After the Eclipse After the eclipse the argument meant everything and nothing. The light dimmed to its ying and its yang, hospitals were still in ruins the people delirious as when they believed a dragon ate the sun. The argument was about death about what we call it when it is as close as it can be. But a merlin was so far in the sky as colors changed over the city and some of the people even looked so far into the light they went blind. Is this what we pray for in places where lights dim and go out and children still hunger for a miracle? After the eclipse the argument was like an old story or a deep wound in the country of our relatives once they were gone and what was left was an attempt to construct life out of absence. The light swells, shuts, and blazes into being again. We speak to someone who betrayed us and expects an apology and suddenly that cluster of bloody curses is unleashed. We stop believing the moon is in the sky, not in the middle of the afternoon like that not when our dragons devour what can be seen and a chill wind blows off the frigid bay! The argument was always there. The only truth. Did the brief darkness bring it into the day? We are not sorry. There is magic in absence. Still, clouds are enough like mountains and that distant merlin still soars. No one knew flight could rise so far above the fallen who wait for the passing of some orb and the rare rare fading of the sun. Yes, once we were accustomed to being the center of the universe and it still appears in our dreams.
The Ember It seems important to know how long one must hold that ember and who one must eventually pass it to. Decisions like these can make or break the web, the fabric of how we see ourselves and how we see each other. As an example: what if the ember swelled? more than planetary, a star that turns red just before it dies and swallows all its satellites, a throb of ecstatic radiation and incessant solar gales, hurricanes we may never learn the secrets to? What if we could harness that constancy? And if we could, would we even consider war in its habitual plunder of our own lasting regret and trauma given away in a plume of horrific proportions that even love cannot hope to subdue? Because, you know, we do love, we do reach out into the dust and fire of our most deeply held secrets just to reassure ourselves that we are not monsters, not yet. We have seen the eruption from the random events of our own arrival, how murderers emerge from the same womb as saints, and the ditches of the dead can just as easily be excavated out of a spirit of prayer as hate or betrayal. How long can we hold those embers, how many fathers and mothers, how many nabkas and holocausts how many wicked or at least misguided unrealizable theories of equality and the redistribution of bleak inheritances of class can we employ as ways to deliver our own load of unresolved fear and deeply ingrained loss into the hands of those we identify as deserving our calumny? It is a good question though it may be too late, we have laid the foundation for our own demise so successfully. How shall we plant that core of burning tuff and where? Into whose hands shall we grant our own reprieve, an idea of cool absence no matter how ill conceived? The cities are thirsty for the answer, our drones and missiles hungry for targets of our unsettled want. Oh pray if you must, get your own answer if you will. Somewhere forests will still burn somewhere the time is always now and great waters churn and bleach and resist our call to heal. Still, you must go on: and ahead? That trail is dark and full of possibility.
Note to my readers re: upcoming poetry on Compendium: The Kitchen Sink: A book I’ve just finished “On Earth and in Poems: the Many Lives of Al-Andalus” by Eric Calderwood motivated me to reread a little collection of poems I put together and Susan fashioned into a chapbook back in 2005. I plan to present these poems in Compendium: The Kitchen Sink in chunks, much the way I have published other collections of mine, like “Pearl’s Own Book of Birds” and “49 Love Poems” Calderwood’s work is an exhaustive study of the wide ranging impact of how the Muslim diaspora thinks about Al-Andalus, a time and a place that blossomed in what we westerners call the Medieval and was centered in the Iberian peninsula. He unpacks a complex and many-layered history of a culture that is considered by many to be extraordinarily gifted and diverse and is punctuated by the resolute perception of extreme levels of tolerance and cooperation between communities from all three of the Abrahamic religions… for hundreds of years until 1492 when the so-called “Catholic Monarchs”, Ferdinand and Isabella, drove out, tortured and killed, or forced conversion on any Jews and Muslims in what remained of Al-Andalus, what is now known as Andalusia in southern Spain. Regardless of the level of absolute accuracy of this perception of the enlightened nature of the culture of Al-Andalus (and Calderwood examines the nature, stresses, and internecine quarrels and conflicts between various factions and forces in the ongoing, nearly mythical persistence, of the ideas about Al-Andalus) one can hardly deny the advanced nature of the culture when compared to what was happening in the rest of Europe during the apex of Moorish dominance in Iberia. At any rate, Calderwood’s book inspired me to re-engage with the poems I wrote about my experience in Spain and particularly in Andalusia. Most of our travels in Spain were spent in the Albaicin district of Granada, the old Moorish quarter of the city, where we had an apartment. Granada was the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain. I think, however proud I was of the set of poems, I felt some reticence about them. Were they primarily tourist poems? Was I guilty of co-opting a culture I had no business speaking of in such intimate terms? I still wonder a bit about these things, but upon revisiting the poetry, I think, in the end, to negate one’s art out of fear of over stepping some ill-defined culturally mandated boundaries… one’s attempt to see and talk about a place and its people, however distant one’s own primary experience may seem to be… is to negate how related and intertwined the planet’s cultures are. I think the lessons of the reality and the dreamscape of Al-Andalus are primarily concerned with how we see one another and how we speak through the images and empathic experience of others’ histories and cultures. How we overlap and share our visions and beliefs about the world. Besides, I find I like the poems even more than I did back when I wrote and worked on them! So, next Sunday I will present the first poem or two from the collection and I will proceed from then on in much the same way I have presented other series of poems here. I hope you enjoy!