Monday’s Poems: Two by Kazim Ali

from The River Cloud Sutra

Launch

Unmake yourself year by year

your urge

surges in your ear

no purpose at all but dispersal

lost in the labyrinth

desperate to wring yourself

dry of lust

wanting exhalation

to mean disappearance

in the space between lightning and

thunder

fling yourself skyward, son-storm

a hagiography of feathers

glued to your sin-singed skin

arrowing sunward

like a son on fire singing the whole way

I’m leaving you behind a ghost of a prayer

leaving you behind the shining thread—

*

dogwood hour—malachite

to Jonji and Suzanne

we met at last in a lifetime after the dry season charmed us

drawn along filaments of fire while you roar the river cloud sutra

the self disguises itself as what hovers up

over the water eternally

a body is a coalition of matter, a body that falls

in the lull between generations, mere moment, lit from the inside

hide me from myself in the prehistoric valley

glaciers themselves forming from clouds

hollow the ear a beast in its lathe dark urge

to bind in afterlife the temporal word

listen when the white-leafed arms fold up in prayer I left

father will the sun always unwing me

how else will I

copyright © by Kazim Ali. Printed by permission of the author.

Kazim Ali’s most recent books are Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities (Wesleyan) and Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art, and the Architecture of Silence (Michigan). He is assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College and a founding editor of Nightboat Books.

Arts & Academe poetry editor Lisa Russ Spaar notes: Kazim Ali’s already impressive body of work – two books of poems, a novel, a short-story collection, a cross-genre autobiography, and a gathering of interviews, reviews, and essays – concerns the circumference of self and other, word and world. Crossing and concocting genres with agility and passion, Ali creates a complex, spiritually hybridized geography in which the self, wrapt by god-hunger and desire, transgresses various emotional, mythic, and interpersonal borderlines and check-points. Jorie Graham writes, “The world is there, but the border between the self and the world is, as I see it, a differently fluid juncture according to each person’s occasion.” For Ali, the occasion –the tensility between the embodied and the aspiring, the pilgrim/son and the ultimately unknowable parent/Beyond – is borne out in vital acts of imagination and language that is ever on the verge of prayer.

These paired, quietly urgent poems – pages from a kind of iconoclastic breviary – offer Ali’s flood subjects in provocative diptych. The word “sutra” derives from the Sanskrit sūtra, thread, and is akin to the Latin suere, to sew, to suture. In both Buddhism and Hinduism, a sutra is an embodiment in language of canonical and/or literary scripture or teaching, often mnemonic, aphoristic, and lapidary in intensity. Ali is not the first contemporary poet to borrow formally from this tradition – Brenda Hillman, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder, among others, have appealed to the sutra as a lens or structure for poetic material.

“Launch,” which deals itself out in condensed, thread-like, spaced apart phrases, opens in the imperative. A you – who appears to be deliberately courting his or her own unmaking in a diaspora of the self, a “disappearance / in the space between lightning and // thunder,” but who is stalled, “lost in the labyrinth / desperate to wring yourself // dry of lust” – is admonished by the speaker to “fling yourself skyward, son-storm // a hagiography of feathers / glued to your sin-singed skin.” Mixed in with Zen notions of nirvana and desire for the extinction of the discreet self in a blaze of beatitude, then, are clear allusions to the well known plight of Icarus. Filial anxieties beset the text and, visually and acoustically, the poem is a maze of stops and starts, blind alleys, false beginnings, hesitancies, surges, and a visceral, mounting sense of impending action, the “launch” of the self out of stasis and into ecstasy. Stitching through the lines, a word like urge becomes surge – then purpose – then dispersal. Son-storm metamorphoses into sunward, then son on fire; sin-singed transforms into singing. Part charm, part pre-game pep talk, part incantatory admonishment, the poem’s intensifying energies propel the you from maze to amazement, and the last italicized lines of the poem, notably, belong not to the speaker but to the launched addressee,

arrowing sunward

like a son on fire singing the whole way

I’m leaving you behind a ghost of a prayer

leaving you behind the shining thread – .

The “shining thread” of “Launch” leads to a companion poem, “dogwood hour – malachite,” in which, “drawn along filaments of fire,” the you (who in this poem becomes more obviously both the I, and even the we) “[roars] the river cloud sutra / [as] the self disguises itself as what hovers up / over the water eternally.” Launched into the ether between heaven and earth, the hour of tree blossom, of cloud and water, can the you (both other and self) know itself as both “lit from the inside” and at the same time hidden from itself “in the prehistoric valley / glaciers themselves forming from clouds”? Is there, finally, any way to “bind in afterlife the temporal word” – the prayer left behind – and to reconcile the life in a body (“a beast in its lathe dark urge”) with the soul’s desire for transcendence? Again, the poem’s last lines, a query, seem to come from inside the you, the son – “father will the sun always unwing me / how else will I” – and the abrupt falling off of the last phrase enacts what is at stake in these poems. Will I . . . what? Here the reader is compelled to fall into, to re-enter, to take up again the thread of the world of “Launch,” where we see that it is perhaps the cycle of lostness, yearning, curiosity, and epiphanic thrall that is in itself both the spiritual/artistic practice and the lesson.