Polka Dots
When we met two sparks perched above Aries
winking eyes at creation and time.
We called them Maman and Baba and tied
our name in water until we became . ماهی
Before them mother whose tongue spun a world
from the warp and weft of dead alphabets
snapped us from the axis of dancing suns.
We were only a ripple tucked in infinity,
an arabesque our mother clipped.
When we tripped on her taut words
she wove new ones from the light that braided You and I.
When meaning split we stitched together Us.
Mother called the stars to an audit,
but the pair had merged and becomeماه ,
accomplice to our union as we
elided into silver crescendos
and called each other sea.
We waved back and forth at the moon
when its orbit pierced the sky,
raising us with a nameless love
we decided to call it tide.
Behind us mother whose veil looms like Cyrus
against the arc of a vast quilt
laces our body with a subtler cadence.
When we gather your idiom, mother,
our secant length will thread the equinox
from the numberless polka dots that are only
an infinite patchwork of ما.
Rostam
Lucky are those who are harvesting now,
And their hands are picking sheaves of wheat.
– Forough Farrokhzad
Give me thread and I’ll string together
the letters of the Shahnameh,
cursive signs that tie the constellations
above the Alborz Mountains.
Against the ridge that binds Damavand
a composite bird seams stone and horizon
her clarion chanting a Rostam
rising under different zeniths.
A lapidary field describes a wider heaven,
ground of our mothers’ annulment
where our sisters’ customs lie latent
beneath a volcanic loam.
The fragments of their bodies
wind around the phantom currents of our fathers’ dispersal.
Wind and ash twisting like calico dervishes
At a marriage dress rehearsal.
The ambrosian voices shift and break
the heart of a steep moraines:
a granular warp on curving tundra
I sew out of the dying present
into a common myth.
and so what if my ancients left me at the foot of a rainforest?
A phoenix has raised me among her daughters
and I have tilled the ashes into the thousand sediments that make a mountain stand.
These fields I join in fallow and in harvest
that the dust of our parents’ flight may settle,
and I hunger and seep and arm
the sere ground we fell on
so the seeds we scatter may graze the crystal ligature
above the adamant rockies.
Buddy friend
Rafi, you know him?
Brother, friend – best man in waiting;
junior accountant and fantasy buy-in:
Natural wing-man material.
A satrap cracking spines once on some break-out tribe out east,
he was born in the eighties and (mensch that he is)
gets the game night beer (please, stay in your seat),
and no matter where you live (it’s on the way)
drops you off in his Nissan (green) Qashqai.
Guys like him, married women admire his eligible MO:
Rafi saves the table for after-work wings
and favours his pallet with a local microbrew.
Threaded slacks baring the quadratic sweep of his slender
not unshapely legs and shirt cuffs (Hudson Bay or Roots) that kiss venous forewrists:
Rafi reads the Economist’s 1843 and knows
who the leader of the loyal opposition is.
If you looked close (not that you ever would),
a 5-o’clock stipple shading his scalloped beard might
(if you were that kind of person) make you look twice.
But the high arch of some schwa begs repeating,
or the way Rafi (born Rafighdoust) punctures a tense syllable (the beat listing a bit)
might extenuate generally tolerant folks’ curiosity.
He speaks in otherwise canted, generally placeless undertones:
if you thought about it much you’d ask him where he’s from.
Rafi has family in Canada and some cousins scattered abroad
and can be found cruising to a digloss of top 40
and Radio Javan.
When he gets back on some odd Tuesday (say),
he unbuttons his bespoke collar and microwaves
vegetable beef-cutlet stew from chamfered Tupperware
his mom dispatched him with on his last visit home,
and has a dream he doesn’t remember when he wakes
of thick air catching so his boy lungs might break,
and an atavistic joy of speaking a foreign tongue.
He wears canvas shalwar and a worsted maman-joon vest,
and runs and runs and runs
vaguely in the direction of the west
where his father dreamed (pointing to the waning day) of starting life again
and the sun (he would say) lived when it set.
First Generation
My country, though I wasn’t your birth-child
you still folded me in your native soil,
where I took root; and you allowed me indistinguished rest
beside the fat of your own sons,
and claimed me a space among them.
I am yours;
though another birthed me
and a far race fathered me,
yours is the name I claim myself.
In childhood you knew me,
and I passed my hand over the loam same as your sons and sisters.
In adolescence I felt the first jerk
away from your native mold, when you called me
by my old name.
A name I had forgotten, but which
screwed me to time – a country I’d never known
but which my father assured me
was mine.
I was rooted up from place,
and the infancy I had known, I understood
as only an idea planted in time,
when I was something called – an echo tripping
along the corridors of memory – “Landed.”
This is the only land I had known as mine;
what could the word mean but the births it harvested from itself;
what could one be other than landed?
I know today the consequence of speaking to my faceless cousins,
shouting expansively over the phone lest the voice stumble through space.
I was landed and they were in space –
abstractly floating until they landed.
Would we need to make a space for them in this soil, then,
when they were sown here?
And if they tumbled along the stony ground and
hadn’t properly
landed?
Would they sprout and offer fruit,
or lay
in dormant statelessness,
with no native land to call them by its name?
I would like my sons to look to me
and ask for the noble origins of their fathers,
or else
accept this land as the only one their ascendants had ever known
and never scurry about the fields of time to make sure
they had safely
Landed.
