Kazim Ali

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 an 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.”

“The Sailor cannot see the North—but knows the Needle can—” 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

refuge temple 254 Purdy Street, Buffalo, NY, childhood home of Lucille Clifton There will be another storm always on the air Or in the air or are you the air Cold unrecognizable following The inside road This vessel bears one through Snow or time to find the house Paint peeling and maybe unfamiliar but the address Is to a place that doesn’t exist anymore An empty lot Now owned by the woman Next door who leases it to a Storefront church that needs the space for parking I take a selfie with the snowbank 254 Purdy Street Sunday morning they will plow and cars will fill the place Worshippers filing next door Names of the family who lived here forgotten Sayles their name was Sayles Well there’s Miss Bowden says the neighbor Who lives over there Ninety years old Lived here her whole life If anyone’d remember she would Though if the house don’t hold against the world And the body don’t hold against the world Snow falling down What can hold The church house the neighbor next door The snow Old Miss Bowden This empty lot We empty now Everybody drive home Song done over Snow river hover House is gone Stormsent era That Miss Bowden may remember The twelve-fingered girl who lived here We tell the neighbor: her name was Lucille Playing in the street Afraid of the dark Bringing the light salon des refusés East Side, Cleveland, OH, apartment building of Julie Patton In the house of Julie Patton Bumblebees do sing pollen In the cave of ears Every thing listens Jimi, Barack, and Marilyn Buck The saints of the place In vigil of excellent beings Light poles hold typical beasts Though here they empty themselves Into me Orange spaces do make A world again for though the gods are mythic The goddesses spin Dear Julie sing Me through the long hallway The dark one sleeved in your mother’s States of mind State of mine is the one that opens my body In heat through dark and salted moments Body is a book House does quiver Unwritten the way of how to find you House is the book In the language of feathers that launch Whose heart could race Winter air winter season that rushes How we in dark are slung The dark that opens its hallways Time mastered by Shiva and Hanuman I did stand in the empty space Filled by snow Then here in the sun-flirted front room Watched by Saint Nina Simone and Saint Joan Baez and Saint 
Buffy Sainte-Marie I wonder forward in Sapphic tongue Who is remember me Who is open me with their tongue Who languages the space of a house that don’t exist Better thought sun see Julie sing sanctified Sing swung sing one and one and one and one school house Barrington, Rhode Island, right near the Bay, home of C.D. Wright 
and Forrest Gander When she gives me directions and describes it to me I expect a red-room schoolhouse Driving across the water from Providence Into the stream-laced far shore Far shore where a boat unlands To determine the shape of what isn’t There I drive past wrong streets Wrong houses places whose bells I ring Stranger in the forest and dark-skinned too Where do I belong From the bathhouse I came Where I worshiped at all manner of strange altars Does this make me more or less human Tongue makes you human And how it translates the body into language To find the door as it was described to me Frosted glass and Japanese characters lining it School saying the language of the sun No sums add up here But she calls me in And I frown to know long to know What holds the house against the world How will words survive the dissolution of the body Of the planet’s core Sore and soar it came down through the cloud cover Gray-white curtains House of a dozen languages At the cold lake the far away lake She grabbed me post-lecture where I told about how I could not translate the words of the poet until I came to her own sun-loved city She begged me to always love all manner of strangers I thought she meant the regions of the body I’d have promised her anything though years later in Rhode Island Named for an island no one can find Lover I love you forever House that disappeared Books that live in the air Island that no one knows While on Purdy Street good people park their cars in the snow Go inside and sing We don’t have nothing more than this anymore No planet no lover no words no nothing no more

You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches, and have to choose between the starving month’s nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings. The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter? If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets into the air and harvest the fog. Hunger opens you to illiteracy, thirst makes clear the starving pattern, the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses, the angel stops whispering for a moment— The secret night could already be over, you will have to listen very carefully— You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain. Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain. Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name. No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain. The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written: “Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.” The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face. The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain. I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled. If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain. I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me. The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

