KAREEM TAYYAR

Shiraz Memories

 

He tells me what he misses most from childhood
is sleeping on the flat roof of the family house,

the low moon for nightlight,

the minarets of the Pink Mosque
like silhouetted sentries,

& the stars—
among them Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares, & Fomalhaut—

like a flock of roaming sheep
he would always spend his first dream rounding up.

 

 

 

Fire Season

 

A friend calls from the road
to tell me the farm is gone,
& that she lost three of her horses,
including Lucy,
the mare I rode the last time I’d visited.

Headed now for her parents’ place in Seattle,
she says Steve Earle is keeping her company on the radio,
& that even though the sky
is too filled with smoke to see the moon,
she knows it’s still up there,

& that’s something.

 

 

 

The Pianist

 

Sits on a stage in Munich
& slices his memories of New York in half,
as if it were a scantily-clad magician's assistant.

The crowd,
moved but too stunned to applaud,

forgets their names,
& the names of their children.

The pianist,
aware that such a thing has occurred,
closes his eyes

&

thinks of a long-ago winter's night on 125th Street,
where from a friend's window he watched a young boy
dribble a basketball across a court slowly filling with snow.

The crowd,
experts on snow,

feel their hands begin to freeze,
& their cheeks redden with this arrival of frost.

(The chandelier is like the moon
on the night before an eclipse,

or a woman in a white dress
turning her hips across an otherwise empty stage.)

The pianist,
who now begins to float on his bench
above the heads of his audience

as if the bench were a magic carpet
new to the marvels of flight,

closes his eyes,
draws in his breath,

&

wonders what Duke or Miles would think of this trick,

one where all these familiar songs
wear each other's coats,

& where the assistant awakens to find herself whole,
her heart now where her left kneecap once was,

but stronger now,
& more open to love.

 

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