Free The Far Mosque by Kazim Ali

Train Ride

    We take a compartment. I draw the curtains and shut the door so that
    other passengers will believe the seats are all filled and leave us.

    This rudeness is against my cousin’s instincts, so I let him take the
    backwards facing seat.

    He says it is the proper way to view the landscape.

    That night in Aix-en-Provence we won’t be able to find a hotel, and the
    hostel will be closed.

    We will spend all night in the public square, reciting poetry to one
    another, and receiving gifts from the late night locals.

    Flowers, drawings, hot pastries.

    This moment now gone.

    I time everything to that current of lapse.

    No absent time.

    Even in deep space, there are particles of dark matter that do not add to the mass of the universe.

    Versions of the story wither over sacred fire. A prophet’s willingness to be blind.

    We travel alone all the way to Marseille. Or: while my cousin uses the bathroom, two girls come to sit with me.

    We have to switch trains at Dijon. Or: we never make it as far as Aix.

    The source of a vision only a priestess getting high on fumes.

    Snake-licked. Shucking off the old skin.

    Blessed be the undone version. The train actually stalls on the tracks for several hours, during which we contemplate returning to Paris.

    It might only be a condition of the window-glass that allows me to see the subtle ridges and gradations in the clouds, the swirling depth of the sky.

    A Cézanne painting on the cover of
The World of the Ten Thousand Things
is so deathly unfinished it looks nearly transparent. Pencil marks on the canvas.

    Later, in a vestibule between cars, the Provençal sun setting, I catch sight of the book’s cover in the reflection of the window.

    Flooded with bright orange and yellow the painting completes itself.

    Is that all: a quest for fulfillment satisfied by the correct conditions? In this case, supposed chromatic equations of the southern skies—my cousin explains it: yellow in Arles, green in Aix, purple on the Côte d’Azur.

    Later he will return to Paris, and I will hike alone to Ste-Maries-de-la-Mer where Magdalen supposedly washed ashore with her servant Sarah. Their bones are in a reliquary in the church.

    Yet another church miles and miles to the north and east of here continues the story: Magdalen left her servant and traveled inland with the gypsies and died there.

    Another set of bones in that church.

    Unlike in mathematics, every quadratic equation in history does not necessarily have an equivalent modular form.

    Small handfuls only create an impression of a manageable amount to hold. For example, I have left out the wild flamingos, a subtle swipe of pale pink along their pearl-white bodies, flying across the road; also the horse-back ride through the swamps of the Cammargue, the hours I sat in the small shack in the bird sanctuary, the black-clad gypsy woman I saw in the market.

    In the gypsy fortune-telling book, past and future shuffle and re-shuffle.

    As our journey progresses we do eventually open the curtains and the compartment fills.

    We eat the previously unmentioned camembert sandwiches.

    We won’t arrive in Aix for several more hours and don’t go on to Cassis for four more days after that.

    Where, in another four days, in the mountains above the city, tired and out of money and ready to go home, we will meet Mister Stevarius, the Belgian Fire Eater, and everything changes.

The Studio

    Great northern window and sheets of light.
    Wine has evaporated in the glass, leaving a burgundy crust.

    How shall I find you?

    My travel case is packed and
    sitting by the door

    Rotted fruit. Skulls.
    Paint marks on every table and chair.

    How shall I find you?

    My coat is hanging on the hook

    My cane is leaning there

    Who are you looking for

The Cemetery at Montparnasse

    Each stone is speaking in tongues:
    Mon travail est ma prière.

    One of the dead is born in my birth year.

    An open mausoleum, empty of