Sadiqa de Meijer

The tour has only started when I’m ambushed by that flat-lined verdigris I’d know even as a stumbling sleepwalker:landschap with tin river, cleaver of sodden pastures — marvelous for painters, says the docent, was the enormity of the sky, rarely cloudless, and she’s already turning to an Italian hillscape when I say wait! this is my bloodstream, as my finger makes brief unintended contact with the canvas, and then my voice an ambulance I tell her there should be a diagram to indicate the grazing motion, how the grinding molars of the Holsteins make the river go — or else, self-portrait in the glassing-over eye of a stickleback caged in a jam jar, left too long in the sun — but now the river is across the room because the docent has ushered me toward an upholstered bench and is murmuring, sit, sit, I have here from the staff room a coffee, here you are — and I’m making the gesture for no, those fields I ate and was made of live in me, uncloseable parentheses

P.S. You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. — General Jeffery Amherst in a letter dated  July 16, 1763 Over the warming ground, swings toll like clock tower bells. Squirrels spiral the trunk of a pine. We fill a pail with sand. The day is robin’s eggshell fine. My mother’s shoulder had three shallow scars. Shining archipelago. The quiet theaters of our lives. Immune is a sung word, skirting sorrow. Kneeling at no registry of toddlers with amorphous voices. Night sweats without monument. The lake has the sea on its breath. One man has an island.

From the dim hallway, walls swollen with summer damp. Concave threshold to the morning’s livid light. When my father said Gerrard Street East, his voice. The passing subway tremors upwards, into me, reverberates in 
ligaments and membranes. On canvas shoes through minor parks, a pinball in a rudderless machine. My father, transiently animate. Funny in the ebbing language, 
bantering with shopkeepers. A lifeguard pours bleach in the fractured blue wading pool, sloshes it out with her legs. If  I could, I’d view a produce stand as he did, fill a paper bag with dillweed, bitter melon, ladyfingers. Miraculous reversal poster in the window of the Portuguese 
apothecary. Who lived where he never resembled somebody. Belled, metal restaurant elephant. They’re barely open. The woman fills and seals samosas in the uproar of a standing fan. I have tea. Father, dayflower, I keep arriving at this dead end where the menu says exotic, stamped with sickle chilis. The fan blades clatter frantically in their cage. A ghetto blaster spools ghazals. Her husband, over the counter, shouts:The pavements here are very bad. You must take your walks on the pitch, in circles. This is what all of us do.