Commentary on Two Poems

“Ghazal at Morning” was actually the first ghazal I ever attempted to write, and at the present time, one of the last. After spending some time with Agha Shahid Ali’s excellent anthology Ravishing Disunities I became enamored with the form and simply sat down and tried one out. This poem was written for my then fiancé and it’s the closest I’ve been able to get to writing both a formally correct ghazal and a successful love poem. And yes, she did marry me.

“Grackles” was written at my parents’ house in rural northeastern Ohio, where I was watching some grackles hop around in the yard. As I tried to approach them in the poem, I found my senses bouncing everywhere at once—an airplane, a stomach ache, the lawn—until suddenly (the birds had at this point long disappeared into the forest’s shade) I imagined a close up of one of the grackles, and my senses converged there, following that miniscule hole in the soil through to what felt at the time like a pretty surprising conclusion. From a greater distance, I think this poem helped me realize that every “nature” poem is actually a fear-of-death poem. I think I somehow had a glimpse of that possibility while writing this and instead of merely describing the beauty of the grackles, I tried to immerse myself in the system that leads to their existence in the first place: the cycles of use and reuse. I think we as humans (and maybe Americans especially) have a hard time forgetting that we’re all bound for dust, but what we do happen to forget is the other half of that equation: that we are nourished by the earth.