Agha Shahid Ali

1 Efficient as Fate, each eye a storm trooper, the cleaners wipe my smile with Comet fingers and tear the plaster off my suicide note. They learn everything from the walls’ eloquent tongues. Now, quick as genocide, they powder my ghost for a cinnamon jar. They burn my posters (India and Heaven in flames), whitewash my voicestains, make everything new, clean as Death. 2 When the landlord brings new tenants, even Memory is a stranger. The woman, her womb solid with the future, instructs her husband’s eyes to clutch insurance policies. They ignore my love affair with the furniture, the corner table that memorized my crossed-out lines. Oh, she’s beautiful, a hard-nippled Madonna. The landlord gives them my autopsy; they sign the lease. The room is beating with bottled infants, and I’ve stopped beating. I’m moving out holding tombstones in my hands.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar Pale . . . Shalimar The epigraph is from a 12-line poem entitled “Kashmiri Song.” There are allusions to “Kashmiri Song” throughout this poem. The Shalimar Garden, in Lahore, Pakistan, was built by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1619 for his wife Nur Jahan. — Laurence Hope Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell Where . . . spell A direct quotation of line 2 of “Kashmiri Song” tonight? Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight? Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—” Fabrics . . . tell The quotations are from Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins, “I am ashamed – I hide – / What right have I – to be a Bride -”. Lines 7-9 of her poem read: “Me to adorn – How – tell –/ Trinket – to make Me beautiful –/ Fabrics of Cashmere –” “Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight? Fabrics . . . tell The quotations are from Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins, “I am ashamed – I hide – / What right have I – to be a Bride -”. Lines 7-9 of her poem read: Me to adorn – How – tell – / Trinket – to make Me beautiful – / Fabrics of Cashmere – I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates— A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight. God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar— All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight. Lord, cried out the idols,Don’t let us be broken; Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow, came to Kashmir from Samarkand, carrying a bag of whale bones: heirlooms from sea funerals. His skeleton carved from glaciers, his breath arctic, he froze women in his embrace. His wife thawed into stony water, her old age a clear evaporation. This heirloom, his skeleton under my skin, passed from son to grandson, generations of snowmen on my back. They tap every year on my window, their voices hushed to ice. No, they won’t let me out of winter, and I’ve promised myself, even if I’m the last snowman, that I’ll ride into spring on their melting shoulders.

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,” Serge told me in New York one December night. “So when I look at the sky, I see the past?” “Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.” On January 19, 1987, as I very early in the morning drove my sister to Tucson International, suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street the sliding doors of the fog were opened, and the snow, which had fallen all night, now sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants, its mineral-hard colors extinguished, wine frozen in the veins of the cactus. *   *   * The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read: The syrup from which sacred wine is made is extracted from the saguaros each summer. The Papagos place it in jars, where the last of it softens, then darkens into a color of blood though it tastes strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine. As I tell Sameetah this, we are still seven miles away. “And you know the flowers of the saguaros bloom only at night?” We are driving slowly, the road is glass. “Imagine where we are was a sea once. Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly sapphire, and the past is happening quickly: the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched out their arms to rays millions of years old, in each ray a secret of the planet’s origin, the rays hurting each cactus into memory, a human memory for they are human, the Papagos say: not only because they have arms and veins and secrets. But because they too are a tribe, vulnerable to massacre. “It is like the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,” Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved arms. And we are driving by the ocean that evaporated here, by its shores, the past now happening so quickly that each stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky taking rapid notes on us as we turn at Tucson Boulevard and drive into the airport, and I realize that the earth is thawing from longing into longing and that we are being forgotten by those arms. *   *   * At the airport I stared after her plane till the window was again a mirror. As I drove back to the foothills, the fog shut its doors behind me on Alvernon, and I breathed the dried seas the earth had lost, their forsaken shores. And I remembered another moment that refers only to itself: in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War, perhaps there were sirens, air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir. The microphone was dead, but she went on singing, and her voice was coming from far away, as if she had already died. And just before the lights did flood her again, melting the frost of her diamond into rays, it was, like this turning dark of fog, a moment when only a lost sea can be heard, a time to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth and I had lost, of all that I would lose, of all that I was losing.

Those intervals between the day’s five calls to prayer the women of the house pulling thick threads through vegetables rosaries of ginger of rustling peppers in autumn drying for winter in those intervals this rug part of Grandma’s dowry folded so the Devil’s shadow would not desecrate Mecca scarlet-woven with minarets of gold but then the sunset call to prayer the servants their straw mats unrolled praying or in the garden in summer on grass the children wanting the prayers to end the women’s foreheads touching Abraham’s silk stone of sacrifice black stone descended from Heaven the pilgrims in white circling it this year my grandmother also a pilgrim in Mecca she weeps as the stone is unveiled she weeps holding on to the pillars (for Begum Zafar Ali)