Know no name Why this holy day honed Hollow day haul I lost wind when wooden I can’t bear to be Unaided in hunt unhanded To haunt when strewn sound Who will be held in hand Brought sent Mooring at the shore Who’re you for For what fewer who wore Be called this wooer More who are the ones In horror to light will strew then sue for war

What represses unhomes in the sound Who has made me what is made me Is a voice just muscles and shape and Breath to phrase a song boats assemble At the mouth of the harbor mouth in Earth you who wrote an ode to silence Never wrote of what is silenced I did Seek all resounding caves let the voice Be lit all the lanterns in the new world we Need the language of stone from string To string quiver in the opening the garden So beautiful Lucifer dark sun of morning No Eden but innocence no expulsion But after • No more will I listen to other than A single note moaned not known I do not here think again what place Presents itself own moan well eye Here body as a battery of the one Moment when it is time to open Your mouth to plug in I will allow what I invented to find its color make A shape which neither water nor Sky do how do you now in this Contained shape go through Your life not like a constellation Not guessed at intuited or divined No name so how do you discern a shape for What is often called g-d • Vantablack was made for missiles Or planes for defense purposes so dark No eye could see it some voices are Like that no one could hear them it Is not good to be lost to be lost is More than metaphor for spiritual Condition I sit at the terrace overlooking The green sea perhaps it is failure That ought to be sought the voice That fails falls silent Sheila’s or The body’s the blue failed me the sun Fails every evening I we you have all Failed too everyone who strove all these Long years for peace failed • August 7 Predawn blue and blue the sound Of the sea further away and less violent lights On the water fishing boats closer than I Imagined no one is awake some animals Maybe what I do without knowing in a Harrowing world what I do without knowing As I listen to the gurgle of water against The promontory I feel like I am listening To a body how slow and opening a piece Of tune where one does not know how It will unfold no chord or cadence to tell You in sound what the path will be how It will happen until it happens I do not want To be alone what does it mean anyway when Someone says “Muslim” • Can she still feel music in her body can she Vocalize even without technology of the Mouth tongue palate glottis vocal chords What is a voice Anish Kapoor granted Exclusive right to work with blackest Black she now communicates through notes And gesture Vantablack made for Military purposes like sound also used For torture all sounds to wake you vibrate Your brain what emerges as an echo from Music as torture children on the beach Playing god is sound or art or science Shit and sex the body’s echo what mess Is left in the big or the little death • Sheila’s voice always in the background Always disappearing into the music Of what surrounds it the way one loses Oneself in sex or death or the moment Of shitting I got lost in Salman’s Music he said it was a surrender of Ego when he left me behind but really It was a surrender of my will words too Have god inside but for the prize of The body they do not compete can Not hold the storm of time cannot Hold the line do I touch the ocean Inside will my family come to My funeral • That night we swam the full moon Civilized us federated us gave us Our nationality we who were lost I have now lost what little heritage I did have returned to the rude Rough world long vowels of Morning evening birds scream No soft blanket falling to cover But a throttling a suffocation Of dusk no silence when the self Stills the absence of noise is itself Torture I cannot sleep tongued loose Drones move through a riff by A singer without papers • August 9 Eleanna takes me out on The water Miller exploding the form Of the novel itself I see now how Nin Wanted to move away from his vociferous Singing of the world as material to try To construct a music of the way The mind works still fed by light on the Water a mute noise of engines under Water as the boat passes the light House and heads out for open sea Remembering in Palestine crawling Down the hill trying to catch a wifi Signal from the settlement untapped Improvisation of space • At the stone terrace the gardener lingers Clipping hedges while I work breeze Between us soon I will return I read The article about a poet who was killed In the street his poems untranslated All the artists and writers killed the open Space of the sea yesterday Eleanna and I Went too far out went almost all the way To Marseille we saw the pink-gray sky Of wildfire I accepted the waves I found In the chapters of the Quran to sing my Way through turbulence draw a way Through the waves savage wildfire all The villages evacuated • We woke to the smell of burning air A little cool smell of charred refuse Colors muted last night the moon Came clear nearly blue eyes too Painfully large rough on the eyes and Impatient but I wanted to look so Badly for the meteors the sea Crashing against the rocks smoke From the fire obscured the sky In the morning we rowed across The harbor and realized fear of heights And fear of depth is the same just one You see and one you don’t

