Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

 

PILGRIM BELL 

My savior has powers and he needs.
To be convinced to use them.
Up until now he has been.
A no-call no-show. Curious menace.
Like a hornet’s nest buzzing.
On a plane wing. Savior. Younger than.
I pretend to be. Almost everyone is.
Younger than I pretend to be. I am a threat.
Even in my joy. Like a cat who. Playing kills.
A mouse and tongues.
It back to life. The cat lives.
Somewhere between wonder.
And shame. I live in a great mosque.
Built on top of a flagpole.
Whatever happens happens.
Loudly. All day I hammer the distance.
Between earth and me.
Into faith. Blue light pulls in through.
The long crack in my wall. braids.
Into a net. The difference between.
A real voice and the other kind.
The way its air vibrates.
Through you. The way air.
Vibrates. The violence.
In your middle ear.

The follow-up to Tehran-born American poet and editor Kaveh Akbar’s bestselling debut Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Farmington ME: Alice James Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] is Pilgrim Bell: Poems (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2021). Writing on the pandemic, sobriety, emergencies, memories, mothers and history, Akbar offers poems that seek to return to the origins of prayer, citing both personal difficulty and acknowledging those who have fallen through the cracks; composing a lyric as a call to the divine. “In what world does any of it seem credible?” he writes, to close the poem “I WOULDN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH A THIRD CHANCE,” “God’s word is a melody, and melody requires repetition. / God’s word is a melody I sang once then forgot.” Akbar’s lyric revels in what has been long seen across multiple cultures as the traditional role of the poet: to speak both to history and faith, writing a poetry of social conscience and spiritual foundations. “They say it’s not / faith if you can hold it in your hands,” he writes, as part of the poem “AN OVERSIGHT,” “but I suspect the opposite may be true, // that real faith passes first through the body // like an arrow.”

Pilgrim Bell is constructed as three untitled groupings of poems, each of which opens and near-closes with a different poem underneath the title “PILGRIM BELL.” Whereas many of the other poems in the collection are comparatively more open in the breath of their structures, the title poems are more compact, and sit akin to pillars, upon which the rest of the collection rests. As the second title poem ends: “The difference between. / a real voice and the other kind. / The way its air vibrates. / Through you. The way air. / Vibrates. The violence. / In your middle ear.”

Akbar writes on empire, history and perspective, and of cultural anxiety, approaching his meditations with the intimacy and humility of the pilgrim. As the poem “MY EMPIRE” opens: “My empire made me / happy because it was an empire / and mine. // I was too stupid to rage at anything.” He writes on joy, eruptions and the men he once was, composing lyric narratives that examine gestures, movement and foundation. Akbar is the pilgrim, working his slow way through the dark. “The algorithms for living,” he writes, as part of “FORFEITING MY MYSTIQUE,” “have always been / delicious and hollow, / like a beetle husk in a / spider’s paw. Hafez says // fear is the cheapest room / in a house, that we ought / to live in better / conditions.” He writes on faith, as he writes to open the poem “DESPITE MY EFFORTS EVEN MY PRAYERS HAVE TURNED / INTO THREATS”: “Holy father I can’t pretend / I’m not afraid to see you again / but when the time comes / I believe my courage / will expand like a sponge / cowboy in water.” His poems seek a way through the knowing and the unknowing, as a spiritual journey that is as much physical and intellectual; of language and human interaction, of compassion and a boundless faith that still acknowledges the times at which it begins to falter.

Twice through the collection, Akbar utilizes the ghazal—“GHAZAL FOR THE MEN I ONCE WAS” and “GHAZAL FOR A NATIONAL EMERGENCY”—a traditional poetic form that originated in Arabic poetry in the 7^th century, and has been long adapted into English vernacular, including early explorations by poet Sharon Olds in the United States, and John Thompson and Phyllis Webb in Canada. Structurally, Akbar’s variations seem closer to the purpose of the form than how it has evolved, as the second couplet of his “GHAZAL FOR THE MEN I ONCE WAS” reads: “Dip a finger in your bourbon, tap it to your lip. Bad water. Bedwetter. Now watch / these hands through your blood—jealous moths. How do they heaven, upset like that?” Akbar writes of anxiety, of the complicated between-ness of belonging to two different countries, two different cultures, aware of the tensions between both. “To be an American is to be a scholar / of opportunity.” he writes, as part of “THE PALACE,” adding: “Opportunity costs.” A bit further into this extended sequence of short fragments:

I have a kitchen device
that lets me spin lettuce.

There is no elegant way
            to say this—people
            with living hearts
            that could fit in my chest
want to melt the city where I was born. 

At his elementary school in an American suburb,
a boy’s shirt says: “We Did It to Hiroshima, We Can Do It to Tehran!”

Akbar explores his two countries not as in opposition, but as two spaces of separate complication, anxiety, conflict. Both sides are problematic, packed with beauty and a load-bearing grief. In the poem “READING FARROKHZAD IN A PANDEMIC,” he writes: “This is a real fact too wretched for / letters. And yet: // My uncle jailed. // His daughter killed. // Waving world, / the other flag— // there is room in the language for being / without language.” The poem ends:

I want both my countries
to be right

to fear me. 

We have lost
whatever

we had to lose.

When one speaks of poetry in terms of meditative and spiritual, or even of a lyric of messiness and uglyiness, Pilgrim Bell might be the new standard-bearer. This is a remarkable collection, one that reveals itself with humility and openness, and a lyric intimacy that bears enormous weight.