Mount Fuji-Photo by Reza Pakzad

Keep doing this, and shake the proverbial salt every time on the wound, our wound, the less fortunate and the much too much given to judgment. Recite the old myth, sing the ancient lyrics, loud but with a different tongue, just so for us not to understand, but simply to repeat the accents. Hold a mirror and the candle to us to countenance ourselves in the faint flickering flame. Contradict us, deny us, time upon time, and every instant, so we confess our unsteady non-existence to our most constant being. Stare at us, from beyond the blue, from over the peak, from behind the meaning of grace, till our eyes are drunk with shame and soaked in stupor. Beat us to everything, precede us everywhere, so that when we arrive, always a little too late, we see that nothing can ever change but that you have already left. You keep doing this; we have the proclivity and passion is of our climes and to our taste. Pain is our only remedy; the itinerary of its motion mapped out into the face of our most beautiful and most innocent.

The Bridge

It was not, as I recall, a damp, drizzly November in my soul, and I was not finding myself growing grim about the mouth, that day, the day before I took the bridge to the other side. It was a lovely September afternoon, remember, that we took a long walk together, and although the dust was still not settled and the wound was still very very fresh, in the garden on the isle of Manhattoes, the scene was still a sight for the gardener, the geometer and for the surveyor alike. You, the gardener and my first geometry teacher, took me by the hand and showed me many things, showed me one of everything. You told me that once I cross the bridge, I will forget all, and then again, little by little, if I try hard and fortune is with me too, I might remember again, remember? And when we reached this, you made me stop and said, Look, look at THIS one carefully. You will see many made in the image of THIS, remakes upon remakes upon remakes, but to see THIS itself again, your own...And before you kissed my forehead good-bye and sent me off, you consoled me: Perhaps, perhaps not, but do not despair. You will belong to the generation of generators and destroyers, dynamos and dynamites, the dreamy generation of costless perpetual movement, and in that age, all images, all copies, all remakes, are almost (barring something of ZERO measure) as terrifying and as terrific as this original. And I crossed the bridge and soon enough, I forgot. And now, I do not know WHAT I remember, what is it that arrests my stupefied gaze into pre-eternity, which image it is that I now dumbfoundedly contemplate, in whose face I abashedly stare.

Cherry Blossoms and Butterflies

Cherry Blossoms and Butterflies*

...they are so alike, so akin to one another, inhabiting so intimately such the same world, so alike not just in their impossible beauty, the extreme frailty of their essence, in their primordial designation as symbols of metamorphosis, of perpetual play of being and not-being

...so alike not even in the fact of both being dead and rotten metaphors, the sure signs of bad poetry, so exceedingly familiar as to be by default, and at once, the ultimate criterion of a nativity and the sign of being suffocated or duped by it

...but so alike in the fact that by virtue of them being what they are, what they really mean, still there are, and there will be, poets who dare call these mortal (and practically dead, as was just argued) beings back to life again, put them back in a verse or two, and show--by way of shedding light on yet another dark corner of our fragile but divine existence--that so long as cherry blossoms bloom and perish and butterflies love and perish, there will be poems written featuring them; and they will be sure signs of good poetry, excellent poetry, in fact

...so alike are cherry blossoms and butterflies...and yet, so unlike each other upon closer observation...so identical...so different when you think of them...that I wonder if any poet has ever thought of putting them next to each other, not fearing prolixity... not fearing paradoxes...in one and the same verse.

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* The obligatory search in the internet yielded, as a matter of fact, a prose piece and a relatively large number of images (including tattoos and merchandise) with the exact same title as this piece here.

Book of I

I

Pushing upward in the deserted city,
Pushing Upward, chapter forty six,
Lying line number three.
Changing into: Gathering (chapter forty five):
The King steps into his temple and consults the great.
Heading south, fortune! 

II

"Truthful You, I, I, false and fearful, blind,
perplexed with Age and Absurdity?"
Gradual Progress, chapter fifty three,
Tree on the Mountain, Sun above, a River,
The conjugal procession. No lying lines.
Nothing (ever) changes; Incomprehension persists. 

