a clamoring for brightness, yet
as I add in days by the handful
they grow distant, dimming in
I see the river has flatlined
I did not intend, I did not
think to do it on my own
to on my own
run: around, out, away
As if the sun floats belly up
and if I can do it, my darlings
if I can do it, why can't I?
Why can't I
check: list, mate, out
(Red Cedar, MSU Riverwalk)
1
you talk like therapy I aim like an arrow
slipping sleeping pills then crash like a bomb
in between sentences like a stupid mecha god
2
buried in the fizz we're hard to imagine
in far-off messages but echoes keep finding us--
from baby monitors like they're rescue dogs
3
I still don't know if I should forgive you
I still don't know if I need to be forgiven
to the louder comfort
of that old loneliness
the bright, uneven burn
of acceptable syllables,
premonitions of escape
This isn't my birthplace and I am
louder for my heart is misplaced;
I dwindle but first I do no harm.
Then I turn calm, you must come
too--time shrugs on, on its own.
*
He hugs the walls when he walks
my sister says of our dad.
We should have bars in the shower
my husband says of my dad.
I think of my dad--
mightiest of his four brothers
how he sat all his brothers on his
meaty biceps--or was that Bhima
also second-born--I'm confused
by the words rolling in my mouth.
*
It's easy to break, ask water--what's
next in the shadow of time's coming.
Of first learning to trust every day's
ordinary dance, stepping to calm,
to harm; saying: I'll take it.
--------------------------
Notes:
My father actually has six brothers, but my youngest uncle is seventeen years younger than dad and so the five older brothers were routinely referred to as the Pandavas in dad's childhood. Dad, although affected by polio as toddler, was somehow also the strongest and sportiest brother--captain of several teams in both school and college.
I routinely confused stories about dad and Bhima when I was a kid. Still do. I don't know if seating all the brothers on his arms was a dad thing, a Bhima thing, or a dad thing inspired by Bhima... and I'm not going to try to find out. Naturally, I was shaken when my sister told me this morning how weakened he's become because he looks not very different in photos and when we video chat.
The Mahabharatha because it is so long (the longest!) and has so many embedded frametales sometimes works on me as a reminder of how life is transient. Lives get lost in that huge narrative, and somehow recognizing individual insignificance is calming? Here, I'm reaching for an abridged version of that fatalistic calm.
Distance is a huge in the pandemic, and I yearn to see everyone 'back home' knowing it may not happen for months or even this year. So the other part of what I was trying to do was to call back to the old country "Bharat/Bharatha."
Yes, I am almost lost in
this small, intimate forest
from the supermarket florist
(carnations I bought myself).
I embrace their candy beauty
how gracefully their economy
aligns ( just so you know--
they must have cost <$7.99).
I address their bodies with
eye caresses, knowing the dears
may last for weeks--or for ever
(if you're counting in flower years).
Morning:
I asked my mentor
to send gifts of time
(I have no mentor)
(I barely have time)
Noon:
if the moment comes
it will be innominate
when the cure comes
I'll seem unsentimental
Night:
we think only of bones
now afloat in this stew
while we thank the flesh
caught anew in every bite
cradle this role
of an unnamed
creature in our
unreal world
offer backbone
roots open into
constellations
in snowy filaments
of tired memory
you tried to believe
in figments I know
from the brutality
of everything we
carry, when only
fragments of story
are ours to control
We know we are every
-one, belong every
place, matter some
-times in epilogue
My form is a machine My breath is punctuation
it will work all day pretending to be a landfill
on knots of goodbye of commas, frozen periods;
--going, going, gone-- it turns up the light, keeps
hard to say--if that's inky spaces of silence and
even--home? heaven? whispered sleep to myself
also, which way home looks me in the eye, parses
--the world is so small the dirge of a sigh, impresses
yet full with forgetting the stray forevers of my lips
Detainee
I might be free--or not;
I don't know
for I have obeyed in advance
Distance
the atlas of my family
fold close
the stretched out assault
Disinvited
for I have obeyed in advance
I apologize for-
giving-you-a-piece-of-my-mind
I can weigh the difference of a day
I doubt most resurrections--yet
the rhizomatic tenderness of your banks
are prayer: lilting, tidal, endlessly
old / done / enduring--but
even in the porous ecstasy of freeze, I know
the delirium of loss, know you won't
take me any place to call home
while I keep walking
everywhere.
Silence sings here, shame too--
like a mosquito hymn
in my ear.
Perhaps I'm a savant of fracture
on an enraptured
exiled page--
perhaps I've siphoned my love
into stories just a little
or too late.
I'll rearrange for my fingers to speak
to the clouds
unfolding like a migraine confession
I mean, I mean
You've cried so much, your eyes
drop like pebbles
and wait to show you a way home
I try, to free
the mistakes I made as a parent
then I draw you,
my love, as a silent self-portrait
***********************
A detail from a mural in the Children's Garden (early morning walking date with L!).
It has been a year. Some days it feels like yesterday, some days it feels like a distant dream of love. There have been tears every day...
