The Comfortable Paths Of Postponed Reckonings
by Mohamad Said Bazzi
(2020)
What boundless darknesses
Await a sleepless man
The stray and reckless tappings
Within him and without
An attaché or a rope
~
In blindness he encounters
His twisted pains and tryings
Curled squirms and stirs
His frail and frenzied lungs
~
He soon unclamps the worries
Of petrified remorse
Wrists tucked in pillows
Hiding spent contritions
~
His fingers rove to find
The sunken slumps and valleys
Around his ribs and elbows
The incremental settlement
Of cartilage and accounts
~
In secrecy he thanks
The foils that awoke him
The bountifuls of solitude
Cannot be understood
By wife or child or colleague
Or comrades in the sand
~
He regulates his breathing
To pair with her affliction
For mercy or economy
Or personal asylum
~
The upward width of night
That swarms throughout the ceiling
The joy of needing nothing
And sensing nothing at all
No voices or defenses
~
In wakefulness he reckons
That he can grasp at wisdom
But the windswept dust that neighbors us
The murmurings of danger
Behind abandoned sheds
Remind him of his failings
~
One day the winds will fall
Into the hands of stillness
And none of us will stand
In memoriam to fraud
Or the cylindrical aspect
Of smokestacks or cigarettes
Or these readings
~
Yet planets, suns, and pathogens
Will continue to align
Approach to form the circles
Of temporary harmonies
Lights condensed to crescents
At a distance from each other
And unknown to each other
~
In learning to create
You must write or paint or forge
The universal secrets
He oft imparted to them
The schooling sessions
The searching sessions
The years-long sessions
Of refuge from the stars
~
The comfortable paths
Of postponed reckonings
The self-sensing seas
The vast cosmos lost
He lies there looking up
Together and alone
Waiting to hear from God
Waiting for the shapes
Swarming in the ceiling
To tremble and collide