III

Power at Large: all but two lies, from the toe up;
Chapter thirty four; Thunder above Heaven.
No vigor; I cast my net, entangle my horn.
Bushy barrier burned; at large?
Upright, robust, a hero with no regrets, (but) not a god?
Second six-liner, (two); Lady Earth, from North-East to South-West.

IV

Eleven, Flow, difficulty in the extreme:
Empty crossing River leaving all behind--lying and gaining honors.
Great comes, petty goes; This is his measures.
He is the ladder between Heaven and Earth,
Lying and with no shame bedding down his daughter. (sixty three),
Already Settled; and little by little, no pattern at the end. 

V

First lie: Blameless leaving quickly.
Decrease, chapter forty one; two small plates.
At the foot of Mountain Lake.
Rage subsided, desire detained; supreme success.
Increasing, greater than ten pairs of tortoises, second lie.
Wind disperses Water, King building his Temple (fifty nine).  

VI

Words not trusted, yours, I,  Alone in the valley of shadows.
Tree ascending Confined; following First Confidence.
Lake above River; there is a mandate.
Within a bronze chariot: lying ends; Shame?
Following the Last; River above Lake.
Sweet Measures exacting Articulation.   
(Farvardin 1, 1391--March 20, 2012)








 

Mulberry

Mulberry


Apples and Pomegranates, Figs and Olives;
Sycamore, Poplar, Cypress, Cedar,
What i s the difference?
I don't know; I was saved,
For the first time, from myself,
When I was seventeen,
And I am now far and away
Not a botanical expert.

But this much I know, remember:
A long time ago,
Right before I left the West of Wishiwash River for good,
In the State of Who'sthere and Who'snot,
At the crossing of a sinful alleyway, 
With a blistering Noontide of Judgment,
I found, without much effort, a mulberry tree,
Which shed its own blood everyday,
Underneath the sinners' step.
And so far as I observed,
Not once one of them stopped on his way,
Never to look up at the trunk, twigs, limbs or branches,
Nor below, at the bloodied pavement,
Let alone ever taste the tempting vintage.
And if one early morning,
One of them saw me with my bowl in my hand,
Plucking and devouring, (and gathering for my friend),
He would stare at me as though I had gone mad,
Or was from a savage land,
Wondering if I knew,
Whether or not I would be poisoned.
O what a blissful ignorance!

Here too, now,  somewhere, in an obscure corner,
On one of the fingers of this island,
There is another mulberry tree,
But she is far from me, quite inaccessible, not on my way,
And besides,
I suspect others than me have already discovered,
How a mulberry actually tastes.



 

The Outlaw

The Outlaw

God must have known, when he was creating the world and molding Adam and Eve, and establishing His Order, and instituting His Law, that there would be human beings so remarkable in the excellence of their constitutions, in the vastness of their hearts, in the height of their souls, in the strength of their characters, and in the infinity of their passion for Truth, Beauty and Goodness, that He would be, at the end of His Days, proudest for having created THEM, but who, at the same time, and for the exact same reasons mentioned above, would never accept the mastery of anyone over themselves, not even His, who would never be slave to anyone and anything, not even to Him, who would never obey laws, any law, not even His--they are the o u t l a w s, they are their own law, that is why He would be proudest of them, He might have created the world to be seen, but not by any old dirty eye, but by the eyes of such humans--, who would never accept that they themselves are not masters, are not supreme, are not God, NEVER!

And for those, to submit to another MAN's rule, to prostrate before another MAN?

Caption

Caption*

But on the other hand, "[m]an, in the ideal," writes the great H.M., the shipmate, or whatever you want to call him, call him Ishmael, in the account of his adventures in the watery regions, "is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.”
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* Caption writing is not an interesting literary genre. That is why most people first write something and then find something for which that thing could be a caption. I am no exception. The original idea of this piece was simply to let my friends re-read  that great line by the great H.M. But then things took,as usual, a life of their own. Now it was necessary to have something, a picture, a caption, to illustrate what the great H.M. actually meant. The purpose of this footnote was simply to remind the reader that while writing the main body of the text took some considerable amount of time and energy, not to mention idiotic audacity, finding something for the purpose of illustration was very easy. I randomly searched the word "beheading" in the internet and picked one of the first photos that crossed my eye. Here it is.
THAT, and also to mention that the emphasis in the first line is mine.