Art: Sasan Golbostani
The Daoist Lu Dongbin Crossing Lake Dongting
Painted Fan, Yuan Dynasty China
He was going to cross the water.
He was crossing on foot,
he was forever going to.
I was forever going to too.
Not the water, not the water,
I was going to cross the street
to ordinary happiness,
I was going to rest
beneath the twisted boughs
of the flowering plum
on a handscroll under glass
across the exhibit hall
but couldn’t turn my back
on a monk who promised
to walk on water
in the thirteenth century.
I was crossing back to see him,
confined beside the left-hand edge
of a square silk fan, lines
of ink so spare—the painter’s
held breath held yet between them.
I was going to light the lantern
in the next silk panel, but not in this one.
I was going and always
planned to be the woman
eating pomegranates
beside the stream, fruit
of good fortune.
But he was going to cross the water
without even a small
wooden boat,
and I was going there ––
with the wind filling his sleeves,
uplifting the long-held hem of his robe,
his feet bare and poised
on the bank of great promise
for ever crossing the water.
Indebted to Wind
Not what it had to say
but what it carried to you.
Dandelion silk dispatching seed.
The neighbor’s trashcan lid
waking you from that nightmare
hurled in a tempest
against the bedroom window.
Howling, love cry,
lamentation.
Wind carries out the past and in
the future,
tutors your own breath
to extinguish the flame.
When love unbuttoned your blouse,
wind did the rest
fumbling through the aspens.
You could have believed
air was empty space
to be lost in, except for wind
stinging your face
at the height of January,
whipping the flag,
lifting the sparrow.
Uprisings
Eagle Lake, October
You just wanted to sit here
and watch what the breeze
knows how to do to the water.
Postcard autumn,
afloat and doubled.
You just wanted to sit here.
But what the wind picks up
when the wind picks up—
untroubled reflections
churn unrecognizable,
one mirror supplanting another.
You just wanted to sit here,
but the work of wind
is the history of uprisings—
furrows and crests
all mouthing at once,
a throng of untold stories
charging suddenly toward you.
Who are you to interpret
when the wind picks up
what the wind delivers to you?
You just wanted to sit
upright in a chair on the dock
believing nobody
occupies
the wind-rattled
empty chair beside you.
On the opposite shore
a mountain is stamped
unmoved against the sky—
sleeping torso on its back, head
buried beneath the treeline.
You sometimes live
at that same great distance
from everything.
But then the wind picks up,
breaching the distance.
Home
Innocent enough.
Following fresh prints in a veneer
of snow.
A trail through the woods,
deep-rutted: mud thawed
then froze again.
Furrows of worry.
The fox, invisible guide.
Nothing to prepare you,
except your whole life,
for the bones of a past
that had no business being here.
Roof slit, slung lifeless.
Beams brought to their knees.
Floors cracked, boards snapped,
rot tumbled to the cellar hole.
This is the child’s premonition,
the whole place leveled
by her father’s next rampage.
Just enough left standing
to recognize—
a swatch of red geranium
still glued to the surviving wall.
Scavengers track through,
pillage what they can—
doors, casings, treads.
Bricks chiseled
from the center chimney.
I want to pry the lintel with a crowbar
for a shelf, pile stones
to weigh down the dead
at the foot of the doorframe.
Retrieve the battered suitcase
pitched from a second story
window into the brush.
On a stump of damp oak,
I sit shiva waiting for dark.
Leave this house
picked clean,
gutted by moonlight.
Points of Departure
Between the bungalow and the sea,
the long hedge of winter
is packed with sparrows
facing an ocean
churned to acres of unrest—
the promise of old platforms
for deliverance
revealed by gale winds
as only the barely audible
chirping of bystanders.
Thud of water against
obstinance of stone,
of surf chipping away
at the foundations.
I drove to the coast
to write an elegy for the war dead
and the newly fallen sycamore,
to dream about the fruit
sleeping inside gnarled trees
even now in the nearby
hardened orchard.
Like justice in the the dead of winter
waiting to ripen in every thing.
In the author’s words:
L.R.Berger’s collection of poems, ‘The Unexpected Aviary,’ received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. She’s been the grateful recipient of fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN New England Discovery Award, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and The American Academy in Rome. With Kamal Boullatta, she assisted in the translation from the Arabic of “Beginnings” by Adonis (Pyramid Atlantic Press). She lives and writes within earshot of the Contoocook River.
About the artist:
My name is Sasan Golbostani. I was born in 1957 in Lahijan,a beautiful city in North of Iran. My artistic activity is in the field of Persian Calligraphy and I started it in 1986. Finally , I have obtained the Artistic Certificate or the grade one in art that it equals PhD degree. But my activities in the field of photography started in 2007 and my interests are landscape photography, abstract photography, minimal photography, conceptual photography and straight photography.
