A poem that happened this morning after a rather restless night. The ghazal is originally an Arabic form that also has had some notable English language practicioners—my favorites are Adrienne Rich’s Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib & her Blue Ghazals. Other English language poets who’ve used the form include Maxine Kumin, W.S. Merwin & Thomas Hardy.
Ghazal 4/24
the willow’s limbs fidget in an April breeze from the west
& the sun is nonetheless blind white in implacable blue
so I have to ask why the dead & the lost come to visit
as I wander the night away in an old house up a staircase
a maple bannister a light in a cut glass fixture a cold white
light—the bedsheets creased & wrinkled into alphabets &
so I have to ask why we have travelled so far from the white white
magnolia blooms of another April & the granite statue of Christ loom-
ing at Swannanoa lugubrious & floating on another wind rattling
with laughter “like dice shook” I said—the breeze agitating the willow
voicelessly—in a supermarket parking lot far over the hills & the
rolling gnarl of bitterbrush & the rudbeckia’s buttery eruption—
we were going our separate ways & there was eye contact
unsettling across the blue cigarette smoke years the curtains carried
across a street to a house as dark as spruce trees en-
circling a Vermont backyard in an August green
dusk—the lost & the dead come turning their faces into the
breeze—the sharp white ripples across the wind-stirred pond
John Hayes
© 2009