ALSO BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ
POETRY
Blue Hour
The Angel of History
The Country Between Us
Gathering the Tribes
PROSE
What You Have Heard Is True
EDITED BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ
Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500–2001
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Forché
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Forché, Carolyn, author.
Title: In the lateness of the world / Carolyn Forché.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037457 (print) | LCCN 2019037458 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560401 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525560418 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3556.O68 I5 2020 (print) | LCC PS3556.O68 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037457
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037458
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
for Harry and Sean
and in memory of the others
To those, finally, whose roads of ink and blood go through words and men.
And, most of all, to you. To us. To you.
EDMOND JABÈS
CONTENTS
Also by Carolyn Forché
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Museum of Stones
The Boatman
Water Crisis
Report from an Island
The Last Puppet
The Lightkeeper
The Crossing
Exile
Fisherman
For Ilya at Tsarskoye Selo
The Lost Suitcase
Last Bridge
Elegy for an Unknown Poet
Letter to a City Under Siege
Travel Papers
The Refuge of Art
A Room
The Ghost of Heaven
Ashes to Guazapa
Hue: From a Notebook
Morning on the Island
A Bridge
The End of Something
Early Life
Tapestry
Visitation
In Time of War
Lost Poem
Charmolypi
Souffrance
Sanctuary
Uninhabited
Clouds
Passage
Light of Sleep
Theologos
Mourning
Transport
Early Confession
Toward the End
What Comes
Dedications and Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
MUSEUM OF STONES
These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir—
stones, loosened by tanks in the streets,
from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Baudelaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,
agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of a city’s entombment, stones
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, blue schist, gneiss, and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamian,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, load and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.
THE BOATMAN
We were thirty-one souls, he said, in the gray-sick of sea
in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.
By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight,
all were soaked to the bone, living and dead.
We could still float, we said, from war to war.
What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone?
City called “mother of the poor” surrounded by fields
of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers,
with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah.
If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone.
There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters
from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under
the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you.
But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night
we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting face-
down in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us.
After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain
of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where?
We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans
again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised
to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive
with no safe place. Leave, yes, we’ll obey the leaflets, but go where?
To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?
To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, w
here?
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.
WATER CRISIS
They have cut off the water in the sinking metropolis.
Do not wash clothes! Bathe only with small buckets!
Meanwhile, cisterns on the roofs of the rich send it
singing through the pipes of the better houses.
There is the sound of applause, it is the clap of wings
just before doves enter the darkness of the dovecote.
Then a quiet comes. The sirens die down. Security gates
slam shut. It is like night. We are waiting to breathe again.
The gamecocks are forced to fight with knives taped to their feet.
This is illegal. So is everything else and there is never enough.
The logs are fed little by little into the mouths of the clay ovens.
Many songbirds have been roasted by the heavens.
Motor scooters flock through the streets, a murmuration.
Crossing like starlings the skies. It is a matter of thirst.
They transport the cocks in baskets covered by plastic bags—
their entire lives tethered to the ground, trapped in wicker.
Until they are angry enough. Roof to roof in the conclaves,
cistern to cold cistern. They have seen to it.
The rich will have what they want. Is this a relief?
The last cloud is empty. The first death reason enough.
REPORT FROM AN ISLAND
Sea washes the sands in a frill of salt and a yes sound.
We lie beneath palms, under the star constellations
of the global south: a cross, a sword pointing upward.
Through frangipani trees, a light wind. Bats foraging.
Foreigners smoke the bats out by burning coconuts,
calling this the bat problem. Or they set out poisonous fruit.
The gecko hides under a banana leaf. So far nothing is said.
A gecko mistaken for a bird that sings in the night.
It is no bird. A healer blows smoke into the wound.
Sees through flesh to a bone once broken.
In the sea, they say, there is an island made of bottles and other trash.
Plastic bags become clouds and the air a place for opportunistic birds.
One and a half million plastic pounds make their way there every hour.
The pellets are eggs to the seabirds, and the bags, jellyfish to the turtle.
So it is with diapers, shampoo, razors and snack wrappers, soda rings
and six-pack holders. Even the sacks to carry it all home flow to the sea.
Wind has lofted the water into a distant city, according to news reports:
most of that city submerged now, with fish in the streets.
