Poemunity — your poem community

It is time to be old, To take in sail:— The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: “No more! No farther shoot Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root. Fancy departs: no more invent; Contract thy firmament To compass of a tent. There’s not enough for this and that, Make thy option which of two; Economize the failing river, Not the less revere the Giver, Leave the many and hold the few. Timely wise accept the terms, Soften the fall with wary foot; A little while Still plan and smile, And,—fault of novel germs,— Mature the unfallen fruit. Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, Bad husbands of their fires, Who, when they gave thee breath, Failed to bequeath The needful sinew stark as once, The Baresark marrow to thy bones, But left a legacy of ebbing veins, Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,— Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.” As the bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: “Lowly faithful, banish fear, Right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, And every wave is charmed.”

Our high and mighty termite mound arises far above the ground, and just as deep, grows underground. Our nest is blessed to be immense.   It gives us all a firm defense, superior to any fence.   It shields us from our enemies.   It keeps us cooler, by degrees. From floods and droughts it guarantees.   A prize nobody will assign in architectural design, but still our hill suits us just fine.

In the desert, the moon shivers. Tonight, to stay awake, I’ll cut my feet with glass. Outside Oaxaca, in a clinic, my mother said, “I hate your Indian face.” In the dream I’m running. My limbs skeletal and scabbed. After my mother’s death, I found, in a box, her wedding dress. As I lifted the lid, a stench corkscrewed into my nostrils: the dress had curdled like milk. During the day I gather tinder. Paper. Shed snakeskin. When the last light above the mountains knots into stars, I crouch under mesquite, make a fire. Sometimes the moon stops shivering. Sometimes I tally what I owe. In the dream I’m running through a hallway. The floor uneven. The walls green. Last month, as my son blew out the candles on his cake, I noticed, for the first time, the hideous shape of his nose. Tonight I’ll pinch my thighs to stay awake. My mother, in the clinic, said, “The rain has a fever, it needs plenty of rest, it needs to drink plenty of water.” The doctor scribbled in a file then asked for more money. If my mother could see me now! My feet bloody. My face darker than ever. Tonight, to stay awake, I’ll sit close to the fire. In the dream I stumble, but I never let go of my right breast: an urn heavy with my own ashes, an urn I’m lugging God-knows-where.

