she drew her dark cloak of constellated blue
so the boys that speak in the snake’s interest
couldn’t leer at what all babble fails to say.
No spring vision
(birds interpret as they sing)
of flowers limning the unguarded flow
of heaven is fresher; without her, L’Or
gives skin no glow nor JPMorgan’s yearly
profits; within her high castle’s living pew
our seeming leaders might be less possessed,
all who exchange her presence for the Devil’s pay.
God’s elision
in life’s book of our killing –
that only sin – our joy with our sorrow
surely bodes well for his setting some store
by holy communion, wherein we’ll merely
look and kiss and laugh along each bared sinew
as I measure the lovely weight of a breast
where the light, the embodied light, swells its ray.
Ah, derision
for my own solemn honking
bites once more – sound in which we think we go
about the gardens of an emperor,
dreamt court in which we whisper cavalierly
as his money man – and I’d be a fool to
mouth her name and put love to the test:
no saint protects those whose chatter keeps the dawn at bay.
Tree
for Zephir, b. 18.8.04
I root myself at the heart
of lucid, pathless space,
fingers in all directions
braced against the silence.
I am a pine, bristling
with dark electricity.
For a hundred million years
I have brooded over mysteries.
I am a plane, my great leaves
flapping like anoraks
beneath the cocksure
patter of the rain.
I reach from dirt to light,
equally expansive
in skies and under earth,
basking in blackness
and gripping empty air;
I am a splintered column
taking heaven’s weight,
a river falling sunwards,
a mind lit by strange birds
at the heart of space,
fingers in all directions
opened to the day’s clear flame.
SUMITA CHAKRABORTY
In the summer of 2014, my younger sister suddenly died at the age of twenty-four. The cause of her death remains undetermined. Her death became the main interest of this poem, which takes its title from the English-language translation of Priya, her Sanskrit-origin name, and on which I worked for the subsequent two years.
While the poem is therefore an elegy of a kind, it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper, or to write a way of inhabiting grief rather than exactly writing about grief. As a result, neither its subject nor its addressees are my sister alone, and its references range widely, including Louise Bourgeois, Nina Simone, Calvino, Beowulf, the names of horses I once saw at the only horse-riding competition I’ve ever witnessed, and more. As that list as well as the length of time I spent writing this poem might indicate, several different texts and interlocutors were on my mind as I wrote it. Four repeated touchstones were: Paradise Lost, to which I listened on audiobook often during those two years; Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song; Alice Oswald’s Memorial; and Marie Howe’s The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. Howe’s title is the phrase that often comes to mind for me when asked to describe this poem. The mood of elegy, I found, is diverse and capacious, containing bliss and misery alike; inhabiting grief happens in the day-to-day procession of the most ordinary time, which can also feel like a kingdom – one that is at once evil, or blighted, and beautiful, not to mention everything in between. These decisions motivated each aspect of the poem, including its syntax, form, and diction. The desire to write the mood of elegy or to write the experience of inhabiting grief became, as such, not dissimilar from what I tend to hope of any poem or tend to admire in poetry: that it will write into being a world that already in some way exists.
Dear, beloved
Child. We are done for
in the most remarkable ways.
– Brigit Pegeen Kelly, ‘Dead Doe’
It would be winter, with a thin snow. An aged sunbeam
would fall on me, then on a nearby summit, until a mass
of ice would come upon me like a crown of master diamonds
in shades of gold and pink. The base of the mountains
would be still in darkness. The snow would melt,
making the mountain uglier. The ice would undertake
a journey toward dying. My iliacus, from which orchids bloom,
would learn to take an infant’s shape, some premature creature
weaned too soon. My femoral nerve, from which lichen grows
in many shades, would learn to take breaths of its own
and would issue a moan so laboured it could have issued
from two women carrying a full-length wooden casket, with dirt
made from a girl inside. The dirt would have been buried
with all of the girl’s celestial possessions. Bearing the casket
would demand more muscles than earthbound horses have.
The girl would have been twenty-four. This was my visio.
Sometimes I think of it as prophecy. Other times, history.
For years it was akin to some specific land, with a vessel
that would come for me, able to cross land, sea, the spaces
of the universe, able to burrow deep into the ground.
Anything could summon it — a breaking in cloud cover,
wind chimes catching salt outside my mother’s window,
a corner of a painting. And I learned how to call it, too.
This is the only skill of which I have ever been proud.
When my sister died, from the head of my visio came offspring
in the thousands, armed to the teeth, each its own vessel.
My first, their mother, lived on. For itself and its hoard
it found a permanent home in a cave at the bottom of a lake.
And it waited until I was standing on a mountain to sing to me:
You will call this mountain home until I tell you to move again.
There will always be more of it underground than you
will ever see with your eye. And so it turned out to be true.
And so when I stood on the mountain that became my home,
I beheld a dirt sea, and saw our moon, which has two faces.
I learned that one face of our moon is dappled with maria,
and that the sunbeams here are newborns that lie
on each other, purpling into the fog and outstretched pines.
The Earth spins masses of air until it looks like one of many
irises studding our galaxy. From space, parts of the Atlantic
look like leather, wrinkled and dark, and others look
like iridescent fishes in an old Master’s painting of the sky.
I live in the valley of a crater here, where steam rises like ghosts
in the summer heat. This mountain is made of igneous stone.
Every day I issue a warning to lovers: darlings, I have
in my possession a dead girl deer. Her head is draped
over my right shoulder. I hold her with one arm
encircling her torso. You wake each morning with flowers
shrouding your body, like a corpse; I put them there.
To me, you died when my legs curved around your head.
