Poems from "A Wolf Lying in Wait"

Abbas Kiarostami

It was Abbas Kiarostami’s birthday yesterday. Belated Happy Birthday O creator of images!

When a dear friend and comrade-in-poetry shared Abbas Kiarostami’s poems with me, she said - “His poems capture the images that his camera couldn’t” - a definition of startling precision that is mirrored in the poems themselves. Even Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks of how the many scattered, unfinished stories that he wrote early in his life found their way into A hundred years of solitude. It is interesting to see poetry as the detritus of a creative mind; a notebook continuously recording images that are not always meant for display or publication. Kiarostami best describes this way of seeing:

My mind is like a laboratory or refinery, with ideas as crude oil. It’s as if there were a filter channelling the assorted suggestions in different directions. An image comes to mind and ends up imposing itself so obsessively that I find no rest until something is done with it, until it is somehow incorporated into a project. This is where poetry proves itself to be so convenient and useful for me. Some of the images in my head are simple, like someone drinking wine from a disposable cup, a box of wet matches in an abandoned house, a broken stool sitting in my back yard. But others are more complex, like a white foal emerging and then disappearing into the fog, a graveyard covered in snow that is melting on only three headstones, a hundred soldiers going into their barracks on a moonlit night, a grasshopper jumping and sitting, flies circling a mule as it walks from one village to the next, an autumn wind blowing leaves into my house, a child with blackened hands sitting surrounded by hundreds of fresh walnuts. How much time would it take to commit those images to film? How difficult would it be to find a subject for a film into which those images could be incorporated? This is why poetry is so rewarding. When I work on a poem, my desire to create an image is satisfied in only four lines. Taken together, the words become the image. My poems are like films that don’t cost anything to produce.

…But then again, they cost everything.