Year: 2017

Without interruption on the surface, our biases work
like invisible engines driving what we do. When you
visited for the first time, alighting from the plane,
you smiled then whispered nervously: I hear there are
many blacks here? Having grown up where we did, far east
in a country that used to be a colony of the one where I
now make my home, I understood this wasn’t something
seeded from cruelty, but rather from an idea we were taught
before we even learned to think: how beauty was everything
white and blond, everything unlike our brown selves
parroting See Jane run! and Look, Dick, look!— their picket
fence and buttoned cardigans alien and fascinating as the two
yellow braids Jennifer Moser wore in grade school. I touched
them out of curiosity: for which I was promptly disciplined.

I watched you but never learned to sew facing
and interfacing, while understanding how two

pieces cut from the same fabric could still pull
away from each other, though forcibly joined

at the seam— Just like how you were aways careful
to match the colors of every outfit, finish with scent

and lipstick and jewelry; while I chafed at mohair
twin sets and pantyhose. I’m past your age when you

decided on the dresses of my wedding entourage: yards
of lace and chiffon, pearls. Now I grow increasingly

comfortable wearing jeans to work, though I’ll top them
with a clean-lined jacket, a sweater in fine wool.

Something to do with warp and weft, how to make two
biases work, without visibly interrupting the surface.

What does it mean when someone is speaking,
not asking, yet the sounds they make seem to curl

harmlessly upward like a question mark? I’ve an old
fear of looking too hard beneath the blunt ends of things

—something might break open at last. For a long time
I carried my agate carapace in pieces, proof of

another form, proof of having once been seen, before
something was taken. After, it dangled from my waist

in a sling bag. I wanted to piece them back together:
with red and yellow seeds, an eye-shaped amulet.

I know it’s sometimes hard to tell from looking
what I used to be. There are faint finger marks

going down the middle of the spine, as if to stopper
holes in a flute. That’s how I learned not all

undoing means yes, or I agreed to this. For a long
time it hurt to put the voice back in the throat.

“The capitals of the world are burning.” ~ Li-young Lee

In fact, she doesn’t mind the quiet after everyone has left. Doesn’t want to turn the TV on. Picks up the paper flung at the doorstep at 5, and promptly tosses it in the recycling bin. The quality of silence is different at different points of the day, or of the year. At midmorning in spring, like a film that’s just beginning to settle on the surface of milk as it cools in a cup; or in summer, the barest crinkle of plastic protecting the furniture, as one shifts one’s thighs. Later at night in autumn, like the smooth insides of a pear after the knife has sliced it in half. She listens to how the air cycles, warm puffs of heat coming through the vents. It’s nice sometimes to just press one’s spine to the wooden floor. But of course none of this lasts. In the next room someone is turning dials to listen to the radio— people marching in the streets of Warsaw, sounds and cries in a different tongue. Mixed all together like that, it’s impossible to distinguish young from old, who might have been invoking the name of God while trampling women underfoot. Elsewhere, in a little southern town, the walls and floor of a church have been painted over, all in white. The report describes white chairs with gold lettering, one for each of the dead; just one red rose on each chair. A halo of perfection over the site of carnage. She can’t understand why none of the reverence which goes into these acts of memorializing is ever given before people are maimed, burned, beheaded, shot.

And in Babelplatz square,
underground: empty white shelves.
20,000 books once burned there.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Sylvanian.

Who remembers the time the three of them lived together in the garden, or for how long? Branches with deep green scales linked arms sinuously. Fruit glistened and asked to be picked. One day he sat down in the shade, overcome by a strange sadness. She asked him why he watered his hands with tears. He looked up and said, I don’t know how old I am. Do you know how old I am? She had no answer. The next day the sun came up as it always did before. The sky remained silent. Not even a hint of thunder from over the hills, like a muffled voice on the intercom. The days passed like this for a very long time. I say time, but also I remember how they didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference. Who knows if it was a month, a year, fifteen years? A marriage of one day can feel like a feather-stuffed comforter, a weighted blanket, a copper-clad kettle darkening in the fire.

Bathing in the river,
she let the water speak
to her about thirst.

We’ve slipped the clocks back to fool
the darkness, though it is never misled—
The script says, upon getting up we must then
joyfully put our hands together at the sight
of sunlight. Year after year, I’ve tried
to perfect such a skill. But today
when I held out my hand for the woman
painting mehndi, she drew scallops
and lines that circled my wrist
like a net. I turned it this way and that,
mud-colored fish delighting in scales.
Thus everything swirls into a tight
bud of shadow, then fans out as
abundance of arabesques. Beautiful night,
gradually I learn to lean my weight
like the honeysuckle does at the edge
of the trellis, though my throat
wants to open like the flower that blooms
only a few times each year. To desire
like that— to look forward to one brilliance
after fifty weeks of whispering little
swan or sweetest darling.
Or to lie quietly in the cell, listening
for the one that utters her true name.