#74: After Timur
What falls into the hellbox of translation
After Timur
I thought I killed a kissing bug and saw Death's head on a bean the day you went North for space. Disregarding these unfavorable signs for the steely resolve of partitioning my bare minimum self-compassion from a poor life of faulty wiring, I now write, tree-trunk wide, and replete with saps that bind rather than drain, that Home is where I am not teaching. Foolishly, I affirmed at one point that teaching is a form of learning - and so I haven't finished a book since the summertime warmed us at the lighthouse on the Hudson. At work, I teach youth about the ghazal and the memorizer, espousing with a triangle on the board: mystic, romantic, and platonic love, each angle labeled (but it should've been scalene rather than equilateral), oriented towards use of imagery, symbolism, and ambiguity. A 700-year old writer from Shiraz who witnessed massacres by Timur - what, Gary, do you hope they learn? "Youths who seek happiness hold the advice of a knowledgeable elder" - as if you could give it to them from the ruins of your youth where good advice was choosing the right channel to watch and making sure to mute the commercials. Still, I dream of Samarkand and Bukhara's dishes in my favorite cookbook, two-steps removed from Orientalism, but cooking for one and dancing very little but for the raw power of the rage against rose garden pavings. Beloved, how are we to find the wine seller whose divine pour aerates our ecstasy through the geomagnetic storm? I marry the garlic powders on the shelf of spices, pouring me into you, as colors translate our senses. Copyright 2025 by Gary Dale Burns




Maybe teaching is more a form of study. Who knows what we actually learn?