Death of Suhrawardi at Thirty-seven

He was a donkey driver.

He was, said Saladin, what the electrons made him,

numerized as well as could be expected.

That weight-draining swoop and creak, all that

drifting interior smoke.

He drilled the theorists to groan,

the jurists who worked on the pitchtone of their teeth threw themselves down.

Malik, son of Saladin, regent of Aleppo, like a wasp

sipped from the meat of the speech of the drunkard.

Look, this man had walked through fields of blackberry canes

and through snowfields and over glaciers

and had written on a blond wood board under a tree

in black heavy-lidded ink

(in which black bears and badgers dug holes)

as he walked, their speech,

that is, yes, the intuitions of  glaciers.

This, Malik decided, was worth some afternoons of his time in sun-out-of-the-chute Aleppo.

Saladin, distant, low in the latitudes of his beard, thought thicketly of Richard the Lionheart and Phillip Augustus of France, gristle and bone,

breaching in with the hugely ranged and pronged death weapon of God.

The boy would cut wires from the teacher’s alarm.