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Figure: MAP (AT TIDE)
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Alternatively, fragments from memories without the experience otherwise
necessary to account for them.
Sonam Kachru (December, 2010).
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--"And if the seasons defeat our garden?"
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ONE
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I
what fear after the flowers
If our eyes recede
And we ebb, with unfamiliar light,
Against discolored skin, at tide
The cutting shores
Of crueler seasons?
Here are yet mothers, and every bit as kind
As the stranger sea; we are taught, and teach
Our children to live as at the ends
Of cut stem or leaf, or at the break in bone
With the wit of calluses;
To take their tea with salt,Wash one another clean with mud.
Here are mothers, with a knife
To keep under the pillow of a child at night
To sever them from sleep, if their sleep
Be unkind, or in the least inviting: to forgive us
Should we trespass in the light of morning
With a too beautiful, even unmarred face
Even as we forgive those who recede
And do not wake.
What if this is not light we once knew
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To gather to it all that is bright
In a clean room in a swept house,
In the splendid accord of flowers
Pressed to absolute, almost up-to breath,
Condense at the window above the translucent flesh--
Her first turnips;
Or knew to abound,
By un-mute edges in spring,
In water we drew from mirror-blank wells,
Moldy taps set in mottled walls, to remember
Something of winter.
Still,
The light is not nothing--to show us nothing
Of the nothing new with us--
But is some scaled thing
Or unwelcome thought, coiled
In a damp corner in a fevered brain,
Alive to all that un-still still lives
And passes through us, and is caught
As little dust in little light.
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II
Here is the country, if any, for amateur theology.
For, doubtless, God wanted this blue country,
Eventually,
To tire, of the gravel-throated songs
The drowned hyacinth songs
O,
O, O,
But he kills me every day...Did you see him this fall
Embrace me to winter?
And tire of her tears
That flowed as prayer in her rivers
And as ash in her songs;
Gently whetted songs
In crueler mouthsall heartless birds
Our stones no longer breed
From the thirst of snow,
The silence in reeds.
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III
Know that it was not so, Witness,
Or is it martyr? Sip, and between sips
Remember: it was not like that at all.
We carried no gods on roads away from snow.
Children, disjointed at dusk, I remember,
But no fossils of paisley or dew of pearls.
A blackened cup, but not the samovar, with
The testimony of a blackened case for cigarettes.
In her untidy eyot of hands:
Glissade in dirt a broken-backed bird
Gathered to itself in her garden,
The only almond eyes I ever lay beside;
And no crop of gods.
Of the skin she carried she made herself a winter mask.
Quite shut in with memory of new snow, fed on echoes
Of water from yesterdays snows she remembered.
It fell into her lap, there where we slept, with her endless hair
And the first thoughts in her swept head, like unclean feathers
And snow from birds, to the floor of a cage she did forget
To clean before she left.
I heard it collect,
With the crocus feet she let lie on a broken chair, to drift
In the bitter surf and the bitter shade, withered,
As she might have said, as a walnut in unclean dirt
On an unfamiliar street, dried in a foreign summer.
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Only three days I lay beside all four pathetic feet
Of exile earth in hermute to mirror this,
Now unframed earth of us all, sublimed
Breathing only the naphthalene
That clung to her to the end of her attic days
In her hair and on her breasts and on distinct fingers
That held her pale hands, once, in mine.
I do not recall, Witness, or Martyr, the gods
You insist she carried away from you with their homes,
Leaving you, your windows in your arms, out of doors.Know that we carried no roads away from snow,
Only a memory of snow, and what was less, if more than enough
In a little room, her broken-heeled regard for dead-end roads.
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TWO
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So long as we can say This is the worst.
The worst is not
Where we can say, This is the end,
Unless it is not
An end but the beginning of worse.
Who can say
When it begins to end? There must be time,
And ours enough, to begin an end.
In the end he was bound to have written us
A book of time,The drift and not the wreckage.
This was one way, after all, to come to rest where he was,
And close without beginnings or ends
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II
When he left, he took with him every door to his house
But not the walls, and begged us to sink every word,And make no ripple
In the gravel-colored waters in the mud-cold lake.
Let us not speak of worms.
I cannot hear enough of landscapes, or eyes.
Some winters we stayed home and nevertheless
Lived apart, as vultures, to ourselves.
(But in a little room, a girl let down
Her glowing hair. Small comfort
We did not drown--we were deserts
In her shade. She sang
To water our stony heads:
Ill not go back on the road I came.
But the moons a fool, and Ive got no change
In these pockets. What shall I give
The man in the ferry? Ill not go back, no,Ill not go back.
Songs are not like houses,
She said, but paper boats
In leaky rooms.
An unfamiliar figure).
