For Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)
Sometimes it seems like I’ll never get back to sleep-
ing like that again—like the simple way that my mother
led me to sleep as a child, with a Scotttish sleep
song about sheep-folds to quiet my bones. That’s the sleep
I hope you struck off for on your last journey, Shahid.
You were younger than my age now. Why shouldn’t your sleep
be sweet, like your waking was—a wide, strong child’s sleep?
Isn’t it true that any poet who could write a canzone
as veiled and loving, as thick and crying, a canzone
as clear and dying as yours are, deserves to sleep?
To repeat (we know) takes, and gives, innocence—so kiss
me goodnight again, dear duende Shahid. Let the bursting kiss
of your words buoy up my own; leave me a kiss
of my own, to own my words. Then, at last, I’ll sleep.
Because what are poet’s voices, after all, but kiss-
es alert and awake in the mouth, heartbeat’s soul-kiss-
es glistening (as far past touch as the memory a mother
trails like mica through the rock-making dust of my loneliest kiss?)
Though you taught me something, once, about how rhymed words kiss
(the gift you said Merrill had given to you once, Shahid),
no rhymes need weigh this floating gift you left me, Agha Shahid
Ali— this vessel your poems still weave—this boat that will kiss
the sky till it rains— this excrescent, exuberant canzone—
this life-raft for poets on watery journeys. Ah, canzone,
you squeeze like a jellyfish, you weep like a pine tree, you, canzone,
lick me long as the endless tongue of a dangerous kiss.
Shahid, how could you have kissed us with anything but a canzone
(no, three! And it seems that the hungry tracks of a canzone
are fertile, like the tracks of a night with little sleep…)
And, Shahid, would you have left us anything but a canzone?
It trailed after you from your deathbed, your last canzone,
that mysterious one. (There was the great one about your mother,
the one you wrote while she was dying. And now my mother
must soon be dying) and finally I float this canzone
out on the waves that you make rock for me, Shahid,
veiling the air with such moving water, Shahid,
canzone, canzone, Shahid, face, Shahid, voice, memory, the Shahid
we poets repeat now, insistent as a canzone:
“Shahid was so witty. Oh, how I miss Shahid. Oh, Shahid . . . ”
“No-one cooked (entertained, laughed, spoke) like him . . .” Ah, Shahid,
you “the beloved” (“the witness” in Arabic) whose name-kiss
winks out from so many sweet ghazals that your very name “Shahid”
becomes its admirers, you that rare poet, still-rocking Shahid,
with a sweet veil (you know it) reaching out from your hard-rocking sleep,
trailing us in, always in to the births that will trail neither sleep
nor forgetting, but trail births again. A poet’s voice as full as yours, Shahid,
enters into a life like a witness. When I heard that my friend Agha Shahid
Ali would be reading in Ohio, there I was, the raw mother
of a new baby, my poems still influenced largely by my mother—
And my voice was alone. So how could I have known, Shahid,
that you’d be with me even now still, standing near my grandmother
who’s been smiling at me for decades out from the gathering of souls? Oh Mother
Goddess what a gift your voice gave me that first day, Shahid! Each canzone,
ghazal, joke, protest, villanelle, hung gold with the thick pollen of the Mother
of Muses sifting on you so deeply (she’s Memory—mother
also of madness, and grieving, and joy—remember?) She’d poured that same kiss
over you and me before on the night of our friendship’s first kiss,
2 AM at the bar when you named me (a first-time new mother,
away from my baby for the first time, not ready for sleep),
baptizing “Annie” with your voice, waking me from sleep,
mocking how Americans pronounced it. And then I could sleep,
since you said it the way no one ever had except my mother,
locking my name to your voice, oh my teacher, my mother. Oh Shahid.
Name-giver. Rhyme-keeper. Ghazal-shaper. Bearer of the canzone,
Now I touch you to life with a poem again, as late as a kiss.
First published in Prairie Schooner