by Dionne Brand
If I see a patch of flowers near a road, surviving heat and exhaust fumes and boots, a homesickness washes me and I am standing in the front yard looking at zinnias. They had to be planted just as the rainy season ended so that when the dry, hot season came they would flower. Then half of the front yard was orange and full of butterflies that could easily be caught and flown with a bit of thread around their waists. The circumstances in the house behind, the material circumstances, inlay this homesickness. I am homesick for zinnias; I am homesick for scarcity. These two same things.
If I think of the word fibre, I am immediately lying at the edge of a mattress on a bed shared by four or five children and I am fighting for the outside and not the middle; equally I am standing on the edge of a room, the floor strewn with coconut coir that has to be teased apart before it is put in a newly stitched sacking. This sacking, made from a coarse cloth called ticking, is sewn on the Hitachi sewing machine in the room and it is sewn into the shape of a mattress. After, it is stuffed with the teased coir, which is called fibre. It takes days to tease this fibre since it has been slept on for many months, until October, and has matted together and made itself hard. Everyone in the house does this work of teasing lightness into the fibre again. When the mattress is stuffed with the fibre, you need a large needle that can thread a thin twine and with this needle and thread the mattress is tufted. Then you have a brand new mattress with striped ticking. That is what happens when I hear the word fibre.
If I see a patch of corn in front of a house, as I did this morning, or a small zinnia bed or a wrecked mattress forlorn on the side of a house, all this overtakes me.
VERSO
What the author has. A condition and a state. Situations. The word way, with a number of meanings. A route, or a course. Distance. An aspect. One point in time and a procedure. Three masks and one photograph. A kerosene lamp. A blue bowl full of feathers. A photocopy of two faces in a frame on the south wall. A misplaced photograph she finds at times in a mirror. A blue door. Six pairs of spectacles.
VERSO
What the author has. No time. No time, no time at all. By which I mean no time. No time at all.
VERSO
What the author knows. I will have added for clarification or withdrawn some detail. I will have parsed the structure of the sentence and the meaning of the sentence and reformulated it to resolve some understanding that was tentative in the first place, but that merely for the sake of agreeing to a rule of syntax I present as certain. Moreover, I will have cleaned out all of my doubt, or all of my prevarication, or all of my timidity. Indefinite and unbound weight, the clerk murmurs.
VERSO 33.2
What part of this are you letting go, the clerk asks, because it seems to me none of this belongs on the dock with me. The clerk is being clerical, she doesn’t want to handle every passing stray thought of the author, let alone every feeling. Every feeling need not be considered, else there would be no room left in the world. No room. The author finds it hard to rise in the mornings, whatever she is carrying lies as a boulder on her forehead when she opens her eyes, though it is invisible to anyone else. The clerk thinks it is mere self-indulgence. The author agrees. But what do you do with a feeling like that? It is certainly an embarrassment, to look at a recumbent discarded mattress and feel homesick, or as if one had lost some great love.
VERSO 33.3
A ladybird landed on my hand today while I was cutting the wisteria. Why do you say ladybird, the clerk nags, it is ladybug. We called them ladybirds when I was a child, the author says. I’ve changed enough I will not change that. So a ladybird landed on my hand today, when I was cutting the wisteria. Coccinellidae, the clerk mutters, if you really want to know. The author in her reverie doesn’t hear this Latin correction. She says, it was a sign of good luck when I was a child, if a ladybird landed on you.
VERSO 34
Amphibrach
I believe in very little anymore. How convenient. When there was something to believe in you believed and now there is nothing you believe in nothing. That seems easy to me. It is easy to believe in something when there is something to believe in. You said one night there was nothing left to love. You were in a bar with another poet and you said this. It is always hard to love when there is nothing to love, of course. What is the point of loving when there is everything to love? Isn’t the whole idea to find something where there is nothing? I see the world bare. I sometimes experience an existential awful soberness. I used to think that poetry had the force of action and still, sometimes, in sentimental moments you may find me waxing on that subject. But it does not have the force of action, as can easily be proven. Poetry is not even information. I can no longer vouch for these ambitions. I know I’ve said over the years that poetry in its most profound meaning tries to perform the job of saying that which needs to be said or thought, to apprehend the slippery quality of being human. Now, that all sounds childish and sloppy to me. Now, as opposed to when?
VERSO 34.1
The poem is concerned formally with the qualities of time, materiality, and meaning and has no obligation to the linear or the representative as is often the burden of prose narrative. There’s no pre-eminent or presumptive compulsion to construct or transport your reader, only, simply to address them. Story cannot account for existence. Other questions arise from a poem: when-ness, how-ness, what-ness. The clerk recites this from the author’s memoirs. When was I that naive? asks the author.
To calibrate sound, sense, discipline, passion, line, syntax, meaning, metaphor, rhythm, tone, diction, pressure, speed, tension, weight. Everything, everything, everything, the whole thing, in one line, in one moment, the clerk’s recitation continues. I depend on something so thin, says the author, so thin.