Sex is always monstrous. Blood appears in the air next to the body but nobody asks a question about the body. “Please touch me there. More. Oh god.” For a hitchhiker, the problem of the boudoir is transferred to a makeshift, itchy, unsafe space on the verge of a New Mexico highway. It is often the sex of another era, in which the socks and dress shirt/blouse are not necessarily removed. I hitchhiked in the beginning because it seemed glamorous to me, ultra-American, like a Christian with an entrenched migraine who resorts to brand-name anti-inflammatories when prayer does not do the trick. At first, my encounters on the thoroughfares of your country were quotidian; after all, it is not really hitchhiking to buy a Greyhound ticket three weeks in advance then have a going-away party in a dorm with a banner and balloons. Again, this is an example of departure in another time. As a foreign student on scholarship, it was an ordinary matter to file for an extension for the completion of a thesis on Salman Rushdie’s early works. Nevertheless: “How can we keep tabs on these JI visa holders, who come over here and . . . the university, as an institution, really needs to be more accountable. We need a database and we need a system of checks and balances to make sure any change of address is verified by at least two pieces of information. They need to do their course work and then they need to go home.” I didn’t want to go home. This is a boring sentence. Perhaps for you Oregon is a calming word, evoking images of blackberry pie, ocean vistas, and the capture of suspected felons. I had never heard the word Oregon before. Like the distance of Scotland from London, it seemed impossibly far. A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going. How can I put this? In England, nobody ever, ever, ever did this. I, who once drove straight to Glasgow with a thermos of instant coffee mixed with milk and sugar, in a dinged-up Datsun Cherry, was considered an anomaly. “Are you demented? Why do you want to drive in a car to bloody Scotland? It’s seven hours on the M1, man!” Though, outwardly, I was wan and somewhat reticent, I . . . no, I was. My sexual experience consisted of lying under an elm tree in Hyde Park at the age of seventeen and being told by an undergraduate student of the London School of Economics that my breasts in that position, from that angle, resembled two fried eggs. We were meeting in a park as per the era. I am sure contemporary Punjabi-British teenagers are fearless individuals, undaunted by the prospect of community censure. Back then we met by the iron-wrought gate on a park bench, on a path built for seventeenth-century promenades. It is always a century. In my century, sex was a field of restraint and intensity unsurpassed by anything except drinking coffee in a foreign country like Scotland or Wales and borrowing my father’s car forever. “Are you out of your bleeding head? Your dad’s going to skin you alive!” In some sense, this (driving) is the opposite of hitchhiking, in which the interior of the car is always unfamiliar. The day was real in a different way back then, in the way that it sensitized me to risk, a kind of twin to permisson. Two black swans: that day and this one, history and fiction, what I went for and what I really wanted, which I didn’t know until I got there by which time it was impossible to consider the long journey home as either practical or sensible, considering the trouble I was already in and the rain, which had started to come down in a series of reddish sheets; the streetlamps were pink. On Prince Street, in Glasgow, I saw the sign for American style pizza and went down the steps to the basement café. The tables were coated with green plastic. There was hot tea, which the waitress slung down my gullet with a funnel as I focused my eye on a laminated print of a white, blocky rose with a pink dot at its center. “Charles Rennie Mackintosh,” the waitress, pronouncing “osh” so that it rhymed with horse. “Are you from India?” “Would you like some jam with that scone? I bet they don’t have scones in India, do they?” “More tea? I heard you have a lot of tea, over there, isn’t that right?” Plan b: The extension of my throat. The euphoria of theft. Other countries with their sayings and beliefs. The original plan, formulated by my father during his morning communte across London: marrying a British-born Hindu Brahmin dentist with brown skin, but not too brown, and rosy cheeks. Note on the mantelpiece, tucked behind the marble figurine of Shiva: what is forthcoming under the original plan? Extraction? What kind of sex is possible on the dentist’s chair late at night for that girl, your girl, who nervously asks for a blanket? She has her socks on. She’s shivering. It is sometimes sex when you touch yourself beneath the proffered blanket clearly not washed between patients, but in this scene the limbs of the dentist’s young Asian bride are rigid and smell faintly of wintergreen-scented nail polish or mouthwash. Dad, “please don’t swallow.” Rinse then spit. Spit then swallow. I could not go home and so, after a brief visit to the Hill House—Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s art deco home on the Firth of Clyde, where he painted geometric rosebuds forever in a kind of frenzy, as it seemed from the décor—I turned left and kept driving. I drove my car into the Atlantic and kept driving, my chest very tight beneath the surface. It was difficult to feel anything or really to see, and so I can only say that I went into a damaging ocean. This is going. Damaged, washed up on the mythical shores of New Jersey a few days later, my car failed to start. This is later, when the car stopped, and, looking up from my hands, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, I realized that I was okay. Now I am here, in the future of color. I’m sorry I do not have more to say about the period of submergence that preceded my arrival. I am not interested in it. I do not recall it. I . . . It was only when my car stopped that I realized what I had to do, on my own terms, with my own two legs: get going. Is that how you say it? Get up and go. The destiny of my body as separate from my childhood: I came here to hitchhike. I came here to complete a thing I began in another place. Removing wet pages from my rucksack, I lay them on the shore, securing them with beautiful shells and pebbles. When they dried, I folded them into squares and put them in my pocket, next to my body. Misshapen, exhilarated, I said get. I said go. Get up now and go. “Are you okay?” “Do you need a ride somewhere?” “Let me look in the trunk. I might have something in there. Here you go. You’re shivering! Do you need to go to the hospital? At least let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

For John Skoyles My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent, line drawings that suggest the things they represent, different from any drawings she — at ten — had done, closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in. For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem; for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one. She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card, and wrote I must be brave even when it’s hard. Such love is healing — as you know, my friend, especially when it comes unbidden from our children despite the flaws they see so vividly in us. Who can love you as your child does? Your son so ill, the brutal chemo, his looming loss owning you now — yet you would be this generous to think of my child. With the pens you sent she has made I hope a healing instrument.

