Kareem Tayyar: Night, Westwood Boulevard, Waiting for a Friend

The mad girl says the sky is a garden hanging by a silver thread.

Everywhere the light you love becomes your death,

And no one turns the daffodil of darkness into someone else’s silent temple.

She hands me a quarter,

Though her coat is shorn,

Her hair has not been washed in months,

Her shopping cart a wheeled landfill of the city’s waste.

What’s this for? I ask,

It’s the river’s price for crossing, she answers.

But I can’t help you with the cost of coming back.

She moves on.

The boulevards continue,

Passing cars like winter’s shining, steeled wolves,

While in the Persian bookstore behind me,

Kabir is dreaming inside the paradise of paperbacks,

And Rumi, predictably, is still dancing,

His head turned towards the stars,

His fevered breath like little clouds whose rain will fall on all of us.

Kareem Tayyar is an Iranian-American poet who lives in California. His most recent book is Magic Carpet Poems (Tebot Bach).

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