Meena Alexander

Triptych in a Time of War

Why hunch at the screen chipping syllables, chewing up rhyme?

You’re no Forugh Farrokhzad, registered 678 in the sun’s throat –

counting out jewels in the city street, dead in a car crash, aged thirty two.

You’re older by far, thrice failed your driving test,

never visited a leprosarium or Zahir al-Doleh cemetary in Tehran

where trees leak snow.

Where she whispers as a child might, smoking burnt out tips,

a slip of a thing dressed in white rags

filled with light --

I did it, I got myself, registered,

dressed myself up in an ID with a name.

So long 678... O rattling law!

II.

O the bomb is fear’s flower

there is no love in the bomb,

only chaos, the sea must swallow.

The flowers of Mesapotamia are tiny, blue edged,

driven under the skin of earth. But where can children hide?

The mouth of the cave is rimmed with red.

Spring brings the golden mustard seed and clouds of war

float over the ziggurat of Ur.

Enheduanna is poised on an alabastor disc.

She has nose breasts hands a poet needs, also

that sweet etcetera, dark flower who sheds blood and eggs and praises

to be sung at twilight into the high hold of heaven.

You remember her and Forugh too who fought against pain.

Their stanzas flicker on the internet,

you flee a windowless office,

climb the stairs to the eighth floor, enter a high room.

Light spills through sloping glass,

clouds drift and float,

you hear the clatter of knives in the cafeteria.

On an eastern wall the Dove of Tanna,

wings raised, mute blessing in a time of need.

The artist born a year after Forugh, cut up aluminium for the dove’s tail

infolding fire, icon of earth struck free of flood waters,

pediment of peace beneath the arrow's flight.

You have come to a high room

in search of language that could tell of love,

of love alone, uncumbered and to search for it, as for justice

even in the guise of what has no words and cannot speak

and must lie down in the dark

hungry and unappeased..

III.

Out of the spotted beak of the dove,

out of the olive tree axed into bits,

out of blood a child touches to her lips murmuring words no one else can hear,

out of the eyes of the woman who stands shock still in sunlight

and flings open the door

and Bombay rushes in a tiger that brings her to her knees:

a vividness of island sky and wind,

(she strolls by a slurry wall that held back island waters after catastrophe)

visionary company, electric water, fiery wind

where what is torn and severed slips out of soiled skin,

is seized in simple nakedness,

named and healed.

So turning to little bits of wisdom -- do not hurt, do not cut,

love in all the right places and the wrong.

There is no fault in love.

The boughs know this cracking free of winter

in the cemetary where Forugh’s body lies,

so too the Dove of Tanna.

It takes flight from the eastern wall of 365 Fifth Avenue

and settles on the ziggurat of Ur

by a crater where a bomb burst.

Returning to the office without walls

you hear Enheduanna cry

O the ziggurat of Ur is crowned with doves!

You hear her words unfurl on the screen,

bare sound, filled with longing,

syllables of raw silk, this poem.

Note:

(composed March 7-26, 2003, New York City).

The poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-67) lived in Teheran and wrote fierce, dazzling poems, the lines in italics in section 1 are taken from her poem `O Bejewelled Land’. I have drawn on the translation by Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallee in their book Another Birth, Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (Emeryville, Albany Press, 1981) Enheduanna (circa 2300 B.C.E.) is the earliest poet known in recorded history. She lived in Mesapotamia – her likeness is to be found on an alabastor disc preserved in the University of Pennsylvania museum. The creator of Dove of Tanna is Frank Stella; the artwork hangs on the eastern wall of the atrium at 365 Fifth Avenue, CUNY Graduate Centre

(Published in Meena Alexander, Raw Silk, TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2004)

Meena Alexander

Bengali Market

Dear Mr. Gandhi

It was cold the day the masjid

was torn down stone by stone,

colder still at the heart of Delhi

Ten years later entering Bengali market

I saw a street filled with bicycles

girls with rushing hair, boys in bright caps

I heard a voice cry

Can you describe this?

It sounded like a voice

from a city crusted with snow

to the far north of the Asian continent.

I saw him then, your grandson

in a rusty three wheeler

wrapped up in what wools he could muster.

Behind him in red letters

a sign: Dr. Gandhi’s Clinic.

So he said, embracing me, you’ve come back.

Then pointing to the clinic --

Its not that I’m sick

that gentleman gets my mail and I his.

That is why I am perched in this contraption.

I cannot stay long, it is Id ul Fitr.

I must greet friends in Old Delhi, wish them well.

Later he sought me out in dreams.

in a high kitchen in sharp sunlight

dressed in a khadi kurta, baggy jeans.

He touched my throat in greeting.

Listen my sweet, for half of each year,

after the carriage was set on fire

after the Gujarat killings,

I disappear into darkness..

