Kaveh Akbar

Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler

 

visiting a past self. Being anywhere makes me thirsty.

When I wake, I ask God to slide into my head quickly before I do.

As a boy, I spit a peach pit onto my father’s prayer rug and immediately

 

it turned into a locust. Its charge: devour the vast fields of my ignorance.

The Prophet Muhammad described a full stomach as containing

one-third food, one-third liquid, and one-third air.

 

For years, I kept a two-fists-long beard and opened my mouth only to push air out.

One day I stopped in a lobby for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres

and ever since, the life of this world has seemed still. Every night,

 

the moon unpeels itself without affection. It’s exhausting, remaining

humble amidst the vicissitudes of fortune. It’s difficult

to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having.

Philip B. Williams

Of Contour, of Cadence

 

Resist, don’t: the difference between what one thinks

the magnolias say—branches applauding

some animal act below—and what

they actually say…nothing

 

between us can

we prepare for, only postpone. I’ve learned

 

to plead and to please, another difference.

 

~

 

Turn your face that way where light no more

transfigures you than darkness makes a need for

transfiguration. Yes, the scar above your eye.

 

Blood had dropped from the wound, a curtain.

 

But I believe we are, inside, all blue, you said.

Listen, neither we nor blue make sky.

The earth spins and we, utterly, are spun.

   

Fady Joudah

Carousel

 

All you have been and all 

you have experienced has happened to me.

I travel from my future to our past to lose 

my origins. What’s the beginning?

Where? There was a loophole, and I was the camel 

that went through. One hump or two?

The answers to my questions are beyond me 

but I only ask questions with answers I can believe.

I have seen the world without you in it 

and it’s not what you think.

In the future you will see 

that it was me who gave you the order to ruin my past.

In my past you will seem wicked.

I will not accept your innocence.

Dan Chiasson

from Poetry Society of America Statement

I won't bore you with my theories about why poets my age tend not to like Robert Lowell. I'll just say a few things about why I find his late, little-known poem "Suburban Surf" to be sublime, almost bottomlessly inspiring, inexhaustible as a source for the idiom I need, the key I need, when I intend to write. I know no poem of comparable linguistic constriction that nevertheless reaches for and attains such breadths of lyric beauty. In its alternating civility and fear it seems equal parts compass and wilderness. The intelligence governing this poem is so severe as to find speech itself somehow miscarrying, misleading. Sentences begin and trail off; insights are sketched and abandoned. The poem is about a couple in bed, but its sense of genre is so canny and natural that to call it an aubade feels foolish. Lowell knows the value of grammatical and lexical waywardness: he describes the cars outside his window as "always very loud enough to hear" and that misplaced "very," for me, is worth ten thousand words placed properly. The penultimate stanza implies myth, history, philosophy, ethics, and several other discourses it feels no need to include explicitly. It is more interesting to me than entire careers of more obviously or programmatically "post-modern" poets, because of its authentic traffic in these discourses. Here it is: "In noonday light,/ the cars are tin, stereotype and bright,/ a farce/ of their former selves at night--/ invisible as exhaust,/ personal as animals." My own poems resemble Lowell not at all; our temperaments differ, our experiences differ, and his project is so thoroughly realized that imitation feels seriously dangerous. But if I am able to write something even half so beautiful, so wised-up about the world, so simultaneously severe and delicate in its relation to language and person, I will die a happy man.

Elizabeth Willis

Rosicrucian Machinery

 

Scudding past fancy lights, I’m writing toward your face. If pages enter, they do it with my blessing. There’s no limit to the boy car, its floating night. Noise is noise. Such a you, buying dynamite, rustling in gauze. Don’t speak till sound has eclipsed its idea, your thoughts are on the phone. Sure I’d like a lake, but do we need all ten thousand? The mind can fit just one, well placed among its cabins. How big is our room if we can’t see its edges? Steer that boat toward me like you hope to arrive.

 

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.