Even the Rain

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief's lottery,
bought even the rain.

"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"
Anyone! "when we thought /
the poets taught" even the rain?

After we died--That was it!--God
left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

Drought was over. Where was I?
Drinks were on the house.
For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.

Of this pear-shaped orange's
perfumed twist, I will say:
Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.

How did the Enemy love you--with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.

This is God's site for a new house of executions?
You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?

After the bones--those flowers--this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.

What was I to prophesy if not
the end of the world?
A salt pillar for the lonely lot,
even the rain.

Farewell

At a certain point I lost track of you.
They make a desolation and call it peace.
when you left even the stones were buried:
the defenseless would have no weapons.

When the ibex rubs itself against the rocks, who collects its fallen fleece from the slopes?
O Weaver whose seams perfectly vanished,
who weighs the hairs on the jeweller's balance?
They make a desolation and call it peace.
Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?

My memory is again in the way of your history.

Army convoys all night like desert caravans:
In the smoking oil of dimmed headlights, time dissolved- all winter- its crushed fennel.
We can't ask them: Are you done with the world?

In the lake the arms of temples and mosques are locked in each other's reflections.

Have you soaked saffron to pour
on them when they are found like this
centuries later in this country
I have stitched to your shadow?

In this country we step out with
doors in our arms
Children run out with windows in their arms.
You drag it behind you in lit corridors.
if the switch is pulled you will be torn from everything.

At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed
to perfect me.
In your absence you polished me
into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory. I am everything you lost.
You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

I am being rowed through Paradise
in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.

The paddle is a heart; it breaks the
porcelain waves. It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.

If only somehow you could have
been mine, what wouldn't
have happened in the world?

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way
of your history.
There is nothing to forgive.You can't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed
my pain only to myself.

There is everything to forgive.
You can't forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible
in the world?

Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and University of Delhi. He earned a doctorate in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985.

Ali received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. He was—sui generis among poets, a fractious crew—universally beloved, a reasonable response: he loved the world. Loved it with unremitting disregard for anything petty or pinched, timid or false, tepid or dull, preferring the primary colors. This made him fearless but did not cost a fine discrimination. As his students knew well, he was forthright against the lazy and the conventional, in politics and poetics. Of poetry in his chosen tongue he was a fierce and learned fan. He liked jokes and gossip; he was never hurtful or mean; he was a tease.

Stricken with brain cancer, Shahid undertook the cheering-up of his worried friends ("but how are YOU?" he'd ask). When his vision permanently blurred, following a surgical procedure, and he could no longer read, he memorized "Lycidas" and would recite it for you if you asked. Agha Shahid Ali possessed a rare and undisguised radiance of soul. He lived to get that radiance. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.

His volumes of poetry include "Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), "Rooms Are Never Finished" (2001), "The Country Without a Post Office" (1997), "The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems" (1992), "A Nostalgist's Map of America" (1991), "A Walk Through the Yellow Pages" (1987), "The Half-Inch Himalayas" (1987), "In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems" (1979), and "Bone Sculpture" (1972).