In our country there are two million dead

and more for whom no rites were said.

No land on earth can bear this.

Rivers are criss-crossed with blood.

All day I hear the scissor bird cry

cut cut cut cut cut

It is the bird Kalidasa heard

as he stood singing of buried love.

Now our boys and girls take

flight on rusty bicycles.

Will we be cured? I cried

And he: We have no tryst with destiny.

My hands like yours are stained

with the juice of the pomegrante.

Please don’t ask for my address.

I am in and out of Bengali market.

(Published in Meena Alexander, Raw Silk, TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2004)

Muse

I was young when you came to me.

Each thing rings its turn,

you sang in my ear, a slip of a thing

dressed like a convent girl--

white socks, shoes,

dark blue pinafore, white blouse.

A pencil box in hand: girl, book, tree --

those were the words you gave me.

Girl was penne, hair drawn back,

gleaming on the scalp,

the self in a mirror in a rosewood room

the sky at monsoon time, pearl slits,

in cloud cover, a jagged music pours:

gash of sense, raw covenant

clasped still in a gold bound book,

pusthakam pages parted,

ink rubbed with mist,

a bird might have dreamt its shadow there

spreading fire in a tree maram.

You murmured the word, sliding it on your tongue,

trying to get how a girl could turn

into a molten thing and not burn.

Centuries later worn out from travel

I rest under a tree.

You come to me

a bird shedding gold feathers,

each one a quill scraping my tympanum.

You set a book to my ribs.

Night after night I unclasp it

at the mirror's edge

alphabets flicker and soar.

Write in the light

of all the languages

you know the earth contains,

you murmur in my ear.

This is pure transport.

(Published in Meena Alexander, Illiterate Heart (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2002)

Meena Alexander

Indian April

Allen Ginsberg on a spring day you stopped

naked in a doorway in Rajasthan.

You were preparing to wash, someone took a snapshot:

I see your left hand bent back

cigarette in your mouth

Metal basin set at your ankles

heat simmering at the edges of your skin

in Indian air, in water.

Rinsed clean you squatted at the threshold again,

struck a bhajan on a tin can.

Watched Mira approach, her hair a black mass

so taut it could knock over a lamppost,

skin on her fists raw from rubbing chipped honeypots.

In the middle distance,

like a common bridegroom

Lord Krishna rides a painted swing.

You ponder this, not sure

if an overdose of poetry

might crash a princess.

Later in the alley way you note

a zither leapt from a blind baul's fist.

William Blake's death mask,

plaster cast with the insignia of miracles.

In a burning ghat the sensorium's ruin:

a man's spine and head poked with a stick

so bone might crisp into ash, vapors spilt

into terrible light where the Ganga pours.

II.

I was born at the Ganga's edge.

My mother wrapped me in a bleached sari,

laid me in stiff reeds, in hard water.

I tried to keep my nostrils above mud,

learnt how to use my limbs, how to float.

This earth is filled with black water,

small islands with bristling vines afford us some hold.

Tired out with your journals you watch

Mira crouch by the rough stones of the alley.

Her feet are bare, they hurt her.

So much flight for a poet, so much persistence.

Allen Ginsberg, where are you now?

Engine of flesh, hot sunflower of Mathura,

Teach us to glide into life,

teach us when not to flee,

when to rejoice, when to weep,

teach us to clear our throats.

III.

Kaddish, Kaddish I hear you cry

in the fields of Central Park.

He brought me into his tent

and his banner over me was love.

I learn from you that the tabernacles of grace

are lodged in the prickly pear,

the tents of heaven torn by sharp vines,

running blackberry,

iron from the hummingbird's claw.

He brought me into his tent

and his banner over me was love

Yet now he turns his face from me.

Krishna you are my noose, I your knife.

And who shall draw apart

from the misericordia of attachment?

IV.

Holy the cord of death, the sensual palaces

of our feasting and excrement.

Holy, the waters of the Ganga, Hudson, Nile,

Pamba, Mississippi, Mahanadi.

Holy the lake in Central Park, bruised eye of earth,

mirror of heaven

where you leap beard first

this April morning, resolute, impenitent,

not minding the pointed reeds, spent syringes,

pale, uncoiled condoms.

You understood the kingdom of the quotidian,

groundhogs in heat, the arrhythmia of desire.

I see you young again

teeth stained with betel and bhang,

nostrils tense with the smoke of Manhattan,

ankles taut in a yogic asana, prickly with desire.

You who sang America are flush now with death,

your poems -- bits of your spine and skull --

ablaze in black water drawing you on.

Allen Ginsberg your flesh is indigo,

the color of Krishna's face, Mira's bitter grace.

Into hard water you leap, drawing me on

I hear you call : Govinda, aaou, aoou!

(Published in Meena Alexander, Illiterate Heart (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2002)