Ghazal IV
Haven’t taken it to the head for a minute on another
three day bender. Slept past sunrise. And then another.
The bed has softened over the years, the stoop steps chipped.
Shanties clog memory: was it your most recent love, or another?
Bangladesh is continually interrogated by floods, you tell me.
Your reflection a mist; the mist a shadow; the shadow some other.
Cracked clay riverbeds sound like a cross between square and
sawtooth waves. Always, we want the frequency to be another.
Late last night the house made a drawing of itself: bones, skin,
and a hat. It preferred famine over feast. Liar. It consumed another.
Dear Sound Wave, while sobriety arpeggiates, is reshaped by blurring
filters don’t think too much of any of us. This dissonance becomes another.
Copyright © 2019 by Bojan Louis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 7, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Cantankerous from not writing during a heavy teaching load in the fall of 2018, my wife assigned me homework to research and write ghazals. I was drawn to the form’s history of religious, metaphysical, philosophical, political, and realist verse, which has sparked a longer project and apprenticeship. I also delved back into playing music, learning to use and experimenting with synthesizers, drum machines, and other electronics alongside my background with guitar and piano. It’s inevitable that the process of music composition and sound manipulation will blend, blur, and bleed with the crafting of a poetics, and vice versa.”
—Bojan Louis
Bojan Louis
Bojan Louis is the author of Currents (BkMk Press, 2017). He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.