It is no bird. The man hasn’t sold any of his carved dolphins.
Geckos don’t sing. The vendor of sarongs hasn’t sold a single one.
Prau, the boats are called throughout this archipelago.
Spider-looking. Soft-motored. Waiting at dawn.
Geckos can’t blink, so they lick their own eyes to keep them wet. Their bite
is gentle, they eat mealworms and crickets. This is why no crickets sing.
No one talks about it, but people look to the sea
toward where the plane went down. There is time to imagine:
one hundred eighty-nine souls buckled to their seats on the seafloor,
the wind too much for the plane, the gecko now at the door.
After the earthquake, people moved into the family tombs.
Many graves now have light and running water.
Others live at the dumps in trash cities, where there is work sorting
plastic, metal, glass, tantalum from cell phones and precious earths.
This work is slow. A low hum of ordinary life drills into the mind
like the sound of insects devouring a roof. There is no hope for it.
There is only the sea and its yes, lights in the city of the dead,
and a plastic island that must from space appear to be a palace.
THE LAST PUPPET
Moonlight taps on the puppet maker’s hut, the tip of a brush
touching hide, light falling into water from an egret’s wings
like tears on glass. Stones dusted with ash. Taps as if someone were there,
attempting to wake us up. A bell ringing in a tomb of cloud.
This debris is the puppet maker’s house, taken by a sudden wind.
A storm like the future, filled with pigs, trees, cars, and something
no one should wish to see. Fires on the seafloor. Burnt weather.
The once-soft air embalmed in salt. As if God said it.
They kill the snake, drain its blood into a glass of liquor
along with its still-beating heart. Not everyone does this.
You drink it, and later you chew and chew the strong muscle of snake.
In another place, the blood of fruit bats is given without the heart.
No one knows the difference this makes.
Souls have their own world. The corpse its bone cage.
Nothing but fire everywhere the fire finds air.
There are no hides left, this is the last puppet.
The puppet maker lifts it to the light and has it speak
a language it will never speak again, its shadow finding the shadow
on the wall of no one else. Then he puts a last song in its mouth.
Souls have their own world. They are the descendants of clouds.
Take this puppet to America. Hold it to the light.
THE LIGHTKEEPER
A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you
still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,
darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool
you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:
the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow wick lamps,
whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,
the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.
You say to me, Stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his
lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be
their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,
seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out
for a long time. Also, when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,
and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.
THE CROSSING
No matter how light it was or wet the fields, and whether or not the horses
from the stable down the road had broken their fence and were grazing
near our windows as horses in a dream, Anna would be gone, out
pounding the earth with her pronged hoe. S
he never woke me, although I slept
beside her, like sleeping near a hill wrapped in house-silk. Her teeth floated
in water on the nightstand where she kept her spectacles, this woman who
crossed, as a girl of my age, in the hold of a ship for weeks, lowering
her bucket of night soil by rope, then, from the sea-rinsed bucket, pouring
seawater over herself on the lower deck where bathing was permitted.
The salt stiffened her hair and burned her eyes, but she was clean.
It isn’t what they tell you, pisklę—calling me the name of a little bird that sings
too much. If there were no cattle, horses, or sheep to be sold, they would take
people whose passage had been paid and whose forfeit put up. Our papers
were in order, and we had the passage and forfeit to board. They gave us
drinking water, but shut off all water at night. Two weeks of the rocking
boat and stink of buckets, all of us asleep on planks. Such rise and fall, such
pitch of the ship! But some nights on deck, holding the rails for all her life,
she said she ploughed the sea as she once had the fields, and into the furrows
of light went the seeds and the black-winged waters fell upon them.
EXILE
The city of your childhood rises between steppe and sea, wheat and light,
white with the dust of cockleshells, stargazers, and bones of pipefish,
city of limestone soft enough to cut with a hatchet, where the sea
unfurls and acacias brought by Greeks on their ships
turn white in summer. So yes, you remember, this is the city you lost,
city of smugglers and violinists, chess players and monkeys,
an opera house, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir
where two things were esteemed: literature and ships, poetry and the sea.
If you return now, it will not be as a being visible to others, and when
you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if
someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.
In the Lateness of the World Page 1