Zaparan

Poetry’s only terminology.
It’s not a thing. It lacks sharp boundaries.
It’s a word that translates imperfectly,

As words will. It’s not even exactly
What’s lost in translation, just a mismatch
To terms like it in other languages,

As it should be. No word can tolerate
Another with the same identity
Long. When a word meets its doppelgänger,

In its home language or any other,
It starts to mutate immediately,
Acquiring, shedding configurations

Of meaning. The most referential nouns
Shimmer with slightly different featherings—
Although you could say they all mean saffron,

What saffron is to an English pop song
Is not quite za’farān to Arabic,
Which wears a nimbus of connotations

Not quite like zaparan’s Persian halo,
Shining with gold string. And even within
Languages, within experiences,

Uniquely constellated memories
Shapeshifting in individual skulls,
Meanings can never align exactly.

Oh, what are we, what are we, these meanings
Words acquire and release,each entourage
Of conventional associations,

Useful links, and personal imagery?
We want to fling our chains at you to see—
Crimson threads, spice, crocus corms, poetry.

General Guilt’s March

Is it everybody, you ask us,
You ask each other, or is it just

Them? Red may bleed through all the laundry,
But it spread from particular stains.

The people who get the worst rarely
Get to give back as good as they get.

Innocence lies in the imbalance
Formed from the murdered and murderers,

Robbed and robbers, enslaved and slavers,
Raped and rapists—doesn’t have to be

Found in purity of the victim
Against malevolence of the crime.

Sum over enough random humans
And come up with some of everything,

Including occasional cases
Where the vengeance was the vilest part,

But it’s not a smooth distribution.
The darkness starts spreading from the gouge.

The capacity’s in everyone.
Only actual someones were harmed.

Although We Fade, We’re Never Vague

Of poems themselves in their own

Insidious precision,

Displayed as the arranged bones

Of agreements about terms,

What they suggest, what they mean,

How they can be connected

To distilled experience,

The snowmelt, rain, creeks, flash floods

Filling lakes of memories,

The landscapes of lavender

And rolling saffron meadows

Spread near those glacial green waves

From which the ghosts rose as fogs

And left as clouds for other

Lands, to gather in other,

Similar lakes, what is there

To say that has not been said?

It is written. It has been,

Over and over again.

But the bones can’t stop moving,

Dissolved in peat, turned to stone,

Feeding lives that wait for them

At the bottom of the lake

Insidious precisions.

In the Cruelty of Humans and the Forgetfulness of Dreams

In the cruelty of humans
And the forgetfulness of dreams,
In the mysteries of zero
And whole impossibility,

In the absurd acrobatics
Of the art of infinities,
In the all-connecting weakness
That smoothly bends to gravity,

Reason finds itself alien,
An alien both resident
And native child of this country,
With no notion why it should feel

Orthogonal to its own world.
Under a mulberry at night,
Between summer and early fall,
Wind tossing silhouetted leaves,

A delivery truck grunting
At the end of its supply chain
Somewhere out in the parking lots,
This courtyard dark enough for stars

Despite the local, conjured lights,
Dusty ribbon and meteors
Between the outlines of the cliffs,
Consider that eternity

Was once believed a property
Of mountains like these, of seasons
Like this, of nightly rotation,
Of those eternally fixed stars

You now measure candling, birthing,
Burning, collapsing, and dying,
A supernova of knowing.
Could it be? Could it be someday

You will make a discovery,
With our help, of course, with numbers,
All our technologies of signs,
That even your core eternals

Are not? If gravity could be
Changing, bending at different rates,
If, in cosmic history,
There’s evidence the rules aren’t rules,

That there are ways to understand
How to divide all sorts of things
By nothing after all, if all
Postulates, like epicycles,

Elegant as they were, proved soft,
And all spheres of laws elastic,
It might soothe the rage of humans.
You might no longer need bad dreams.