AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION
IN ARABIC WITH “EMILY”
(a koan?)
Why did Ibn Al-Arabi
not try
“silver bells, coral shells, and carousels”
to query the Beloved
how a lift—meme—lamb
could equal
“the thing with feathers—
that perches in the soul—“?
Ahmad Jamal (probably)
I think of my poetics as hyperQBist and understand HyperQBism as a poetics of participatory realism engaging in improvisation as a tesseract of faith—which may imply a superposition of cacophony & apophany or from another angle an entanglement of epiphany & apophany.
Of course any poetics of superposition is a poetics of rein/reign/rain which aims to splice the eye/aye/I.
The colorpuntal is the primary hyperform I employ to achieve a superposition of forms in any given poem.
This implies hyperQBism as the poetics of the colorpuntal.
HyperQBism as a poetics of superposition can also be seen as a poet taking license to define a hypercube as a superposition of cubes. Anyway, here’s a new poem.
This is the last—and to me—one of the most important poems in my book “Ideas of Improvisation” and was also one of the final poems I wrote when finishing the manuscript. As such I wasn't totally happy with the version in the book and have kept revising it since. Here is a version that I think is much closer to my original intent. A reader may find it useful to keep in mind that the first poem in Rumi’s Masnavi is “The Song of the Reed Flute” and that the Ney flute is very important to Sufis in general and Rumi in particular. While Rumi’s masterpiece deals with various types of separation, mine has different concerns. Throughout my book the ideas of entanglement & superposition keep popping up. I was very interested in having superposition play an important part not just in the content of this poem, but also its construction. Thus when the reader encounters the lines:
“what fluted thing
could ruin love”
they are forced to make a choice-does one read this to mean ‘what fluted thing could ruin adore’ or ‘what fluted thing could degrade love’? Both meanings are grammatically superposed in the text and it is only the mind of the reader that collapses the waveform of meaning in one direction or the other. Thus the poem is at least two different poems intertwined with each other. And in case anyone is wondering, yes this poem is in conversation with the famous Rumi quote involving ruin. Enjoy!
THE RUMI IN YOU
may stir to wonder
what fluted thing
could ruin love
as much as the rasp
of eroding rain?
And as you hear rasp
you may think of rust,
another shade of ruin
related to rain.
Do you not still grasp
why Jalaluddin
was among the Last Poets
whose rustic beard
faced arrest in every nation
including rumination?
When the past Harvest moon
acquired a cover of clouds,
did you begin to love
your most purple bruise,
or did you begin
to whisker a weak chin
because your own ruined beauty
wasn’t a wearable thing?
Although you’ve seldom
whispered it, wabi-sabi—
Japanese for a reign of rust—
seems a roomy word.
When you first heard
a lilac flute
begin to flower,
did you overhear
any faith
in imagination?
Did this sprouting
prevent or incite
a diction
to the long open you
found in “bruise”
or hint why that i
so central to faith
ran quietly as a letter
left out in the rain?
And how might this frame
the eye in ruin
or the eye in union?
Assuming the answer—
could you not see it?
Perhaps outside some window
the U in Rumi mishears
a whirling tune
of windblown petals
reining in whispers
and wonders—
now sapphire as the i of a sufi—
if one seeks
to whisk a thicker roux
from a flower’s fat sorrow,
do either your beard
or your bruises
mean to masquerade
as faith or even masculinity?
Or do they merely mean
to petal a purple music
of fluted blooms
until there could
be some chance
the Rumi in you
happens to sense
what separates us
from the nay in name
or begins to learn
how some become lovers
of the sound of rain,
yet others simply lovers
of the sound of ruin?
As long as I’ve been writing poetry there are only three forms that I wanted to become competent at—haiku, sonnet, and ghazals. Ghazal is by far the older form and the one I understood least, but now I’m ready to at least attempt to sink or swim. Here goes.
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LISTENING TO RAIN
Is grief a group of islands excluded from rain
or waves of an ocean which could soon become rain?
“Ki ilhas tem catxupa, ma ka tem txeu txuba?
where Cizé makes island wide smiles if she hums rain.
At this angle of dawn & that density of dusk
yin & yang may not mean zero-sum reigns.
“If I were to cry out which angel would hear me”
— the Necessary Angels circle to drum rain.
As it plunges thru hair to kiss your shoulder blades
don’t forget to sip what one thinks of as plum rain.
If you shift your weight & pin a lover’s hands
—can sugarcane be pressed into a rum reign?
“With vice I hold the mic device, with force
I keep it away of course” we spit to overcome rein.
Can church bells seeking to carry atone—the way
one Monk sought to carry attune—even numb rain?
In this plaza we long to tissue our faces
—a bluish guitar makes a case to strum rain.
In “A Return To Our Usual Truancies”:
why does my Beloved go roadside & thumb rain?
As people come by with broken parchment for tongues
hear the raven pray to bathe in a crumb rain.
Reneg8d—how now might [88 + 53 + 15]
seem to atomically sum rain?
