THE DAY WE WENT TO THE SEA
The day we went to the sea
Mothers in
The Marina for missing children.
Thatch flew in the sky, prisoners
Ran free, houses danced like danger
In the wind. I saw a woman hold
The tattered edge of the world
In her hand, look past the temple
Which was still standing, as she was —
Miraculously whole in the debris of gaudy
South Indian sun. When she moved
Her other hand across her brow,
In a single arcing sweep of grace,
It was as if she alone could alter things,
Bring us to the wordless safety of our beds.
WHAT THE BODY KNOWS
The body dances in a darkened room
Turning itself inside out
So that skin can face the light in fractures,
Slip like shadow through skeleton walls,
Begin to cry — really — to scream
About the tarnished weight of dreams.
This has been a drift after all.
The body returns to its original place,
Moves from one to the other — creeps —
Tries to flee itself, lone trunk,
Searches for remain of bark,
Hints of what it used to be.
Perhaps an ocean framed in bone,
A pair of birds in early white,
Flying from this dream to the next
Fixing the gaps between memory
And reverberation; binding spine
On vein, feather to lesion.
The body collects its wandering parts,
Leans back through layers
Of thickening water; roots above
Boughs beneath, feet caving in to wonder.
It’s how the world reverses itself,
How the distant sky finds the earth.
I.
I hold my husband in plastic bags.
He’s whispering like a soft, worn thing,
Drop
me here, drop me gently.
Everything is terribly light — incense,
Ash, the thinness of his voice falling
Into waves, disappearing.
II.
The sea picks up my life,
Empties it across itself.
I see it spilling over, dissolving.
Here are the forgotten parts —
A pink night sky, broken bangles,
A fisherman walking away from
the light.
There you are, held up with wind and sails.
If you would turn, you would hear me say,
Come back, my arms ache from all the carrying.
Underneath, you’re lost in a place
Where everything is scraped together
And nothing is thrown back.
You sink. Colours dissolve.
You move hair from your forehead,
Salt from your eyes. You’re left with greys —
Calling out to me, bubbles
Instead of words. It is a silent death:
One I feel before it happens.
III.
Was there a child then? The child I could not
have?
With hair that shakes and shines as though a
sun
Were gleaming under her
roots. I want to stroke her.
Lean over and touch her. Come here, let me
hold you.
I want only daughters — a thick rope of black
Around her neck. She calls; the beginning of your name.
If I were really a mother, I would do it quick
And painless, out of love. Take the hair —
Twist, yank, drop; tilt her over like a bag of
sand.
It would be done then. There would be less
To clean up. She will never be like me.
The death of her child will kill her.
IV.
If you must collect pictures, take them
When I’m looking away. Here’s a beach again —
The nets spread on the sand drying,
A fish in the corner
slapping its tail.
Nothing matters then,
We’ll meet when we’re warm and dry.
Take this picture — my shoulders, the bone,
The shine, the criss-cross
of white straps.
V.
I’m eight-years-old, running into the sea.
Run in, my
mother says, Go on then like a naked girl.
Nobody cares, nobody’s watching.
The sea pulls me in around the ankles,
Grabs the sand from underneath, shows me
A glimpse of my life, what
it will be like later.
It was all calm once, long ago, a teardrop
Between apartment buildings. But here in my life;
Hiss hiss. This one
is no good.
This one doesn’t love you.
This one doesn’t know what you need.
Leave, let go, stop.
The frothy fingers at my throat,
The voice pouring into me,
A terrace of vanishing blue.
You
will leave this one.
You
will leave this place.
For a while you will know nothing.
THE AFFAIR
These days men on curbs are curved
Like farm tools or bits of wire,
Like unruly saucers of tea flung
Into the trees, the walls, the breeze.
Houses are shifting too —
Up and going on emerald shoes,
Colliding on streets, spitting
Bits of brick and splinter on our sleeves.
This one holds a wife
Standing at the bleak stairway of a dream,
Grappling with her wedding veil;
With mothballs and pearls and girls.
See, the husband is rising — a shipwreck
Disappearing against a photograph
Of beaten love. He’s separating pink
From dark, fodder from cloud,
Movement from half-movement.
We can throw away these things:
The sweat, the chests, the hair,
The dead weight of despair dropping
Into the living rooms of our lives;
The broken furniture, the cracked foundations.
I claim you back, the wife says to him.
She claims him back.
But what of this youngest one
Inching along the sinew of the floor?
He knows nothing- little kernel of snail —
Except to unfurl along his silver trail.
THE DELIVERER
The sister here is telling my mother
How she came to collect children
Because they were crippled or dark or girls.
Found naked in the streets,
Covered in garbage, stuffed in bags,
Abandoned at their doorstep.
One of them was dug up by a dog,
Thinking the head barely poking above the ground
Was bone or wood, something to chew.
This is the one my mother will bring.
* * *
The parents wait at the gates.
They are American so they know about ceremony
And tradition, about doing things right.
