The Far Mosque

 

THE FAR MOSQUE

Also by kazim Ali

Quinn's Passage: A Novel

© 2016 by Kazim Ali

All rights reserved

Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc.,

an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington.

Alice James Books

114 Prescott Street

Farmington, ME 04938

www.alicejamesbooks.org

eISBN: 978-1-938584-84-8

Cover: Detail of “Mosque” by Kazim Ali

Interior: Geometric Pattern by Marco Wilkinson

N
OTE TO THE
R
EADER

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CONTENTS

• Cover
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright
  
• Note to the Reader
  
• Acknowledgments
  

1.     
   1
   

1. Gallery
   
2. Renunciation
   
3. The Agnes Martin Room
   
4. The River Cloud
   
5. Prayer
   
6. One Evening
   
7. Night
   
8. Source
   
9. Speech
   
10. Agnes Martin
    
11. Travel
    

1.     
   2
   

1. Night Boat
   
2. Train Ride
   
3. The Studio
   
4. The Cemetery at Montparnasse
   
5. Rouen
   
6. Departure
   
7. The Year of Summer
   
8. Journey
   

1.     
   3
   

1. Rain
   
2. The City
   
3. Event
   
4. The River's Address
   
5. Precipice
   
6. After I Said It
   
7. Ghost Boat
   
8. Thicket
   
9. Hunger
   
10. The Return of Music
    

1.     
   4
   

1. Dear Rumi
   
2. Said: In the Rain
   
3. Maya
   or
   Mayaar
   
4. Rhyme
   
5. Sleep Bowl
   
6. Glacier
   
7. The Book
   
8. The New World
   
9. Danger
   
10. Well
    
11. July
    

• Notes
  
• About the Publisher
  

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the editors of the journals and periodicals
Americn Poet, Beacon Dispatch, Catamaran, Colorado Review, Five Fingers Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Rattapallax, Second Avenue Poetry, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Washington Square and Xcp (Cross-Cultural Poetics),
and the anthologies
Risen From the East and Writing the Lines of Our Hands
, where many of these poems appeared in earlier versions.

Thank you to Jennifer Chapis, Hyder Aga, Jean Valentine, Sean Safford, Kavitha Rao and Jeff Golden. To my teachers and fellow students in the NYU Creative Writing Program. To Kathy Graber who assembled the earliest version of this book from a folder of loose poems. To Agha Shahid Ali. And deeply, to Zehra Begum, to the entire extended Ali/Saeed family and to Marco Wilkinson.

   
1

Gallery

You came to the desert, illiterate, spirit-ridden,

intending to starve

The sun hand of the violin carving through space

the endless landscape

Acres of ochre, the dust-blue sky,

or the strange young man beside you

peering into “The Man Who Taught William Blake

Painting in His Dreams”

You're thinking:
I am ready to be touched now, ready to be found

He's thinking:
How lost, how endless I feel this afternoon

When will you know:

all night: sounds

Violet's brief engines

The violin's empty stomach resonates

Music a scar unraveling in four strings

An army of hungry notes shiver down

You came to the desert intending to starve       so starve

Renunciation

The books were all torn apart, sliced along the spines

Light filled all the openings that she in her silence renounced

Still: her handwriting on the papers remembered us to her

The careful matching of the papers' edges was a road back

One night Muhummad was borne aloft by a winged horse

Taken from the Near Mosque to the Far Mosque

Each book likens itself to lichen,

stitching softly to tree trunks, to rocks

what was given into the Prophet's ears that night:

A changing of directions—now all the scattered tribes must pray:

Wonder well foundry, well sunborn, sundered and sound here

Well you be found here, foundered and found

The Agnes Martin Room

What is a question to someone who practices years of silence?

Stones skim the water's surface, shimmer there, lost.

In the window sound of last year.

Swim dimmer there.

After four days without speaking, I don't ask questions anymore.

Given a line, draw through space.

Reach to reason to region.     To seem or sum

Sun or stone.

Could weep here.

Sleep here.

In the sweep of watery gray.

On white, the wishes, the whispered accounts,

a little autobiography, littered on the surface.

Where we listen. Were we here.

Unaccountable dark matter of the universe,

an utterly supportless planet. Ocean of space.

All the same river to read. All shapes or landscape.

The scapegoat silent, following the road of devotion.

Going down without air.

Sounds like the rope against the side of the boat, a hollow bell.

Get subtler and subtler in the acres of water until

one refuses to return.

Spirit send the question sound.

Painting is the quicksand back.

Two tracks over the seeming field of white.

All the eventual answers are nothing.

Painting is asking you.

No time is passing.

The River Cloud

On paper, on the sky, on the river's mad meniscus

I've drawn a blank

Remaindered against the banks, pressed there by the current

The river dispersing into the light gray

Cloud me down by the river edged with willow

The smoke of the river cloud canticles

A thought river between shores leads out and out

River draw all this through me

What's hidden beneath the hull of the boat

Or in the cloud of the river

Future river feeding

The charts are no good

The far shore disappears

Give it to me now to live

In the river's unmaking epoch

Locking itself into the oars

Onto the boat my cloud

Boat my body

Body my oar

Oar and fog

Fog oar rowing

Cloud oar rowing

Prayer

Four green threads interrogate the wind.

Pilgrims tie them to the iron fence around the saint's tomb.

Each thread is a prayer. Each prayer is a chance to weave.

I do not want to return home without that which I came for.

The poet was here—but he's gone now—

you've missed him.

The river turns three times on the journey home.

I have to tie the thread around my own wrist bone.

One Evening

The half-light of the moon is silent.

Every tree's branches are silent.

The morning songs of the bright birds do not linger.

The hillside, swathed in green, sleeps.

Even the river slows. The church bells do not echo.

Silence stretches low over the valley.

My heart, you too should try silence.

Invite this sadness in to sleep.

Night

Up against the window, the fading sun.

In rags, Orion's notes appear against your skin.

Sparsely thrown across your chest.

Swathed in the folds of blankets.

Now you are luminous.

The bow no longer exists.

The star chart I traced into the palm of my hand.

Has smoke written all through it.

Are you terrified of absolute silence?

I drive miles into the country just to have a look at you.

You are no plagiarist of dusk.

Nothing in the sky equals itself.

All the stars have changed positions.

All the fortunes have been faked.

Charted against a lover who hasn't existed for a million years.

Source

In the brain, a silver window

Where the sky evaporates—

Then condenses to an enveloped name

Sealed with an unsigned letter.

Dickinson's house: a breeze coming from the inside

Sounds bury themselves deep in the woodwork.

When a Scholar pauses by a closed door

She may not be listening to the music, but to the door

What lingers in the letter, loosening or found

Sky-name—wood-wind—syllable—sound

Speeck

How struck I was by that face, years ago, in the church mural:

Eve, being led by Christ through the broken gates of Hell.

She's been nominated for the position of Featured Saint

on the Icon of Belief, up against the dark horse candidate—

me: fever-ridden and delirious, a child in Vellore, unfolding

the packet around my neck that I was ordered not to open.

Inside, a folk cure, painted delicately in saffron.

Letters that I could not read.

Why I feel qualified for the position

based on letters I could not read amounts to this:

Neither you nor I can pronounce the difference

between the broken gates and the forbidden letters.

So what reason do we need to believe in icons or saints?

How might we otherwise remember—

without an image to fasten in that lonely place—

the rock on which a Prophet flung himself into fever?

Without icon or church, spell “gates of Hell.”

Spell “those years ago unfolding.”

Recite to me please all the letters you are not able to read.

Spell “fling yourself skyward.”

Spell “fever,”