MY FIRST (AND ONLY) GHAZAL

Sometimes I try poetic forms new to me. Sometimes, they click for me and sometimes they don't. One that didn't click was the ghazal (which is not to say it's not a lovely form). But recent unpacking of items from long-term storage elicited the one ghazal I've ever written ... and I thank Central Coast Poetry Shows for publishing it by making me their featured poet today on their Facebook page--"Day 584 Poetry." The ghazal (to date) is not the \ form for me but, as I say in the poem's last line:

"O Beloved! I was the wrong dame!"

Since the poem is on Facebook, I replicate poem here for those of you not traversing FB (the long lines just continue on to next line):

RICHARD WOULD WRITE MY FIRST GHAZAL

while floating on the Seine, noon light lingering, south side of Notre Dame

feet up on starboard, tide gentle, memory searching for a red-haired dame

where grey rocks polka-dot Pacific Grove, breathing space at the Seven Collars Inn

overlooking an aqua sea, flecks of white tissuing chin, nibbles piled on a giggling dame

at the Monterey Fish Grotto overlooking “The Point” where the Allegheny and Monongahela

join like thighs in Pittsburgh (the sommelier bleary-eyed), biding his breath with a wide-hipped dame

on a smelly dock creaking in Beach Bay Harbor, Maine, savoring streetside lobster rolls

$7-$8 per sandwich—“heaven cheap at that price”—colliding tongues with a succulent dame

over Calistoga or Arcadia National Park—“don’t matter where”—to ride a hang glider

and hear from the open cockpit a high-pitched susurrus like bliss cried out by a childhood dame

with Susan on her porch—“I smell her perfume to this very day”—wheat napping beyond the horizon

“How did I come to be denied the scent of jasmine permeating the hair on that low-lidded dame?”

Or on a slatted bench in Stag’s Leap courtyard with a glass of chardonnay, then cabernet

where Richard outlined this poem, no hiccups in his stride though I, Eileen, was the wrong dame—

Oh, Beloved! I was the wrong dame!