gemmed Bracelet.

Carrier Pigeon, Anonymity

Retrieve? Ask the bird's claw, bare and riven
Where the message fell, where it diminished— 

Where the note filled—a Hand, unbidden . . .
Writing that bore my own hand's mark, vanished?

Result: a wrist smiles weakly, unable to lift.
Result: a tooth grays, a lost tongue, a lisp.

"Consider the knot's weight a loosened threat,"
The Manual said. "Consider the wind, the cusp

Of breath—an objection, an unwinding, a debt."
I left your envelope unsealed. I bought

A tattered wing, a cataract, from a merchant
Of cuttle bones, and birds. Months passed. I thought

You were weakening, ill. I wrote: Why
Does this comfort me so? Signed—no name—Me.