#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