Today I am fascinated by Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem, “Brink of Life,” published in his chapbook, Solitude Is An Acrobatic Act, (Above/Ground Press, 2020). Because I am fascinated, I want to peer closer. So I will.

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born Toronto-based writer and translator. He is an immigrant who misses his first language enough to return to it, to keep it alive through translation.

I suspect that poets who translate have a different relationship to language than poets who do not. Sometimes I suspect the number of words a poet uses diminishes in direct proportion to the amount of time they spend translating other poet’s words; it’s as if each word becomes heavier or carries more. Or maybe it’s the opposite.

The title of Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem begins on the brink of something—the brink of life—and we expect the poem to develop this, which also links to defining life somehow. You can’t be on the brink of something undefined. The word “brink” designates an edge, a boundary, a cliff, a limit.

It is a short, one-stanza poem—everything is given to us in eleven lines—and this compactness makes its structure visually significant. The architecture stands out in a way that it wouldn’t if this were a longer poem, if it asked more from the eye, if it were busier, if it spread its energy across stanzas.

There is no punctuation, no period at the end to denote closure.

There is one capital letter at the beginning, and the word “Children” is the only word that receives this sort of visual attention.

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject an unwanted body

Right away, one senses the motion will blur the end of line from another, and this, in turn, will make it hard to distinguish which body is the subject. —And I love this. I love this. I love that the line doesn’t read “Children are delivered like parcels” because the absence of “are” is the absence of an equal sign, or an equivalence.

It’s amazing what the tiniest verb (or its absence) can insinuate. This absence shifts the weight of the address from a first person witness to a mystery. The speaker is there and not there. The speaker is thinking, and delivering images which connect.

The motion from the first line to the second line is seamless, but something happens in the middle of the second line: a tiny crack opens up, and the poet’s decision not to use a comma is (I think) a decision to keep the motion blurred, to keep the equals out.

Read it with a comma. The comma clarifies, or serves a sorting function:

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject, an unwanted body

The poet’s lack of punctuation is accomplishing something here—it is making it hard to tell which body is unwanted, or what part is a parcel—it is blurring the container and the contained.

Mohammadi disorients us again with the next line, an image that pulls away from life but indicates time, indicates simultaneity:

while dolls await in triage

He doesn’t say the babies are like dolls—he posits the dolls alongside, or in the same poem-space, as children and bodies. Just when I think he is going to clarify or make a distinction, the poet swerves, shifts into swift anaphora, piling metaphor atop definition:

a child as a gift leased from the hospital
a child compounds interest daily
questions questions questions

I linger here. I know that the brink of life is not going to be the line I expected. I realize that the motion enacted by the poem is actually altering the form of a brink, curving it, turning it into a circling motion.

figures abstracted in privacy glass
mirrors are ashamed of reflecting
no longer show the woman her body

I realize that the mirrors have more agency, more power to verb, than children.

I also realize that the dolls had a similar agency—the dolls could wait. The inanimate surrounding objects could do more, or act with more volition, than the children or the child or the unwanted body who are acted upon.

Even in the woman’s relation to the mirror, it is the mirror who can show—not the woman who is looking. The poet doesn’t tell us that she is looking. The poet tells us what the mirror is doing, or not doing, namely, showing.

And so I am at this brink, where life is not something which seems to belong to the human subjects, but to the surrounding objects.

I know the poem is almost over. I know I am further from an edge because there is no line, no delineation. Picking up where the poet left off—“her body”—I read through to the end:

a soul cemented in language through names
a life nestled within life in language

Here, her body is defined as a soul cemented in language through names. Her body is defined as a life nestled within life in language. There is no reference to fetuses or babies or children—it is the woman’s body who is centered in this final, circling motion (which the repetition of life in that last line helps to accomplish).

I love this poem for the way it withholds comfort somehow. I love the way it leaves us alone, separate, and yet bound by a life which names us. I’m not sure if the poet intended a larger point about the role or importance of names—and I’m not sure I need that from this poem in order to feel it does important things.

“I want my poems to keep someone company,” Mohammadi said in an interview.

I suspect many of us live in that loneliness—in the relationship we build into the poem, and the hand it stretches across an invisible room, asking to be read, to be of use, to be felt.

This is the cover image from his chapbook. Because solitude is both titular and transcendent in Mohammadi’s work, I tried to see if it speaks to this “brink of life,” and the tension in that relationship. There is a man pushing a single tree a top a hill. Or the tree has fallen over and the man is trying to plant it or re-root it. There is something that wants to stay and someone that is doing unclear things related to roots which could go either way.

There is no brink, quite. But there is the aloneness. There are two forms of life, and each as alone as the other, and maybe this, itself, is the relationship.

You can follow Khashayar on twitter here or read his incredible translations online. I don’t think you’ll regret it.