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For a line of years — no gasp, all tumble.
For the winds that blow — yellow leaves with red veins will tumble.
There's a way that only little girls have skinny legs.
Or flashing back — colored newsprint print on a leotard. We used to tumble.
There's a way that birds look like fish when walking home —
A place of shadows to read a book and wash the linens. A warm sweet tumble.
There's a way to predict future blisses and laugh at advertisements.
And Fumble Rumble Crumble Tumble Tumble Tumble Tumble.
There's a way pink fingers and nails grasp and dance in neither dark nor light
But against a landscape of Lowe's and cottages and hills, and upon valley towns they tumble.
There's a kernel of imagination — only Rachel being cried out — a pulse a
beating,
Louder breathing . . . alone, together, burst and tumble.
The flat world rotates too fast; you seek out the hills.
Betrothed to the mountains and replete with the hills.
Smooth ripples glide through the gnarled oak's reflection
In the pond where the old bass swims between the hills.
Uncle Bud (who loved pickin' crabs) sanded coal tracks,
Breathing in sharp bits of beach underneath the hills.
Potato salad reunions are digested
With Mamaw's dulcimer dressing sweet on the hills.
"Yerout!" the jowled ump's shout echoes off mill stacks,
A gobbler objects in the spring heat of the hills.
"Better'n sons," we sisters drove pulp in the one-ton
While Daddy grinned and worked the skid team through the hills.
Granddad, he pickled nearly all of creation:
Eggs, pig's feet, catfish, deer, onions, beets from the hills.
New sheriff! Watch all copper snakes flee the county
Taking that cucumber smell back east of the hills.
Drive through clouds of night-perfume, oh honeysuckle,
Make the stoic weak-kneed. Memories sweep the hills.
The laurels bloom for HampshireGal on Raven Ridge
Tucked in a ginseng bed, she's complete in the hills.
Thunder rumbles, breaks into her dream
as she waits for what she cannot dream.
The trick of invisibility
is a promise made within her dream.
This shadow haunts her at razor edges
of consciousness in a twilight dream.
It stalks her. She can feel it follow
so closely its breath is in her dream.
Furtive, she turns, dares to confront it.
Elusive, it slips into her dream.
She tries to grasp flickering shadows
until she quiets her silent dream.
Feigning sleep, she stays awake as it
creeps up on her unseen in her dream.
She hears its hoarse whispering draw near,
until its tendrils of being dream
into her. Invisible, its glance
changes her into another dream
where she leans into its warm embrace
and Laura never wakes from her dream.
At the center of the earth lies an undiscovered treasure,
the blackness of space hides an undiscovered treasure.
On the salt flats the wind scribes mysterious cartography
describing the path to the undiscovered treasure.
The dawn sky is scribbled with calligraphic scarlet
clouds spelling the Name of the undiscovered treasure.
Joyful water throws itself from a stony height
singing the praises of the undiscovered treasure.
Lumbering bison raise clouds of dust all across the prairie
patient trekkers on the road towards undiscovered treasure.
The soul yokes wonder and sorrow to its chariot
and flies off in search of the undiscovered treasure.
The heart burns and turns like a sunflower's head
marking the direction of its undiscovered treasure.
Autumn in the temperate zone has always been my favorite season. November is the month when autumn slides into winter as subtly as tea leaves steeping in hot water. This month's ghazals all, for me, relate to the month, the seasons, and the transition from autumn into winter. As I write this, I'm visiting family in northwest Illinois, looking out at a cool sunny afternoon. That coolness, light, and sense of impending chill and storm shape autumn for me.
These four ghazals use the jumps between couplets adroitly to shift image and tone around the pivot of the qafiya. There is also a flow among the four of them. Rachel Ensign's "November" plays with the tumbling of the season and brings the reader's imagination along on tumbles from leaves to little girls to linens in the drier. Kathee Rogers' "WV Ghazal" refers to other seasons than fall, but the imagery — the people, the activities, the places — do align with November. Rotating, rippling, playing, driving, pickling: the West Virginia hills resonate with human needs and pleasures.
A strictly personal association: fall and winter, for me, are seasons of dream. Shorter days and longer nights encourage turning out the lights, lying down, covering up warmly, embracing — and dreaming. The invisible, unseen, elusive secret that haunt's the poet's dreams echoes deeply in the heart of imagination. Tiel Aisha Ansari's meditation on a traditional saying of the Prophet Mohammed resonates deeply with the secrets of the invisible, the Unseen. The "undiscovered treasure" awaits us, ready for discovery in the world we inhabit, written in the very elements of our experience.