Augustinian Heart
We talk about art and its source
of greatness.
How a painting or poem could move you like
a religious impulse, spirit and matter infused,
true and beautiful.
Year after year each time you read that poem, or
see that painting, a still-life, a self-portrait,
an abstract landscape so loved by the artist
you ache to touch it, to hold it.
______
We talk into the night.
Behind the house, the crescent moon silvers
the wilderness dark.
In the flesh of my hand—the knowledge of your flesh:
all I need; all I know.
If art is a private religion, so is love. We take it all to heart,
as if, Augustine said, our existence depends upon our having loved.
Beauty
so ancient and so new.
We try to tell each other about the sacred
what needs to be visible to the jaded eye.
______
.
The long slow walk leads us back to each other.
Winter air frosts our bones and our cold arms are full
of each other and the everyday immortal ache of spirit for matter,
of matter for spirit.
I have come to understand this is the same need
grasped through the lips hands body and in the
vision that if we touch what we love, if we hold it,
behold it, then it will last.
—from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets, edited
by
—also published in Reading
Like a Girl.
Anthem
1
Place your hands that I love upon me.
Say my name as prayer. Taste each
brine sweet syllable. This is what will
haunt us. Stone hearts in our mouths.
Your love will not be salvation.
This I know.
2
Watch me burn. The cells of my old body
melt away. Bracelet my wrists with your grip.
Drink the blue that rivers my hands. Make my bones
lovely.
3
Meet the rush of my wants, meet the
light of outrage, the after-burn. Edgelit.
4
Language is always culpable. Grammar
a climate of love. Write in the colors of a
Tintoretto dusk. Slice of moon, scrape of sky,
armfuls of rain. Read me with conviction, absolute.
Fit your words to me like the precise cut
of tuxedo, riding jacket, Dior gown.
5
Take every journey into the past,
delusions, false namings of events.
Take memory that gnaws on the ribs and
turn it into prophecy. Revise me until brave
new days bloom in my throat.
6
Love me. Cradle me in gentleness.
Release the heart’s shroud. Make me the
last poem in your book. Let me hear you say
I want this more than anything. This love will
not save us. I would run from it but it is the
only grace. Love. Lean into its slant. Postscript
of light in every century.
—from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets, edited
by
—also published in Reading
Like a Girl.
First Lessons: Postcolonial
Every morning my mother would
part my hair down the middle, plait
it into long braids reaching down to
my waist. I would walk with the other
neighbourhood kids to Briarwood Elementary
School, absent-minded, face always
in a book, reading as I walked, dressed like
the other girls in dark navy tunics, white blouses,
novitiate-like collars.
Those days, my knees were always scraped
and skinned from roller-skating on the concrete
slopes of
my neck, flying, weightless
my father continuously swabbing my cuts with
hydrogen peroxide, scabs peeking out over the
tops of white kneesocks,
my
In class, we stood at attention
spines stiffened to the strains of singing
God Save the Queen to the Union Jack
recited The Lord’s Prayer
hallowed be thy name, learned lessons
from a Gideon’s bible.
In geography and history lessons the
teacher would unroll the giant map of
the world from the ceiling, use her
wooden pointer to show the countries
of the Empire, the slow spread of a faded
red stain that marked them, soft burgundy
like the colour of my father’s turbans.
Ancient
history. Crisp whites of
cricket
matches at officers’ clubs. Afternoon tea
in the pavilion.
Decades later I can reconstruct the
story, move past the pink glow,
excavate the hollows of history.
If that surface was scratched
the pointer would fly along the contours of
the parchment world, across the
through emerald coils of steaming rivers.
Under my fingernails, the scents of spices
and teas, the silk phrasings of my mother’s
saris, the stench of imperial legacy, blood
spilled from swords on proper khaki uniforms
lanced through the bodies of Sikh soldiers at
the frontlines of her Majesty’s British Army.
But our teacher never said. Remember this.
—from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets, edited
by
—also published in Reading
Like a Girl.
Saccade
The chronicle of the city unravels
like a prayer cloth
calm of storybook nurseries, book codes,
swift calligraphy of desire.
The city dreams us
gives us exigencies in eavesdropped
stories, undistinguished pleadings
requiems for forgetting.
