`At Some Point the Mind Will Not Suffer Improving'

Only recently have I learned of the ghazal, a 10th-century Persian poetic form consisting of couplets, often rhymed, practiced throughout much of the Muslim world. The history of the ghazal is longer and more complex and various than the sonnet in the West. At least since Goethe, Western poets and songwriters have toyed with the form, and I just re-encountered it in Lee Gerlach’s first book, Highwater, published in 2002 by Handsel Books. Gerlach was born in 1920, and his book is slender but dense with quiet and a lifetime’s experience. It’s the opposite of improvisatory or casual. His poems are deliberate in the sense Thoreau intended when he wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”

At the heart of the book is a series of 45 unrhymed, untitled ghazals that remind me of Wallace Stevens and, more rarely, Rilke. I have no idea how these poems measure up a ghazals. As poetry, they deserve and demand rereading – a serious life’s work asks no less. Here’s No. 43:

“At some point the mind will not suffer improving.
Wants nothing more, becomes obstinate.

“It lives in the perceiving of its old weathers,
It rises from bed content to be what it was.

Yet, if it were truly weary, it would slump back
And not stand up like a cathedral in the desert

With no parishioners, no one coming to worship,
The bats in the belfry hanging in leathery sleep.

“The morning is brilliant, impossible to describe,
More like the last thought than one that might come.”

I like that final line of monosyllables that enacts the inevitable slowing down of thoughts, like breath, before sleep. This is poetry, measured and contemplative, for grownups. Lately, I’ve been able to read only poetry, little prose. My brother told me on Sunday he is reading, for the first time, Wallace Stevens’ poems and Beckett’s How It Is. Lucky guy.