The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, as if you were walking on the beach and found a diamond as big as a shoe; as if you had just built a wooden table and the smell of sawdust was in the air, your hands dry and woody; as if you had eluded the man in the dark hat who had been following you all week; the relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, playing the chords of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin in an afternoon when I had no one to talk to, when the magazine advertisement forms of soft sweaters and clean shining Republican middle-class hair walked into carpeted houses and left me alone with bare floors and a few books I want to thank my mother for working every day in a drab office in garages and water companies cutting the cream out of her coffee at 40 to lose weight, her heavy body writing its delicate bookkeeper’s ledgers alone, with no man to look at her face, her body, her prematurely white hair in love I want to thank my mother for working and always paying for my piano lessons before she paid the Bank of America loan or bought the groceries or had our old rattling Ford repaired. I was a quiet child, afraid of walking into a store alone, afraid of the water, the sun, the dirty weeds in back yards, afraid of my mother’s bad breath, and afraid of my father’s occasional visits home, knowing he would leave again; afraid of not having any money, afraid of my clumsy body, that I knew no one would ever love But I played my way on the old upright piano obtained for $10, played my way through fear, through ugliness, through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases, and a desire to love a loveless world. I played my way through an ugly face and lonely afternoons, days, evenings, nights, mornings even, empty as a rusty coffee can, played my way through the rustles of spring and wanted everything around me to shimmer like the narrow tide on a flat beach at sunset in Southern California, I played my way through an empty father’s hat in my mother’s closet and a bed she slept on only one side of, never wrinkling an inch of the other side, waiting, waiting, I played my way through honors in school, the only place I could talk the classroom, or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary always singing the most for my talents, as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering her house and was now searching every ivory case of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black ridges and around smooth rocks, wondering where I had lost my bloody organs, or my mouth which sometimes opened like a California poppy, wide and with contrasts beautiful in sweeping fields, entirely closed morning and night, I played my way from age to age, but they all seemed ageless or perhaps always old and lonely, wanting only one thing, surrounded by the dusty bitter-smelling leaves of orange trees, wanting only to be touched by a man who loved me, who would be there every night to put his large strong hand over my shoulder, whose hips I would wake up against in the morning, whose mustaches might brush a face asleep, dreaming of pianos that made the sound of Mozart and Schubert without demanding that life suck everything out of you each day, without demanding the emptiness of a timid little life. I want to thank my mother for letting me wake her up sometimes at 6 in the morning when I practiced my lessons and for making sure I had a piano to lay my school books down on, every afternoon. I haven’t touched the piano in 10 years, perhaps in fear that what little love I’ve been able to pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets, will get lost, slide away, into the terribly empty cavern of me if I ever open it all the way up again. Love is a man with a mustache gently holding me every night, always being there when I need to touch him; he could not know the painfully loud music from the past that his loving stops from pounding, banging, battering through my brain, which does its best to destroy the precarious gray matter when I am alone; he does not hear Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary singing for me, liking the sound of my lesson this week, telling me, confirming what my teacher says, that I have a gift for the piano few of her other pupils had. When I touch the man I love, I want to thank my mother for giving me piano lessons all those years, keeping the memory of Beethoven, a deaf tortured man, in mind; of the beauty that can come from even an ugly past.

Amazement fills my heart to-night, Amaze and awful fears; I am a ship that sees no light, But blindly onward steers. Flung toward heaven’s toppling rage, Sunk between steep and steep, A lost and wondrous fight I wage With the embattled deep. I neither know nor care at length Where drives the storm about; Only I summon all my strength And swear to ride it out. Yet give I thanks; despite these wars. My ship—though blindly blown, Long lost to sun or moon or stars— Still stands up alone. I need no trust in borrowed spars; My strength is yet my own.

The adults we call our children will not be arriving with their children in tow for Thanksgiving. We must make our feast ourselves, slice our half-ham, indulge, fill our plates, potatoes and green beans carried to our table near the window. We are the feast, plenty of years, arguments. I’m thinking the whole bundle of it rolls out like a white tablecloth. We wanted to be good company for one another. Little did we know that first picnic how this would go. Your hair was thick, mine long and easy; we climbed a bluff to look over a storybook plain. We chose our spot as high as we could, to see the river and the checkerboard fields. What we didn’t see was this day, in our pajamas if we want to, wrinkled hands strong, wine in juice glasses, toasting whatever’s next, the decades of side-by-side, our great good luck.

That this is the morning in which nothing much that the sky is still there and the water dresses accordingly that only at night does the water rest vanish from sight that the stars are too small too far to register there that all our names too are writ invisibly on water that abiding requires more hope than I can possibly acquire that hope is not a thing with feathers that hope is a thing with a fist a thin crust sketched over oceans that hope is what despair uses for bait come in hope says the water's fine that hope is the blood with which you write letters that start dear sea dear ocean stop asking so fucking much that hope is a telegram delivered by men in pairs men in uniform a telegram that says missing stop that says once again presumed lost stop

That everything's inevitable. That fate is whatever has already happened. The brain, which is an elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is. In this world, I am the surest thing. Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes. Please insert your spare coins. I am filling them up. Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim. But yet, I am a vatic one. As vatic as the Vatican. In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum I am waiting, like an animal, For poetry.