VERSO 34.2
I do not witness the violence of war, I witness the violence of spectacle. This is what she tells the clerk. Neruda and Lorca, she says, witnessed in their work the violence of war. They told us what we did not know and suggested that if we did know we would respond as better human beings. We do know and we are not better human beings because we no longer respond to knowing as better human beings might. No longer, asks the clerk. In the author’s papers, the clerk visits the actual sites of war as the televisual, the Internet, the newspapers. The author is the site of war. This is a metaphor, the clerk asks. No, it is not a metaphor. How can I tell you.
VERSO 35
The sea is oscillant, the waves heave like the back of the number 3; the clerk climbs out, looks back at the dock, the freight, the whole enterprise, the temblous archive. When I was,…the author begins. I hate the past, the clerk concludes that sentence. But we would not…Precisely my point, the clerk says, disappearing over the undulant back of the number 3, again.
VERSO 35.1
Blue acts, blue ethic, violet surplus, the clerk says, the clerk says with her pen between her teeth, better violet, violet sleep.
VERSO 35.2
The clerk mumbles more and more these days and more and more the author visits the clerk and listens to the clerk murmuring analgesic violet, early blue. What is all that noise, she asks. Violet respite, gravitational violet, the clerk continues. When you are finished, the author shouts, we must continue. Blue respiration, stapled violet.
VERSO 36
Pictures that the blue clerk has. One of the author, against a pyramid, with black short hair. One, against the North Sea. One against the Atlantic at 49 degrees north, and one at 7 degrees north, and one at 10 degrees south, then at the Indian Ocean and the Niger Delta and the Mekong. Then, after a broken-down bus on the way to Kumasi, in a field with other people, one of them looking away from the author.
VERSO 36.1
One hundred and seventy thousand odd nouns after the colour blue or violet, such as blue maximums, blue wine, blue safety, blue havoc, blue speed, blue marrow, blue steering, blue disciplines, blue opportunities, blue reload, blue diastole. Violet metre, violet scissors. Violet dialysis, violet suspension, violet incarcerati
on, violet haunch, violet cancellation, violet systole, violet visas, violet emergencies, blue snares, etc….
VERSO 36.2
(Things the blue clerk has.) Two bottles of ink, one stapler, one statue of Ganesha, six thousand seven hundred and thirty-one pens, five blotters, a slate board and slate pencil around her neck. Also the way to conjugate verbs in at least three languages; and the sound of ringing; a view of a fountain in a garden behind a doorway.
VERSO 37
She lost the veined blue book of her thoughts. The one book she wrote herself. In the desert between San Pedro de Atacama and Calama and falling asleep she thought, how will I reconstruct it all. No, that is for the author. The notebook, she thought, was full of blueness anyway. Blue limits. The desert will dry it. Don’t worry. The desert will choose which mirage the blue book will enter—a harbour, a volcano, the salt corals, the sulphuric algae. The blue clerk felt peace with this accounting. The clay and the dust went by, the sand mounded and drifted slowly in their million years. The experiments of the blue clerk in the lithium mines and the three villages with the drill and the four hats and the left plane engine, all this arrived with the clerk at Valparaíso with its lit morning harbour. There were grey naval ships there and a pilot vessel coming in continuously for the bales of grey paper, the flare of red leaves.
Is it the same dock? Valparaíso is so beautiful she wants to remain there, ride the funiculars up and down their particular streets, walk into a shoe shop. There are the gulls, the faint ship on the horizon. The clouds from the window are cobalt cranes.
VERSO 37.1
When I lost the blue book of your blue thoughts I was, at first, afraid. These were documents I felt I had lost and would never find again. Evidence of my collections, my thoughts, yes. But then my vertebrae, my vertebrae or it seemed as if my bones, my ribs left their place and walked into someone else. Someone calmer. Anyway I knew that I could summon it all again, and anyway what was in the book was all my past anxieties, and I had lost them before the bus rode out of the desert toward the airport after I saw the smallest Malva field.
VERSO 38
I looked into the same mirror as Neruda, I touched his telephone, his hairbrushes; peered at his briefcases. Te recuerdo como eras en el último otoño….y las hojas caían en el agua de tu alma…this far this distance, sun’s going, Avenida Constitución. I saw a walking baby in Bella Vista. These are the notes the clerk deciphers.
VERSO 38.1
These are Ho Chi Minh’s spectacles. I took a photograph. I took a photograph of his sandals. I walked in a quiet line into his vault containing his translucent body. A child and her mother pointed to my face and laughed. I did the same to them.
VERSO 38.2
On the subway from Pedro de Valdivia to La Moneda as from Yonge to Warden, still, the sleeping commuter between home and work, the universal handbag. In the deep, deep sleep of tyrannies, the long, long sleep of oppressions. Look at our faces, we are ready to abandon everyone else for the violent domestic eases.
VERSO 38.3
On the road after Calama. On a road like this you don’t know where you are. Whether you have arrived or whether you are still on your way. Whether you are still at the beginning or at the end. You are in the middle all the time. What would be the sign?
