Marianne Szlyk

A Green Sort of Ghazal

                        After reading Kazim Ali’s “Rain”

Having grown up among lawns of hissing, endless green
and all-day roadsides emptied of all but green,

You say you can no longer see color:
Black, brown, red, yellow, or green

Being the color you once swam in but now cannot see.
Trees’ leaves, shapes lost, are all the same.  Green

palms or jacaranda do not fit into the screen you watch
miles above the prairies’ green—

the Great Flyover, home of couples ambling through Wal-Mart
after dinner at Ryan’s. There grasses are a thousand shades of green.

Sandhill cranes nest and soar, sparrows flit,
and the songs of these birds sound like green.

A few couples cross the river and join the trees,
All that we do not see, blinded by green.

 

 

Ghazal for Maryvale Park in July

Today the small stream through the swamp is hidden:
turtles, bullfrogs, stones, bottles, cans, all hidden.

The birds sing from behind the oaks’ lush leaves.
To all but a blind birder, their names are hidden.

One bullfrog calls out, his voice a bass gulp,
from behind the reeds in the pond where he is hidden.

Yellow and purple flowers carpet the swamp.
I look for milkweed. Where is it hidden?

A pale yellow butterfly flutters over the flowers.
She is the ghost of monarchs from whom food was hidden.

I walk to where the stream always reappears.
Surely its turtles will not be hidden.

For once I do not see the school of little fish.
I wonder where the turtles’ food is hidden.

I see the turtles swim with nothing to find.
Fish, worms, spiders, weeds, all hidden.

Before too long, I fear, it will be bare winter,
warm winter when nothing but my heart is hidden.

 

How We Remember the Kokang

Peering across clotted Sixth Street from a Thai restaurant, we remember
the Kokang, where we often ate when I moved to your city. We remember

walking in back of the arena, then up two flights of stairs.
As our hurried server refills our water glasses, we remember

the Burmese man who always served us at the Kokang, always wore white,
the owners’ son. He was so tall, so calm. You remember

running into him at the Fourteenth Street Safeway last year.
You chatted with him by the frozen foods. I remember

how you can talk, even to strangers. I can’t.
He had ready-made meat loaf in his cart, you remember.

He told you why his parents never reopened the Kokang.
Ten years later do they still remember

how to cook pork with mangoes or Chicken Kokang?
how to bake semolina cakes? Do they remember

how to eat without their child’s help? I know my wife’s father is forgetting.
Yours did, too. So did mine. We remember

the Kokang’s Burmese green tea salad, not quite bitter,
not quite sweet, gram fritters with red sauce. We remember

the bright yellow walls on humid evenings. My kitchen
is not quite the same shade but close enough. I remember

how quiet the Kokang was without TV or music.
Trying to ignore Rachel Maddow even with the sound low, we remember.