Three Ghazals

by Jeffrey Burghauser (June 2020)

The Poet, Doris Lindo Lewis, 1930

 

 

[1]

 

“What shall I my lady give?” Your trembling.

“Tell me what a person’s for.” For trembling.

 

“When did you last know what anguish signified?”

When the stars were neither still nor trembling.

 

Poet, here’s a stubby pencil & a grid.

Yours must be the hand that keeps score, trembling.

 

 
[2]

 

Here’s the birth & simple death I’ve been between,

Smelling smoke and hearing all the din between.

 

Here’s my sternum; here’s my thirteenth vertebra—

Loci for my frantic heart to spin between.

 

Here’s the model. Here’s her painted counterpart.

There’s an acre of sequential kin between.

 

Here I am; and there is Hell—with nothing but

A dense, chthonic cladogram of tin between.

 

Show me pairs among the ocean’s fabulous

Sinews only fit to fit a fin between.

 

Thoughtful Poet, promise that your words be so

Mason’d that you cannot fit a sin between.

 

 

[3]

 

Damson plums are slowly stewed in rosewater.

Darkness offers a divine cuisine of pain.

 

Poet, you’ve survéyed the whole of History

From this Mughal-crimson mezzanine of pain.

 

 

 

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Jeffrey Burghauser is a teacher in Columbus, OH. He was educated at SUNY-Buffalo and the University of Leeds. He currently studies the five-string banjo with a focus on pre-WWII picking styles. A former artist-in-residence at the Arad Arts Project (Israel), his poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Appalachian Journal, Fearsome Critters, Iceview, Lehrhaus, and New English Review. Jeffrey’s book-length collections are available on Amazon, and his website is www.jeffreyburghauser.com.

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