The Far Mosque

Kazim Ali

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781882295531
• eBook ISBN: 9781938584848
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

These gently fragmented narrative lyrics pursue enlightenment in long, elegant yet plain-spoken, dark yet ecstatic lines. Ali travels by water and by night, seeking the Far Mosque and its overarching paradox: that when God and Self are one, an ascent into Heaven is a voyage within.

1

Gallery

You came to the desert, illiterate, spirit-ridden,

intending to starve

The sun hand of the violin carving through space

the endless landscape

Acres of ochre, the dust-blue sky,

or the strange young man beside you

peering into “The Man Who Taught William Blake

Painting in His Dreams”

You’re thinking: I am ready to be touched now, ready to be found

He’s thinking: How lost, how endless I feel this afternoon

When will you know:

all night: sounds

Violet’s brief engines

The violin’s empty stomach resonates

Music a scar unraveling in four strings

An army of hungry notes shiver down

You came to the desert intending to starve so starve

Renunciation

“The Sailor cannot see the North—but knows the Needle can—”

The books were all torn apart, sliced along the spines

Light filled all the openings that she in her silence renounced

Still: her handwriting on the papers remembered us to her

The careful matching of the papers’ edges was a road back

One night Muhummad was borne aloft by a winged horse

Taken from the Near Mosque to the Far Mosque

Each book likens itself to lichen,

stitching softly to tree trunks, to rocks

what was given into the Prophet’s ears that night:

A changing of directions—now all the scattered tribes must pray:

Wonder well foundry, well sunborn, sundered and sound here

Well you be found here, foundered and found

The Agnes Martin Room

What is a question to someone who practices years of silence?

Stones skim the water’s surface, shimmer there, lost.

In the window sound of last year.

Swim dimmer there.

After four days without speaking, I don’t ask questions anymore.

Given a line, draw through space.

Reach to reason to region. To seem or sum

Sun or stone.

Could weep here.

Sleep here.

In the sweep of watery gray.

On white, the wishes, the whispered accounts,

a little autobiography, littered on the surface.

Where we listen. Were we here.

Unaccountable dark matter of the universe,

an utterly supportless planet. Ocean of space.

All the same river to read. All shapes or landscape.

The scapegoat silent, following the road of devotion.

Going down without air.

Sounds like the rope against the side of the boat, a hollow bell.

Get subtler and subtler in the acres of water until

one refuses to return.

Spirit send the question sound.

Painting is the quicksand back.

Two tracks over the seeming field of white.

All the eventual answers are nothing.

Painting is asking you.

No time is passing.

The River Cloud

On paper, on the sky, on the river’s mad meniscus

I’ve drawn a blank

Remaindered against the banks, pressed there by the current

The river dispersing into the light gray

Cloud me down by the river edged with willow

The smoke of the river cloud canticles

A thought river between shor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Notes
• About the Publisher