Some winters we carried tea and fried bread to friends
In the clutch of stones. This was before
They left us, out of our depth,
When their eyes were variegate, stuck
To flaking stone and lives the maker of ends
Left behind on painted walls.
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This was when their mouths disinclined to rubble,
To what truth lies with pleasure in a time of leaves,
And when our ears remained, at their leisure,
Words meat.
(But let us not speak of worms). They have left us
A matter of climate, a sort of taste in the head, and
Leaving, placed their words just so in our heads,
Like misshapen statues with unfinished eyes,
Arranged to be counted,
Like half-recollected breath.
We proposed to make a book of itFor them to live in, a book un-housed,
A history of empty scenes un-walled,
A book victorious, like no monastery ever built.
They took the book with them, but left us each
Written on a pebble: Your superstitions bait worms.
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III
One alone among them returned to us in summer,
Fleshed in the skin of a cow, carryingOn his back, with a crowd of books, stones
With the faces of familiar gods
Through which he spoke indistinctly:
Come gather, you who remember
The lake is not deep enough for winters bones
Now the dogs have found your wells.
My roof is broken. After little water, the journeys
Over. I am broken, but you are louder
Than all the spinning wheels of winter--
Now theres a noise to keep you from unhinged sleep.
(Whatever that might mean).
He looked long but did not meet a face he remembered
In the crowds that gathered like water wherever he slept.
He left the city of bridges and found a girl who lived in a stove
With hair and a mouth of fire.A year she was to him a crossing, only to die a distended bridge
Over falling air, further down the river.
He passed her in autumn for the woman who lived in the rock,
With skin like water and a tongue like dust.
When he passed into the rock, he left only his skin, his books,
A few stones and his mouth, though there was not room enough
In the rock to hang a man between them. She had (it was later
Said) only this to say: to spring a trap made with love,
And not get stuck, youll want knowledge, or cruelty, or both.
Undressed, he lived
And the rest of his life watched a boy
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In muted-white stone grow between them in a corner.
The woman left them only her smell, indistinct as the colors
Of urns, for air.
When one died (as one does), the other stood
And passed over a body with a face that he knew
And a stone mouth wet with the smell of her. He left the rock
But leaving no longer remembered which he had said he was
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IV
Are these human, the faces you see
Indistinct, as cut stalks in wet grass,
Or something else? When they speak
Is it audibly said?
Or do their words drain in your throat
Alone, and wrenchLike bloated dogs in flooded gutters?
Are they yours,
The urn-white children that come and go,
Inspiring, in corridors, a little dust
To whispers under a discord of tables
In a rind-thin hall where men brood,
And do not discuss, like scholars,
Lesser conspiracies? Is it moonlight
You overhear
Undo blue shadows on the walls
And never once face
The children who made them,
Or the sound of restless wings
Beating against stubborn nothing?
Your room is a fit of doors, but like no poem
Ever written.
I might have been one of them
Rotting at the table, waiting,
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THREE
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I
Spare us your mapmakers bold,
Your historians gauze-thin colors.
Have we not fore-suffered all,
In every insufficient palette?
Our city sleeps opalescent.The memory of the unwashed face
In the cinder lap of unthawed winter
Of the re-splendid goddess
Drowned in the arms
Of her timeless lover,
God of tears in things,
The answering swell of strong brown waters--
The city bears the name of every city ever broken.
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II
In this country, after the flowers, I cannot remember:
Was it doors or windows you carried in your arms,
Or the willow bats under ferans once children pretended were AK-47s
Or the landmines they had our children carry before them
On roads away from snow, into buildings without air: to burn
Their stillborn shadows into our dislocated memory of stone?
So much in this country now depends from air.
Allegedly, a most peculiar affair,
To have you feel as you do
When your brain is a rifle
With an inconvenient safety, only to turn
As did the loaned barrels, into the lit ends of cigarettes
And the questions they forced
With all that smolders in colors
(In rooms without end and without windows)
And watch slip, duly beneath
All the answering colors of your skin.
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III
Was it then bitterly said
(Given the husks, in a dry month,
Of green almonds in his ripe mouth):
Are we human?
Or bitter to hearThis side of the receiver: Who
Said "human"?
He heard, as if chiseled
From his still smile,
An unfinished mouth
Profess in stone
We have given
Each man for the ferry his due.
What man hanged shall here fear
The colors?Then finish it with me:
Do you give a damn?
And the answer, profuse stone
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IV
You made room in my bed,
Mother, to lie with all the seasons.
It was not yet winter before me,
But autumn in the gable windows,
When the one with a stain of blue
Through his throat (His eyes like rain),
Waded like a stork through the wet leavesAlong my bed, and every honest mask stitched from air
Above my head. (His face made with all that is indefinite
In the faces the clowns in spring knew to bring us).
