Starting today, I will share a poem on this blog every Friday, 12:00 pm PKT for the next nine months or so, from a set I wrote in recent years.

These future posts and other poems can be accessed under the “Poetry” label in the header menu. I hope you will revisit, and enjoy reading some of them too.

This summer air…

This summer air is not a state of matter. It is the space
beside knowledge of fractals and scales that music
makes its own. There are likenesses and likelihoods asleep

in the small patches of flowers on the wayside, and the wayside
is a doorway to the dispossession of noon. The crackle and
smoke of hermel seeds may not avert evil but in their antiquating

sound and smell, another world resides; a shadow of some
traveling self that often finds itself saying and hearing things
with the imprecision of words exiled to the latency of years.

If nothing in the world is new, we owe it to an abiding recollection
of what it is to love and be loved. If Plato was not right about
our memory of Forms, he was right about the form of our minds.

We could populate a page with flowers, birds and insects whose names
we know and that most resemble nature in its imperfections, like
a forest densely quivering by day with cicadas fed on the moon’s milky sap.

You must have seen how in quieter, calmer monumental spaces,
the drift of your hair, the warmth of your face, your palms
and eyes have often taken wing as little songs and settled in the groves.

I don’t encourage the illusion that your body is distinct from your voice
that I wear like a shroud of sleep, or that the pools of your eyes are
not harbors where the broadest thoughts could anchor and regard the sea.

Knowing red as red is not the same as remembering it as flowers,
and the certainty of childhood too is not enough. Tell me,
my muse, what you remember of time; of the sweet and sore eidolons

of memory and desire, so we may arrange them in a picture book,
on strings of verses which don’t rhyme or rave in measures.
They’ll be replete with rounds of reason, loosely hung as ribbons

over features of absences and returns of ambivalence,
taking shape along the frames and margins of the hottest days
melting into rain… inimitable like love, salubrious like you.

—
Taimur Khan