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On the Wing

You fly to my table with unbuttoned sleeves.
You look like an angel with unbuttoned sleeves.

Where have you been? Did you run from a fire?
Here, share my meal with unbuttoned sleeves.

Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee.
You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

Don't say it yet. That's not what you mean.
I know you too well with unbuttoned sleeves.

How many years since I first loved your face?
You could have set sail with unbuttoned sleeves.

Clothes make the man. Our bed's still unmade.
Please pay the bill with unbuttoned sleeves.

Unbutton me back to our first nakedness:
I have no name at all with unbuttoned sleeves.

From OPEN SHUTTERS by Mary Jo Salter. © 2003 by Mary Jo Salter. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Commentary:

This poem is a ghazal, an old form that first appeared in Arabic, Persian,
Urdu, and Turkish, but is now much more popular in English thanks to the
Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), who commissioned many American
poets to write in this form for an anthology.  An expert in the form
himself, and a deeply gifted poet, Shahid, as he was called by his
friends, died young of brain cancer, as had his mother—for whom he wrote
a marvellous elegy in canzone form, "Lenox Hill."

As Shahid explained the ghazal to me, its couplets must all be
end-stopped, thereby suggesting, he said, a feeling of space and longing
between utterances.  The poem should not be long, and it must employ a
refrain (one word or several words, such as "with unbuttoned sleeves" in
my poem) that recurs in the second line of each stanza (and twice in the
first).  Immediately before this refrain, a word appears that rhymes with
all the words in that position throughout the poem.  In the final line,
the poet must give his name—or some sly allusion to his name.

—Mary Jo Salter

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Related links:

About OPEN SHUTTERS:
http://www.aaknopf.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=0375710140

About Mary Jo Salter:
http://www.aaknopf.com/catalog/results2.pperl?authorid=26761

Agha Shahid Ali's "Basic Points About the Ghazal:"
http://members.aol.com/poetrynet/ghazals/

Discuss "Open Shutters" in the Knopf Poetry Forum:
http://www.aaknopf.com/poetry/forum/