There is a small star pinned where
It’s late and someone’s almost forgotten how to convince you
he’s telling the truth.
Even in sleep he cries out for help
and you minister to him
a woman like history returning for its wounded.
Blackbirds drop from telephone wires
rosepetals collect in birdbaths.
______
Everything stories you. You take Rilke at his word
Taste it everywhere. Wonderland signs
Eat me. Drink me.
Your hands like hobbled birds
read the classics. The hero enters the arched gate of the city.
In these books it is clear where the story of the city begins.
In the book of lost entries
nothing is pure but the forgotten things
crossed out words on a haunted page
useless dark of ink.
______
Today the city is unwriting itself
in a coffin of glass.
In the blurred doorways,
in skyscrapers that rise silver and blue
cool as if nothing could ever make them burn.
Sprayed on concrete walls
Where is my beautiful daughter
Emma was here
Escúchame
I’ll pray for you
Lucas
Fuck the politicians
Recuérdame
Inamorata
the billboard with the women tall
with long legs against white sand and blue ocean
red mouths puckered high above the crowds
smooth lipsticked smiles longing for cigarettes and sex.
______
Across the city, lights are shutting off
Good night, good night.
On the radio, the sirens are singing
Emily Lou Harris, Alison Kraus, Gillian Welch
ethereal lullaby Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby
Come lay your bones
on the alabaster stones
and be my ever-lovin’
baby.
Reading Emily Dickinson
Beauty crowds me til I die.
You feel the loneliness.
That’s what is left of the dream of beauty.
Beauty
So many kinds to name.
You hope for a day soft at the edges
for something, someone to
know the small hands of rain
to be like rain
wet with a decent happiness.
______
Kiss the gleaming armor of the world.
Feel its electric purr.
Close your hands on wind-stunned leaves.
Buff the scars of history with your mouth.
—from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets, edited
by
—also published in Reading
Like a Girl.
Reading Anna Karenina
The volume of Tolstoy thumbs her open.
She tries to keep the heroine alive.
Outside the library windows
ragged moths beat against the streetlamps.
She feels the heat of locomotive steam
rising from the stacks, weeps when she
sees Anna’s red purse on the tracks.
She closes the book with stunned hands
as if she had touched the hem of a final
morning, a sense of that going into it alone.
She begins to think she will not be carried
unscarred, untorn into any heaven. Wants
someone to hold her while she burns.
—from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets, edited
by
—also published in Reading
Like a Girl.
You know this is a landscape that tends to unfasten
you, brings you again and again to the brink of weeping.
No matter how many departures and disappearances,
you are marked by this beauty, astonishment that depends on loss.
As the bitter edges of things slide into memory and flesh, you
claim the meaning of your days on this frayed loveliness.
You sign your name to it.
At these moments something is given back to you, panic
dusted off, calmed by desert heat in the summer, vineyards
heavy with grapes. The body is set to music, carried by rain in
the spring resurrection of orchards. In the fall, the road swells with
harvest, the ripe comfort of apples. Even in winter, the skeletons of
trees dangle gifts, Golden Delicious earrings abandoned to the wind.
The ghosts of dead teenagers and drunks live here, their
voices echo along the curves and bends, in the rocky incisions of
graves, haunted by memories of prom dresses, cigarettes smoked in
the
There is a soft spot in everything.
You drive that road, move into a sky like a late Turner painting, gold
and amber, white canvas dreaming
colors of
there is tenderness in every geography, And this has the power to change you,
unweight your eyelids every morning, as the sky leans towards the absolute.
—from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets, edited
by
Copyright © 2004 by
The Poet Contemplates
Her Art
But where my moment of Brocade—
My—drop—of—
—Emily Dickinson
What have I expected poetry to do for me? At midlife, poetry
has not yielded a God. Poetry is that unfinished thing, some intangible hope. Persistent practice of courage. It is the waiting for a
loved one to return home. It is the young woman I was. It is the hue of my
wedding sari, shot silk the color of dawn, brocade border of gold. Not the
usual red silk of the Indian bride, some whisper of hope contained there in my
rebellion. As the light fades, the mind wanders over books, pen and paper, even
as the hour pulls you into exhaustion. What a scrap of paper gives . . . a
grocery list, letters, the
—from Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets, edited
by
Copyright © 2004 by