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Radix Improvisations for Khaled Al-Saa’i
Language breaks forth with alphabet demons, the divs and devas whose spiral nebular orgasms generated wheeling uncials, cursive minuscules. Ah the tongue wars in Cro-Magnon night talk, the pain of firewood felt by an erect iris voiced as vowels like aimless planets coursing the consonantal ink of libido carving outward. Language starts up below as a root discontent—as a human sphinx peers out of a maned cave, a queen force generates bags of letter fodder becoming the breasts of masked amoebic engineers!
Al-Saa’i sees nature as intelligible word lore mortal scored rims or rhymes, a lingo ribbonesque with inner din (questers sounding themselves off stone in a darkness sparkling with ghoul-infested whirligigs, Sheela-na-gigs, the jig of the mind in torque about the bud of self).
Through Al-Saa’i’s swervy, granular latticeworks I see the world of the Shah-nameh. Transport to rocks blushing with vegetation, peonies swelling with crimson joy, leafless twigs seething with bio-remorse, the oyster-fresh eyes of rocks, rocks pecking their way out of their shells— then I return to Al-Saa’i’s calligraphic airs in which light can be sensed praying, I enter its minty densities, its reptilinear interlocking sway, its alpha radiant omega drone. I witness the caravan departure of a great octopus rising from the waves, transforming the tentacle water shudder into a lacework of letter flavor cometary clover!
Pause
I hear you close the bathroom door.
An absence weighted balance lifts into presence.
Is the source of human bondage the fear of loss?
Now that you are showering, cables of water convert, ghost-loaded suds, Rabelais’ mane furls from Aphrodite’s thigh…
The patter of my tattered tale, swirled drain. Rising like a sewer of precognition: Is the real death the death I am preoccupied with here and now?
The sound of drying, the clay in the cloth, the veil that will reach me before I reach the end.
To accept loss as it looms larger, to pull out the last part of myself left inside, to get all of myself born.
Thoughts of Gorky, Looking into Vermont Woods, at Tinling’s, October 3, 2004
One stands on a creaking, October leaves like cobra hoods waltzing, wattled parasols..
My eyes focus latrines— a putrification is under way.
Warm bath of heart re-obtained. To inhale, to be in the columnar density of a warming that now takes on global contours.
Leaves as reefs birch-white with amber pink lime-tinted Atlas still the molten under-yolk, the sphincter of mayhem Gorky breathed in, staring at gnats adrift, grass entanglements, entry an ever-exiting bruise, burst flagellation of a pyre drummed on by ants possessed in elfin serenade.
Cockscomb and marigold are thistled in a graphite legacy recalling Crane at Melville’s grave. Monody of a line picked up at Pech Merle. The supped russet totality eye-needled through.
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