St. Louis

We begged him to come
Not because he was desperately needed
But because his absence would have left a dangerous gap
We could not afford.

He arrived
After a lengthy debate with himself
With a quiet disposition
And a sincere disbelief in our good will.
Later,
In small gatherings in which we tried to make him feel at home,
He would often not say much
Except in shy disjointed phrases
That came out as loud bursts of disagreement.

One could have even liked
These crude, almost offensively honest, remarks
If it were not for the arrogant conviction in his voice
That he could not be other than right.

His face lit up when manuscripts and dictionaries were mentioned
It was almost as if someone else had temporarily borrowed
His face.
He loved languages
And most of all roots of verbs
Not because they could be celebrated as fertile sources of derivation
But because he could substitute
A history of their morphological behavior
For curiosity about the splintered, panoramic allusions
They must have spread in the air
When people of the past spoke them
In fact, verbs loomed so large on the horizon
That little room was left for the speakers.

In a way, the entire history was a nuisance
A disruption of the “truths” one ought to be seeking
The “truths” he knew had always existed
Tucked away in between the golden layers of classical ages
And had been known
To unrivaled masters of conceptual skills
Beyond the grasp of many a modern intellect.

Now, he stood shoulder to shoulder with these masters everyday
And unearthed such truths from the disappearing depths of rarely
Understood texts
Celebrating, in the process, the self-inflicted loneliness that
Despite its chronic pain
Made him shine like an old precious jewel
Set on a cheap machine-made modern ring
But a rare jewel nontheless.

The students resisted him, with all their young stubborn might
We did not press them to change their minds
When the end of his short term with us came
He did not insist on staying longer
Neither did we.

He took his quiet disposition, love for verbs,
And occasional loud disagreements…and left
Having never touched us or been touched by us.
Two passers by going in opposite directions
We found ourselves face to face for one instant
And bowed
Not out of overwhelming reverence, I suppose
But because a handshake would have been a lie.

Perhaps we were too unpredictable, too noisy, too disturbing
For him.
Perhaps we disrupted the neat conceptual arrangement of the
“truth” as he knew it.
Perhaps we were too much like history
Moving too fast for comfort
And better to be avoided.

St. Louis, Sept. 2000

Back from India
Still fragrant with spices and colorful silk
Radiating the serenity of walking in shady bazaars
She runs into me in the corridor of Busch Hall
And that brings tears to her eyes
Overwhelmed with the generosity, I put my arms around her

Back in my office – still overwhelmed-
I reach out for Rumi’s Divan
And start with a short ghazal
Which opens like a gentle discrete song
And there upon, in his shocking habit of teasing and tricking
Expands quickly beyond the page
Until it spreads beneath my feet
Like an exquisite red carpet
Leading from the second floor of Busch Hall
To some remote, inviting, intimidating Mountain top.

“What a place to be ecstatic in!” I think to myself
I think, half amused, as I close the door of my office,
And get distracted with the curious light that filters through the shades
The pulsating unknown!
And the joy!
That spreads like a wave of heat
Or an explosion of light
From the core of my body to the smallest object in the room
And my heartbeat in the background
Like a magnificent daf played by a master drummer
Interrupting the flow of silence
With neatly carved pieces of geometric sound

Holding tight to my chair
In the left corner of my office – with my back to the computer
And still worried about the class I am to teach in half an hour
I know exactly what happened 760 years ago
When someone I know well whirled for the first time.

St. Louis, August 31, 2000

The air cushions we intend to use as parachute
Have a way of turning into slippery soap bubbles
Appearing to fly until one reaches out to touch
No bubble! No hope to flay! No room for speculation!

The highly empirical experience of falling off the edge of the bed
Does not amount to much either
No rude awakenings of any kind
Just a general disappointment with life
A vague difficulty with rising above oneself!
And almost always…back to business as usual

So easy to stay tired, dissatisfied, and overworked
To never have the time to look
At the cruelty of the lie you have not told
But have not disclosed either
The lie that has now spread itself to every corner of your life
Like a drop of black ink
In a bowl of clean water – pale, pervasive, permanent
And smoothly spread

So much easier to chase a family of enchanting ducks
In their noisy tour of the lakeside
Than to preside over
The quarrel in a family of hungry squirrels
Involving a single acorn
So much easier to play in the safety of a sandbox

Why in all of elementary, intermediate and higher education
We don’t ever teach our children
That life is no one’s fault?
It just happens to happen on the edge of nothingness
As we tiptoe around pointed rocks
To avoid falling into the seemingly deep valley
And unless we pick the contradictions
That camouflage as smooth surfaces one by one
Hold them in the palm of our hands
And endure the pain of their impossibility
Our horizons will never stretch beyond the sandbox

May be someone ought to offer a course
On the ins and outs of falling

St. Louis, August 23, 2000

It is a summer night alive with magic,
Watchful magnificent trees are standing upright.
The cricket’s chores sing from a distant bush,
In the dreamy dark patched with a yellow light.

A sense of wellbeing is spread in the air,
And a mysterious light that grows with growing dark.
A rich green drips from the tip of all branches,
Dissolving instantly in the warm flowing dark.

I sit on the porch sipping my cup of hot tea,
Flavored with orange blossoms from a garden in Shiraz.
The world touches my fingertips curled around the cup,
As I remember a tune played on the Turkish saz.

I remember Mother’s presence loving and forbidding at once,
Like her thorny rosebush that perfumed the morning air.
Her mints and basils green, playful, and fragrant,
Bathing in her attention as she stood there.

Old bazaars, starry skies, and cypress trees follow,
But, poetry flows in my plain, unexotic space.
Sitting on the porch I sip my cup of hot tea,
The summer magic pouring madly on my face.

The cricket’s chores sing at the top of their voice,
Lesser-known singers join in for a tune or two.
Watchful magnificent trees nod and listen,
As most creatures in the flowing dreamy dark do.

May 31, 2000
St. Louis

Unabridged Lexicons

Darkness descending,
And a silence… not pregnant with words
I look around in panic
“Where did I leave them?

– Where did I leave my words?”
“Did I drop them on the way out
“Or did the custom officer not allow them in?”
“Or did I forget to pack them altogether
“In the frantic frog leap from one life to another!?”

**

But then, I did everything right
I faced with composure
The onslaught of the native gaze
Rapped in a long correctly worded phrase!
And threw back a piece of my analytical mind
“Not a big deal” look on my face.

Running breathless to catch up with proverbs
Never cringing at the rawness of idiomatic speech
Occasionally hiding behind a foreign expression
Gasping for air!
Aware of my full surrender
To the unforgiving laws of syntax!
I never confessed to anyone
That even in a world that loves building forbidding walls
Unabridged lexicons are scary things!

**

Why did it take me twenty years to see
That you had my missing words?
That I had never lost them!

May 4, 2000, St. Louis