I'm interested in the idea of unseen selves--perhaps exterior, perhaps interior. And, after reading lots of ghazals, I'm not surprised to see this 14-line poem want, today, to be in couplets. We'll see if it stays that way. I'm going back to 14 lines, mostly, by the way. I liked the short sijos, but they still feel like beginnings of things to me, short 10 or 12 turns of thought. Next I'll find that 14 is numerologically significant, somehow....
Night mysteries
i. insomnia
Thinning sheets of sleep, too fragile to wrap dreams.
Images fall back, into the almost-black.
Waking tired, confused, smells of lost travels
fading before they’re named. Another night razed.
Nature creates its own burrs and thorns to rip
mind’s fabric, make anything cling. Words. A place.
ii. my restless doppelgangers
So much of science becomes cryptology.
Patterns emerge first as pairs of similars,
near–repetitions. Is it just inexact
duplication or subtle variation?
And our own near-twins? They don’t know who we are.
Still they ache, our phantom limbs, those unseen selves.
iii. my own dream thief
The girl in the supermarket had my face,
hovers at the edge of the bed till I wake.
3/23/07
