Figures in the Carpets

[SAROUK]

We buy what we cannot control, the rugs,

rhythm-makers, containing refrains of

the oldest story: a man takes a journey.

I have no stories inside me, he says,

so travels on, to rest beneath a carpet

of blue constellations, star patterns

at the edges of disordered border walls.

At the center, a meditative medallion

makes a moving immortal-flowered ground:

to live there is to give oneself over

to greenness, redness, occasional blues,

holding those spirits of woollen dyes

rising from the knots within to breathe

against the woven, multi-colored air.

[BIDJAR]

Now there is a coat of many colors hung

around the wanderer's shoulders where

he climbs out from that pit, down which

he flung himself, or was thrown into.

Reaching to soothe his wounds, he finds

the dusts of centuries residing there

beneath his feet, the hopeful travelers

passing, wearing thin, fighting about

how best to articulate the names of gods

for whom they yearn—accursed by wars'

helmet curves, shields, chained stitches

of unmediated reds and yellowed husks

of blood—broken lines marking a garden

in whose precincts his journey began.

[KAZAK]

Three sunbursts spin, enigmatic energies

through golden latchhooks, surrounding

cloudbanks; three eagles, darting within

their shifting images: they return him

to streets of lit porches in summer dark,

a boy stuttering over random syllables,

a blindfolded man pleading for his life—

whose fate is in the hands of some men

whose fate is in the hands of other men,

whose fate . . . until the whole pattern

emerges, and the language becomes clear.

On the floor lies his mother, moaning,

until he comes out, guilty, before her—

amid the mud of his own frozen blood.

[SHIRVAN]

To live inside such squares as the weaver

of this green, becoming golden, labor;

to pull back old skins and try to emerge,

victorious, from that old prison after

so many years, is to find a path back to

harmonious designs, surely centered on

the search—yet still speaking of a life

with knotted figures seen as suffering

variations on themes that can be inferred

from small vibrations of weft and warp,

the ‘snakes' within the threads worn down

to the shapes of ribbons, even rhythms

writhing in a loom of days: those humming

ancient instruments whose music seems

[SHIRAZ]

raw as colors governed by the earth, pink

as brick, or deserts scraped from rock,

rough clay slowly grinding, then drifting

down the slopes of the central plateaus

to fresh respites from thinner regions of

dessication fixed at the fringes below.

These lands lie under the ache of desire,

which calls feet out to play upon sand,

to fill each new hollow, and dance about,

tongues turning on the knots of umber,

ochre, woven into those undulating waves

others might summon in flowery manners

to escape from bitter orange, still held

by recalcitrant fingers, to the purple

[KERMAN]

empowering all those who try to hold on—

as all things will hold to themselves

an idea of themselves—to an aspiration

towards good fortune, unwavering even

unto death. Yet here are dusky passages,

canopies of clearness, an everlasting

understanding of the earth as cancerous

points of coloration, acid starbursts,

or dangerous blots—all blurring the way

to move past sight: perspectives lost

and found again, symmetrical, surrounded

by the momentos one saves from travel,

old friends, like hues that may betoken,

in hopefulness, some changes of heart.

[SENNEH]

This creates a powerful language about

how to levitate a plane—for even as

the occasional murmurs of new machines

are heard in the land, as old cyclic

gardens arrange themselves in the whorls

and tendrils throughout tilled fields,

snakes hold up this world in variations

of light blue skies above temptation.

Even when an illiterate weaver mistakes

an old date for the design, then dyes

and binds strange numbers into a ground,

the change of the serif, for instance,

in a calligraphy of days marks the date

of cartouches as mysterious, unknown.

[KASHAN]

Yet the signals from the borders suggest

a different tale: lozenges are bottles

strewn along mauve and terra cotta roads,

shaped like a woman found lying along

the side of those same roads—the figure

of flesh, going nowhere but endlessly

back on itself—as a web of years frames

a dying kind of certitude, innocence.

The birds in these cages signify singing,

as the tapestries of perfected threads

suggest reticence, chosen intermediaries

to the indeterminancy of all creation:

and we can buy it yet, articulate or not,

with each new freeing of our hearts.