Mother, autumn will crisp our sheets.
It will eat
Past the leaf-shaped lips,
The leaves in his mouth,
The leaf-shaped eyes, and
The grass sewn in with his hair.
Mother, the one with the stain
Anoints my mouth with what smolders
In colors. He has broken every face on the wallBut the indefinite face of winter.
The shadows on the slatted ceiling
Are as proverbs in your mouth.
Your knife he placed with the rushes,
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And I am shuttered--Mother, I fear
Come winter they'll have us commit stones
To memory--to grow
Where we grew, against spring that was
Lucent, in the garden of long knives.
Do you remember his name,
The one that quiets the dancer,
That can rend his indefinite face, as the blue
Through his tenuous skin
Autumn's latter colors? Am I too young
To remember? I taste again the words
In my throat, words you had me swallow
Like stale bread, and remember your eyes
Recessed, like flowers from winter air:
For what was green in the mouth
And the parched reed
They recommend water;
Blood for its hollows, pale corolla
In quick fires:
The color of Autumn's Crocus,
Stained with Spring's Wilder Madder.
It is best to be as wind
And not water, come ash;
The blue vein of Winter
In stones, come Summer
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FOUR
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I
Each summer we welcome the rattle
Of transient birds in restaurants.
You can overhear them, at dinner,
Emollient, converse
In houses that float on the water, or behind walls
On segregated lawns, until they pause, as one,
Like porcelain that rattles before it restsAt the lips of tables exquisitely carved.
I have heard their ragged claws extend
To a page, and, insincere as snow, caress
The cinder tongues of resident birds--to trace,
Again, every word they smothered in sighs:
'O, what a comfort to hear humans again
In a time of secessions, surgeons and spoils'.
I have heard the compassionate rattle
And what it must mean to hear them say--
'You cannot know how much it means--
O, but that we should no more speak of paradise
But life, or, dare I say it here--Cauchemar?'
There is seasonal wit to whet the keenest voice
That ever drowned in sympathetic smiles.
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Smiles more profound than bone-ash in porcelain.
As savage, more still.
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II
It is summer. Open the boy
No bigger than a stone
That becomes the pebble
In the toothless mouth of a timeless river:
You will find in his head the harvest sky,
Wider than the whitest furrowIn the sleep of grey fields, after the fires;
Concertina of holes across his chest;
A scatter of stones buried before him in spring.
Everywhere, the smell of graves:
hamin ast o hamin ast o hamin ast,
The earth our gardeners inbreathed
To exhume us, on the third day, no house
But the first bouquet of the garden to come,
As is written in the book of gardens, given earth
And time enough of martyrs,
and rival Shalimar
...agar firdaus
bar rue-zameen ast, and it is autumn
And the guns subside, and after, the stones,Even as our leaves subside, to fire un-numbered
Then is our brittle harvest,
Our ash-mothers to gather
Mouths that, parted from eyes, fill with colors,
The unbearable likeness of indefinite ruin,
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Immemorially weaned on indifferent fuel
To be fed more intimate fires
Till all that is of light in voice return
To ash,
And crisp words reduce
In hearth-cold mouths, to name
Just how it is with the air that is honest
About burnt rock, in the burnt fields.
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III
So much, in this country, now depends from air
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FIVE
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I
Winter is not colorless, if for a time being indistinct
As a miniature on marbelized paper, or a poem
Insinuating a desolate, mud-colored duck
On dissolute veins of ice in a rust-colored river.
Winter on a plate is indefinite, buried with the leaves
In the aborted shade of a walnut tree: with a mirror under the skin
Of a walnut, dates from an unwashed calendar
And cowries in the hair of fresh flowers--their bloated stems
Salted in cold water
...These we packed into snow
With all the eggshell care our barbers knew to extend
The unopened vein in every boy
That ever burned through fevers in winter.
He knew (when their skin
Took on the look of glass-dark turnips
Obscured through the clouds of oil, flushed
Against the shoulders of brine brown jars)To subdue them, even as we knew
To pack the spiced fish-heads in clay with a little snow,
To leave them, to the cold, to congeal--
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Winter knows
Only such intervals of relief
As are struck in cold air and expire
At the limits, like a match by a cigarette
In a shriveling mouth (it is no season for the unsteady),
Or wink out, anonymous,
Like girls they now find with reeds in their hair
(And not accidentally, for truth, it is said, in winter,
Prefers to dwell at the bottom of eyeless wells).
Winters relief can be
To dissipate, as my thawing wordsIn your steaming mouth
If indifferently said, (as something, that is,
not even dead) or the unintended wilderness,
At my cheek, of a grandmother's warm
But graceless breath.
