a poem is not enough unless
the sun rises or sets within it
or the moon travels from one side
of its horizon
to the other
the page must be torn by light
or flattened in darkness
a poem should hang like a transparent
Dacca gauze that is known as woven air,
running water, evening dew.
a poem is only about poetry
when the poet is not in love.
distant mountains have turned to glass
there is a city where no news can come
a shadow runs away to find its body
until it shrivels, shrinks into almost
nothing,
so it can slip, unseen, into the bed
of an almost forgotten never-to-be lover
who rolls over in his sleep, murmuring,
" i remember nothing."
the poem-shadow slips out
and looks up at the firmament
sheened in moonlight.
autumn chill. the wind blows
rain that turns to ice.
the poem has been cold a long, long time.
i won't tell your father how you betrayed me
nor that a shadow has fallen
like an unburied casualty
on southern snow.
i won't tell him that the poem has died
~Jade
*The Dacca Gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dewa dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. 'No one
now knows,' my grandmother says,'what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.' She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from
her mother's dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.
Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys
were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.
In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,
and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,
my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.
Agha Shahid Ali
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