They haven’t seen or touched her yet.
Don’t know of her fetish for plucking hair off hands,
Or how her mother tried to bury her.
But they are crying.
Feeling the strangeness of her empty arms.
* * *
This girl grows up on video tapes,
Sees how she’s passed from woman
To woman. She returns to twilight
corners.
To the day of her birth,
How it happens in some desolate hut
Outside village boundaries
Where mothers go to squeeze out life,
Watch body slither out from body,
Feel for penis or no penis,
Toss the baby to the heap of others,
Trudge home to lie down for their men again.
Rilke is following me everywhere
With his tailor-made suits
And vegetarian smile.
He says because I’m young,
I’m always beginning,
And cannot know love.
He sees how I’m a giant piece
Of glass again, trying
To catch the sun
In remote corners of rooms,
Mountain tops, uncertain
Places of light.
He speaks of the cruelty
Of hospitals, the stillness
Of cathedrals,
Takes me through bodies
And arms and legs
Of such extravagant size,
The ancient sky burrows in
With all the dead words
We carry and cannot use.
He holds up mirrors
From which our reflections fall —
Half-battered existences,
Where we lose ourselves
For the sake of the other,
And the others
still to come.
LOVE IN
Girls were crying yesterday in their ball gowns;
Holding each other up like poles of wilted beanstalks.
I wanted to carry them into the streets.
To the unused railroad track in the middle of town,
Unwrap the past and lay before them
A fragile girl I once knew, walking toward love
In a thin, determined way. That she should
live here too —
In this town of carefully-guarded houses
And old ladies in rocking chairs
In fake pearls and printed button-down dresses.
Girls are crying in their ball gowns and boys
Are holding them up and taking them to the streets,
To warehouses or backs of deserted pick-up trucks.
A troubadour waits on a wooden porch
For the faultless girl, to speak her name,
Undress her, give noise to her that is new and violent.
The old ladies form a line and hold photographs
Against their faces where the skin used to be
unbroken.
They step out from their dresses and kick off their shoes,
Cross over the barren tracks in their solitary dance.
OPEN HANDS
In
Peering at me from
behind cupboards and trees,
Chortling with
glee: Hello fine!
Here is space. Here
is space.
It is open and
large and dark here
And I feel open and
large and dark.
I’m moving into a
scene already imagined,
A life already
waiting under the topaz sky,
Under the blue
lacquered trees where the dust
Is
spiralling up to hide it.
The boy teaches me
names of animals.
They are spread out
and running under us:
Giraffe,
lion, hippopotamus — Twiga, simba, kiboko.
What if it isn’t
true that we inherit our homes?
It’s lovely here isn’t, the boy says.
It’s lovely.
So we must make
meanings of things:
A carcass of a
jackal in a baobab tree,
A man’s fingers
pushing up the straps of your maroon dress,
A low wood-beamed
room full of misgivings.
The boy holds me in
his lanolin arms,
Looks at me as
though I were a sheet of glass,
A single antelope
facing a row of acacias,
An
unending ruinous landscape.
It’s the hardest thing
to do —
To take him aside,
feel his pigmentless skin —
Explain how there’s
so much space
I’ve lost myself.
How I cannot be
this woman
Looking to a
foreign sky for the day,
Disappeared again,
leaving only a dim glow
In my hands to remember it by.
I once chased my brother
Down to the edge of the sea.
We ran past sheets and towels
Spread like sky on the beach,
Between strips of cloth,
Drying chilli and tamarind.
Past slums shackled to the shore –
A maze of thatch roofs and cowdung
Caked walls. And then I lost him,
Searched loudly for him, called his name.
Said, Come out or else –
All the usual tricks.
A woman cleaning rice on her knees
In a blouse done up with safety pins
Pointed to a hut with a single weary finger –
Where he was hiding with a water buffalo.
The low blue lights of the television flickering.
He was inside, laughing so hard,
Shaking his head back and forth,
I thought the joy would come tearing out from him.
Afterwards, we sat in something like silence –
His rare chubby hand in mine,
Listening to the breath of living water.
TURNING
INTO MEN AGAIN
This morning men are returning to the world,
Waiting on the sides of blackened pavements
For a rickshaw to carry them away
On the sharp pins and soles of their dancing feet.
They must go to the houses of their
childhoods
To be soothed. They must wait for the
wheels
To appear from the thin arm of road.
They must catch the crack in the sky
Where the light shifts from light to dark
To light again, like the body in the first stages of love;
Angering, heightening, spreading:
Bent knees, bent breath.
Now they are moving, changing colours.
Women are standing at the thresholds of doors
Holding jars of oil, buckets of hot water and salt,
Calamine, crushed mint and drink.
Some crawl into their mother’s laps,
Collapse against the heavy bosoms of old nannies,
Search for the girl who climbed with them
To the tin roof for the first time.
Inside, in the shadows of pillars,
Fathers and grandfathers are stepping down
From picture frames with secrets on their lips,
Calling the lost in from their voyages.