October 06, 2008

Ghazal

                    A poem should not mean
                    But be.
                              —Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”

My life an open book, or so it seems
Yet, I can’t even read the words, the seams

Unravel—it sounds like a command
A suave magician makes to silks that seem

Inert one moment, then alive with hope;
Blue infant whose chest expands now seems

Like Lazarus. More than a ghost—a man
Who first must leave this world before he seems

To know life, to see in brittle winter
Grass, the spring, or in the rock shelf, the seam

Of ore, the nugget of gold in mines
That bit by bit becomes the load, the seam

The horse struggles under, up winding paths
The prospector rides asleep; he seems

To dream of barrooms and clean chaps, whiskey,
Smooth skin—it won’t last, but for now it seems

All is possibility, the world not
An oyster but fresh pearls. All things gleam, seem

Priceless, rare: the way you read me like
A book—the words and pages, even seams

Fascinate, and Cynthia’s the moon in
Woman’s form, with each compare more is than seems.

—Cynthia Ris

Posted by dwaber at 03:12 PM