on the wall the dense ivy of executions —ZBIGNIEW HERBERT We shall meet again, in Srinagar, by the gates of the Villa of Peace, our hands blossoming into fists till the soldiers return the keys and disappear. Again we’ll enter our last world, the first that vanished in our absence from the broken city. We’ll tear our shirts for tourniquets and bind the open thorns, warm the ivy into roses. Quick, by the pomegranate— the bird will say—Humankind can bear everything. No need to stop the ear to stories rumored in branches: We’ll hear our gardener’s voice, the way we did as children, clear under trees he’d planted: “It’s true, my death, at the mosque entrance, in the massacre, when the Call to Prayer opened the floodgates”—Quick, follow the silence— “and dawn rushed into everyone’s eyes.” Will we follow the horned lark, pry open the back gate into the poplar groves, go past the search post into the cemetery, the dust still uneasy on hurried graves with no names, like all new ones in the city? “It’s true” (we’ll hear our gardener again). “That bird is silent all winter. Its voice returns in spring, a plaintive cry. That’s when it saw the mountain falcon rip open, in mid-air, the blue magpie, then carry it, limp from the talons.” Pluck the blood: My words will echo thus at sunset, by the ivy, but to what purpose? In the drawer of the cedar stand, white in the verandah, we’ll find letters: When the post offices died, the mailman knew we’d return to answer them. Better if he’d let them speed to death, blacked out by Autumn’s Press Trust not like this, taking away our breath, holding it with love’s anonymous scripts: “See how your world has cracked. Why aren’t you here? Where are you? Come back. Is history deaf there, across the oceans?” Quick, the bird will say. And we’ll try the keys, with the first one open the door into the drawing room. Mirror after mirror, textiled by dust, will blind us to our return as we light oil lamps. The glass map of our country, still on the wall, will tear us to lace— We’ll go past our ancestors, up the staircase, holding their wills against our hearts. Their wish was we return—forever!—and inherit(Quick, the bird will say) that to which we belong, not like this— to get news of our death after the world’s. (for Suvir Kaul)

(In Lenox Hill Hospital, after surgery, my mother said the sirens sounded like the elephants of Mihiragula when his men drove them off cliffs in the Pir Panjal Range.) The Hun so loved the cry, one falling elephant’s, he wished to hear it again. At dawn, my mother heard, in her hospital-dream of elephants, sirens wail through Manhattan like elephants forced off Pir Panjal’s rock cliffs in Kashmir: the soldiers, so ruled, had rushed the elephant, The greatest of all footprints is the elephant’s, said the Buddha. But not lifted from the universe, those prints vanished forever into the universe, though nomads still break news of those elephants as if it were just yesterday the air spread the dye (“War’s annals will fade into night / Ere their story die”), the punishing khaki whereby the world sees us die out, mourning you, O massacred elephants! Months later, in Amherst, she dreamt: She was, with dia- monds, being stoned to death. I prayed: If she must die, let it only be some dream. But there were times, Mother, while you slept, that I prayed, "Saints, let her die." Not, I swear by you, that I wished you to die but to save you as you were, young, in song in Kashmir, and I, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir listening to my flute. You never let gods die. Thus I swear, here and now, not to forgive the universe that would let me get used to a universe without you. She, she alone, was the universe as she earned, like a galaxy, her right not to die, defying the Merciful of the Universe, Master of Disease, “in the circle of her traverse” of drug-bound time. And where was the god of elephants, plump with Fate, when tusk to tusk, the universe, dyed green, became ivory? Then let the universe, like Paradise, be considered a tomb. Mother, they asked me,So how’s the writing? I answered My mother is my poem. What did they expect? For no verse sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir (across fifteen centuries) in the hospital.Kashmir, she’s dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe as she sleeps in Amherst. Windows open on Kashmir: There, the fragile wood-shrines—so far away—of Kashmir! O Destroyer, let her return there, if just to die. Save the right she gave its earth to cover her, Kashmir has no rights. When the windows close on Kashmir, I see the blizzard-fall of ghost-elephants. I hold back—she couldn’t bear it—one elephant’s story: his return (in a country far from Kashmir) to the jungle where each year, on the day his mother died, he touches with his trunk the bones of his mother. "As you sit here by me, you’re just like my mother," she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir, she’s watching, at the Regal, her first film with Father. If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother, I’d save you—now my daughter—from God. The universe opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God’s mother! Each page is turned to enter grief’s accounts. Mother, I see a hand.Tell me it’s not God’s. Let it die. I see it. It’s filling with diamonds. Please let it die. Are you somewhere alive, somewhere alive, Mother? Do you hear what I once held back: in one elephant’s cry, by his mother’s bones, the cries of those elephants that stunned the abyss? Ivory blots out the elephants. I enter this:The Beloved leaves one behind to die. For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir, and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe when I remember you—beyond all accounting—O my mother?

For Christopher Merrill Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land— There is no sugar in the promised land. Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love, I’m already drunk in your capitalist land? If home is found on both sides of the globe, home is of course here—and always a missed land. The hour’s come to redeem the pledge (not wholly?) in Fate’s "Long years ago we made a tryst" land. Clearly, these men were here only to destroy, a mosque now the dust of a prejudiced land. Will the Doomsayers die, bitten with envy, when springtime returns to our dismissed land? The prisons fill with the cries of children. Then how do you subsist, how do you persist, Land? “Is my love nothing for I’ve borne no children?” I’m with you, Sappho, in that anarchist land. A hurricane is born when the wings flutter ... Where will the butterfly, on my wrist, land? You made me wait for one who wasn’t even there though summer had finished in that tourist land. Do the blind hold temples close to their eyes when we steal their gods for our atheist land? Abandoned bride, Night throws down her jewels so Rome—on our descent—is an amethyst land. At the moment the heart turns terrorist, are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?

Feel the patient’s heart Pounding—oh please, this once— —JAMES MERRILL I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time. A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time. Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire? A former existence untold in real time ... The one you would choose: Were you led then by him? What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time? Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth— The funeral love comes to hold in real time! They left him alive so that he could be lonely— The god of small things is not consoled in real time. Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys— It’s hell in the city of gold in real time. God’s angels again are—for Satan!—forlorn. Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time. And who is the terrorist, who the victim? We’ll know if the country is polled in real time. “Behind a door marked DANGER” are being unwound the prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time. The throat of the rearview and sliding down it the Street of Farewell’s now unrolled in real time. I heard the incessant dissolving of silk— I felt my heart growing so old in real time. Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned. What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time? Now Friend, the Belovèd has stolen your words— Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time. (for Daniel Hall)