Winter in a granary is a winter wife to hold in a corner,
The drift of lepers the color of day-old snow
In the gravel, whispering, under the window,
A pair of cowries on clumped eyes.
Winter on a plate, however, was for us to succeed
At ash in the new year. But do not press the ash
For the colors in winter, if winter's colors are winter's no longer
But belong with the wolves you have begged a lover
To feed in her dreams,
When you have felt,
As ash in snow, or the raven
Silhouetted in sibilant white branches,
Envy at hearing tell
Of a past, and for a time, even
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Nostalgic, for time
That must come into view without you.
Winter is no memory for the desolate present.
Winter are the hours that crouch like no animal
...and will not spring.
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II
Winter is a rumor of more voices,Orphaned in barking snow.
Do not strain the ash this winter.
There is not room enough.
Disarrange, instead, for him
His secluded eyes,
That their blue may flower
To thoughts of sky in her constricted head.
Water the foliate lips, autumnal and still,
If you seek atmosphere
But do not water the rasp of echoes
Along the bare corridor, in the shadows
left by these, that were never
Children, or seek to confine them
In the inner courtyard,
like the wandering dog
We tied through a blue afternoon
With white rope to an un-watered tree
And watched, spurred to affection, dilate,
Or, uncomprehending, lessen, ever in spirals
Bound with the wet leaves to the dirt floor.
We watched him rehearse
For us our devouring parts, auscultate
An indifferent geometry --
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It was enough
To have been, at least once, this banal,
And this cruel. But not indifferent.
We labeled the resulting figure 'memory'.
...it is true, we had the skill once
To confine more unnatural animals
To dusk, in the warp and sleep of leaves
Of gardens begun, as we,
With indefinitely many knots
--tied at the other sideTo the shore of colors--invisible
To all but the most cunning
of knives
Or fingers.
These we had made
To press against the eye a suggestion
Of life, of some stubborn seed
In a growing thing, to proliferate
An un-seamed semblance
To live past all memory of life
In the marvelous dead hands
That caught, in empty shuttles, a touch
Of the half-widowed light
that will neither live nor leave,
To one side of the colors.
There is not room enough.
Winter is a rumor in the fever-sleep in colors,
Whispers in the undressed lap of senile light.
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III
It is not yet winter in the courtyardWith his furniture and the painted feet
Of un-skinned gods,
But not the maple tree.
The willow-tressed balcony,
But not its reflection in the brown water.
The hyacinths are at the bloated cheek
Of the reflections of hyacinths
Along the parched river. They have waxed,
As an uncertain smile
Pressed through the oily cheeks of touristsShrinking from a window in the blasted wall,
Shrill voices drowned, but not by water.
In the shade hyacinths drink from shuttered lips.
There is little of the light in the courtyard,
Strained through teeth in a papered mouth,
An unblinking window.
Here water and eyes are blanched, with the season,
In the receding court where a boy saw his first onions
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Advance, his colorless eyes a crowd of eagles
Subdued with the bare leaves of a still maple.
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SIX
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Brine in a glass eye is to remember
And can be stained with any color
You can remember enfold
(As when flowers begin to sink
Beneath their reflections in water)
The impression of a receding eye.
Pickled with brine in eye-bright glassAn eye is more like a flower than ever.
Children with glass eyes ought not to throw stones.
Stones are to milk with mouths winter brought us.
Flowers, by the mouthful, are to be chewed to silence
And not swallowed;
If children with glass eyes throw stones,
They will break, and not extend,
As the smell of flowers through a room
When cut under water.
Children with glass eyes do not break in water,
But will not keep. A flower in a petrified mouth
Keeps longer than the boys bowered in the reeds.Choked with flowers in summer, the river exhaled them
Like urns.
Grant them
That we may require no more
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SEVEN
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I
(Blessed be the makers of beginnings)
We open at the mouth, in no way hermetic.
But have a care with the leaves
When you pour over us; if you answer
Ash in a stone mouth
With rumors of a book of waves.
We have eaten of more than one book in the garden.
It is rumored we will eatNo cautery again, but a book of sutures
Written in unbroken ligatures
Stitched, with a vulture's quill,
Through tongues stiffened with bark.
These we owe hands
Less steady than those of the coroner,
More kind than those of illegible time,
Grown old
time's untimely work,
Fleshed in the carrion grammar of crows.
(Blessed be the makers of beginnings, milkers of stones)
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EIGHT
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So it was I went before my ancestors a mirror.
They were crouched as windows
In an airless room;
Their eyes seemed to look
Through glass, as a glissade of glass seen
In a shuttered window to a darkened room.
We held between us in our teeth
The still threads of recognition.
It was enough to see
Them see themselves, and to see
In them myself unseen.
It was enough. To see...
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