To CD Wright No body is fixed in position no one can be known Still I am read by satellites my tendency extrapolated In the mountains I have no GPS I don’t know where to go There are those trees their leaves flicker like little jewels a whole bucketful Darkness stares back are you even human anymore I close the curtains at night not because I think others will see in Turn left there but so I do not see the reflection that is pure dark I am not afraid of anything oh is that so Citizen bear do this place not belong to you Unseen I wander through the thorny place of what I no that ain’t it No fear can be knew can be none fuck how do you spell it I held a heavy jade pendant in my hand once not in this valley in another In the range of  limited human experience how many places are there really I don’t even have to look at the earth anymore I just have to listen Now that hillbilly whisper guides me which way to turn how far up the turn is Drawling like moonshine we’re really off the grid now Making wild prayers to the green dark which kind do you mean Thank god we thought of  her recording this voice both kinds

In the earthquake days I could not hear you over the din or it might have been the dinner bell but that’s odd because I’m usually the one cooking if not dinner then a plan to build new fault lines through the dangerous valley. I can’t give you an answer right now because I’m late for my 
resurrection, the one where I step into my angel offices and fuck the sun senseless. That eclipse last week? Because of me. You’re welcome. The postman rattles up with your counter offer and I’m off to a yoga class avoiding your call yes like the plague because son you can read in the dark and I have no hiding place left. You know me too well and you know it. We walk hand in hand down the hill into the Castro avoiding the nudist protest not because we are afraid but because we already know all about this city, its engineered 
foundations, the earthquake-proofed buildings, the sea walls. No tempest will catch us unaware while we claim our share of the province of penumbral affections. You have no reason to trust me but I swear I lie down in this metal box as it thunders and looks inside my brain. I am terrified nothing is wrong because otherwise how will I rewrite the maps unmoored a deep sea a moor a cosmonaut Who needs saving more than the one who forgot how the lazy cartographer mislabeled his birthplace as Loss? Riding the bus out to the end of the lines and back I collect trash for art, oil spill, spent forest, the mind is at work and everything is at stake. I demand statehood for my states of mind, senators for my failure, my disappointment, the slander and my brain unmapped reveals no explanation for danger the ground untamed. I make paintings of nothing and stand before them like mirrors. I recently became a man but I do not want to let go of my weakness, instead want to meet God in heaven and in long psychotropic odes have Him send me again digging in the dirt to unleash tantric animal governors to lay down the orgasmic law twice skewered and miserable in the old photographs, miserable in my body, huddled next to my mother, recently permed and aglow so unaware of what is about to hit her. I am the answer to Bhanu’s question: “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?” and so sick I considered that sickness could bring us closer and Shahid and Allen in heaven slap me silly because they want me to know that this world is worth its trembling. At the next table over a mother tries to reconcile her bickering sons. I have no brother but the one I invent has always got my back, he drowns out the mullahs so my mother can hear me finally. In a different book Jesus never suffered, never was flogged or died went whole into heaven without passion. Shall I then deny myself passport through the stark places unsalvageable, imagine it, the Mother of Sorrows did never grieve in the new season trees smell of semen and the tectonic plates make their latest explosive move: to transubstantiate my claim by unveiling this city down to its stone. Everyone I know wants to douse the hungry flames, flee the endless aftershocks, unravel every vexing question. You owe me this witness. I owe you the fire.

we didn’t really speak my summer wants to answer the architecture doesn’t matter this is not my real life when I am here I want to know why do I believe what I was taught a storm is on the way close all the windows begin at the earliest hour is there a self