There was a piece of paper flying by in the desert. From where to where. From the air the desert is a brown paper with lines and wrinkles. On the ground you are at the beginning forever or in the middle or at the end. The clerk may choose right this minute to step out of the car and walk into another room, another atmosphere. Along the way men are scraping up the desert floor looking for something. Some lost object. I can see their nails from here, the sunglasses, the leather boots and belt buckles. Will they find the button they lost, a nugget of their hearts, or the stone of water buried there?
Echinopsis atacamensis lurch out of the Andes, prickled, long-necked. And the road is made of salt to Caixa.
VERSO 39
I travel the subway, the first time in years. There, on the train, I meet my early self, my young and tender self. A young woman in her twenties in a dress with thin straps under a thin coat. She has a book and a straw bag and a face so dedicated to itself, so certain, that it falls asleep on the train so safely as if the train is not harmful, will not be harmful, will stop where the woman wants it to stop, as if the woman will awake when she arrives at her destination, even if she is in a deep sleep and the stop is two stations away, even if it is five stations away. Her face is innocent of any failures. Or it is a face committed to failures as if failures will be the joy. No, it is a face empty of the meaning of failure. Why failure, what will be failed. My tenderest self, the author says, my tenderest self was the self that felt everything newly, all experience freshly. Today everything has the sediment of experience, the cumulus of event tinges the new experience, or summarizes it before it is felt, or alters it before it is observed. But then, I was in my tender self on the subway on a Saturday morning or any time of day, because time was unimportant or time was merely the space where new things could happen.
After those tender and volatile days all is summary, even love. My tender self sat on the train, fell asleep between stops. She was going to a friend’s apartment, she had an earring in one ear, her hair was loose, her wrist delicate with bangles, all the certainty and uncertainty of tenderness, kindness, brightness, newness glowed on her sleeping face. She was ready for the world, nothing was behind her, everything was ahead; even in the months and years to come, even when she passed them everything was still ahead of her; the self looking at her, the one who is the author is behind her. She is an unassailable ache in the author, a lover, not a yearning but a love.
The author loves this tender self because this tender self is unassailable, undiminished, unsedimented, raw and conscious. Sinuous. Without second thoughts, without doubt. At a certain stop the author exits the train. She could stay on but she does not want this tender self to open her eyes and see the author observing. She wants that woman to go on to her life unattended by misgivings. Even a look from the author would blight the woman. That is how potent the author’s looks have become. The tender woman seated there, sleeping her beautiful sleep, has an instinctive clarity that the author will, over time, make too laser-like, too atomic. If the author stays and if the tender woman wakes and sees the author staring, the tender woman will not be able to avoid the acidic routes she’ll have to cross. So the author leaves her tender self on the train.
VERSO 40
If you are in a hotel on the sixth floor and you move to the window, you are not in the salt lake with the dancing flamingos. In the salt lake with the dancing flamingos, the quiet is quiet, the desert is quiet, the absence is quiet, the quiet is quiet. Quiet of some beings like yourself. Quiet of some beings like myself, and you wish to join that quiet not as yourself but as yourself before yourself. I needed quiet.
VERSO 40.1.1
I loved the desert. Unusable word—loved, but I loved the desert, the quiet. I felt a peace in it, not harmless or fragile. I felt even. Level. I only fear other human beings, not the world. Not the earth. There I am willing to be devoured by its silence, its bird, its animal, its salt. Willing, resigned. But human beings, of a kind, the ones headlong, ripping the organism of the planet apart, they chill me. Anyway the desert is beautiful, there are mirages of harbours and seas in it, or was it the oceans, the crust, the magma, the stratosphere’s reflection, or a looking glass, un espejo.
VERSO 40.1.1
There. What romanticism. I could leave the desert. I could but I didn’t want to leave. I wished you didn’t want to leave. Yes, I wished that. But there was a moment when I wanted to stay there, knowing I could leave. It was the closest I had come to staying anywhere.
VERSO 40.1.2
I walked from Machuca toward San Pedro de Atacama beside a strict river. I could have walked on and on and on. At the same time twenty-seven children were slaughtered in Connecticut. If we are not witnes
sing an insane society we are insane. I am insane walking this Atacama road from Machuca. An infection.
VERSO 40.2
I have a photo of me who is me, and then there is the me who is me.
VERSO 40.3
Conquest makes the life of the conquered seem brief. This I thought in Museo Larco after being overwhelmed by the breadth of the Inca Empire. And those the Inca conquered must have felt the shortening of their existences too. When the Spanish arrived the thousands of years of the Inca collapsed into one earthen bowl. All their lives collapsed into one life. A summary.
VERSO 40.4
This morning from my hotel window I saw a carrion bird eating something on a rooftop. A pigeon was there a moment before but when I lifted my head from some distraction it was the coal-coloured carrion bird I remembered from my childhood—from neck to crown it was bald. I learned in my childhood its featherless head and cowl served the purpose of dipping into a carcass without becoming soiled or at least viscera would not stick to its scavenging head. To evolve this way. I could not see the body it was eating. When it was done it left. It was a lone bird.