"Ghazal in the Blink of an Eye" by Joshua St. Claire (Michael Winter)

Ghazal in the Blink of an Eye

The autumn leaves lie in layers around the cottage, erasing a year in lapsu oculi.
Basho pages through his diary then mutters, “mayflies — in ictu oculi.”

A cock and bull story? My monomyth is just a flirt and a tune.
After all, why buy the cow when you can get the milk in risu oculi?

Even the Euclidean plane deconstructs, fractalizes, crumbles.
The broken cosmos coalesces, a gaze around The Lady in Gold in vestitu oculi.

The angle of incidence may equal the angle of reflection, but consider,
for just a moment, the strangeness of the tangent’s abscissa in captu oculi.

Eye of newt? That’s just the start. Retina of rat. Pupil of pollywog. Eyebright. Eyebite.
First star I see tonight. Firelight. Second Sight. What you see is what you get in ritu oculi.

I thank the knife for the spiral of seeds in the honeydew’s heart.
I thank you for these blank tears — the nothingheart in fructu oculi.

Stop. Before you come closer, answer me this: what reaches with four fingers
in mourning, two fingers at the moon, and three fingers in obitu oculi?

The Violet Moon slowly waned. The scent of violets slowly waned.
Our limbs and breath slowly waned. Then, we slowly became petals in lacu oculi.

I must have looked for those damn blackbirds thirteen different ways.
Imagine my surprise when I found four and twenty blackbirds baked in versu oculi.

Terminus est. Will you put my book down now? You’ll enter a different world.
Perhaps winter has come since you were away and snow has settled in respectu oculi.

Joshua St. Claire (Michael Winter)

Joshua St. Claire is an accountant who works as a financial executive for a large non-profit in rural Pennsylvania, USA. His poetry has been published in the Inflectionist Review, the Delmarva Review, and the Ghost City Review, among others. He is Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. His work was included in the 2022 Dwarf Stars Anthology, and he is the winner of the 2022 Gerald Brady Memorial Senryu Award.

Headshot: Joshua St. Claire

Photo Credit: Staff