One of the deer’s eyes has blackened, and her tongue is thick.
She belonged to my sister. O my sister, you were twenty-four.
Listen close. Even to this part. Especially this.
I want you to hear what I say to lovers, because I want to sing
>
to you, who died a virgin, a few treatises on love and sex –
how flesh and ecstasy are born, what they make,
how they live out their days. As a bodied girl
you feared me, and I met your fear with guttural disdain.
I imagine you wondered what it would take for me to hear
a mortal, human voice: whenever you spoke, a vessel came
for me, chattering like some frail and hissing bird,
pigeon-chested, thin-veined feet. Sister, I don’t listen to lovers,
either, who I call by the same names that were yours:
dear, beloved. But spirits are not like their progenitors.
Their touches can range, texturally, from velvet to bristle.
Lover, each time I kiss you I name after you
a sickly feeling in my own body, as if each ailing
is a previously undiscovered moon orbiting a planet
that can only sustain the strangest of life-forms.
Sister, I know neither goodness nor mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life, as surely that I know the beasts
I inherit or create, of all unions familial or otherwise,
are speechless and brute, and bound to die soon.
Yes, there is much to love about the body.
Too, there is much to hate. I cast off care for pleasure,
and for labour, teaching my body over time that these things
can’t coexist. I fear it has started to believe me.
My body has never sought wholeness the way yours did, sister.
It was always still the dull twilight of early morning with us.
You were twenty-four, and when you died, I stopped fearing
arson. When I picture us as girls, we are at the base
of the mountain from my visio, divining the summit
as we diminish into spots of light. We are without parentage.
On my mountaintop in midafternoons flocks of wheeling
birds gather around the crescent moon. When the moon
worms its way through the clouds, it fixes its eyes on me
and sings a song that says we live our lives chained to earth,
and that when we die the flesh falls off our bones
so our bones can turn into the driest of riverbed dirt.
Sister, when you died, your bones cast an enchantment.
We made a powder of them, and I named the powder ash,
because ash is a word with neither origin nor afterlife,
and its definition is the look a doe gets when she’s been away
from her herd too long. When a person goes missing
and we don’t know her name, we grant her the surname Doe.
With this christening we name all missing persons
part of the family of ash, which has no family.
Sometimes I think that each speck of ash
previously named Priya hums on quiet nights
in a frequency only the other pieces can hear.
Inaudible to the waking world she hums to herself.
That hum is how my blood became blue; in lieu of oxygen,
my body began to breathe in only the vibrations of the hum.
Blood has to be born into its colours. Or, more precisely,
it has to die into them. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Nyx is born
of Chaos. Erebus, Gaia, and Tartarus are her siblings.
Hesiod couldn’t decide whether Nyx birthed the Fates
or whether the Fates were born of someone else, but he knew
that Nyx’s children, whoever they were, had no sire.
About Nyx’s brothers and sisters, Hesiod writes:
Earth too, and great Oceanus, and dark Night,
the holy race of all the other deathless ones that are for ever,
and one day – what? Tell me. Tell me the song they taught you.
Tell me how you learned how beautiful Nyx is,
how you realised Zeus feared her, and how you first saw
that within her every star, from the swollen to the hollow,
from the living to the dead, is visible, powered by little
but her peerless face. When I returned north for the first time
since my father turned my sister into a powder named ash,
a word born of nothing and with no children, I heard her
from a seagull on the ferry I rode from the harbour to the Cape,
out of a piping plover on the dunes, in a crow’s call on the highway
from Boston to Gloucester, past Folly’s Cove, Prides Crossing,
Rust Island. Then, from my station again on the mountain,
I heard my own voice from a brown thrasher. That night I drove
through remains of a fresh accident on the mountain highway.
The dropping sun lit my back as if heralding fire.
A dislocated red front bumper straddled the median,
singing a song. Nyx was in the wind, and her siblings,
and they bade me sing, too, like Hesiod had asked.
Grant lovely song, celebrate the holy race of the deathless
gods who are for ever, born of Earth and starry Heaven
and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear.
Soon all were singing. The median sang with the deep voice
of a woman who knows how to sing scat, and the mountain,
standing like a moon on earth, responded with a wordless song
of its own creation. Ash sang. Dirt sang. To them I lent a melody,
which is one of the things I do when I can’t sleep. The secret
about lullabies: when they work, it’s because they sound
like something plants would sing in Hades, on the banks
of the river dark. Oh how I wish they worked on me.
When the sculptor couldn’t sleep, she drew mountains.
They were pink, red, ridged and pulsing, and rose
from valleys of blue. Or else she’d draw eyes that held
too many irises, or wombs that bore sweet cysts,
or spindle-legged women with outsized, drooping breasts,
ill-formed and misshapen eyes for nipples, uneven halos
for areolae, made of the same skin as the kind under eyes
that have been open for too long. Those songs I sing
when I can’t sleep are directed to my army of visios.
In return, they give me images of myself as different
creatures: gibbons, a chicken with a plucked-feather neck,
an asteroid, a mountain, a volcano with the thinnest,
most translucent shell. Me, as some fantastical beast with eyes
lining the inside of my body, watching my diaphragm
turn into the ocean I saw from the ferry, watching plumes of sun
flare over it as it comes to resemble a dead animal’s
long-weathered skin. Ghostly ships with dropped anchors
materialise to trawl it, and squadrons of men dismount,
searching for new blooms in terra mountainous and lush.
My heart is a sky embalmed and bright. When the phantoms
drop anchor, there to welcome their sailors are screaming pelicans
on the rocks, and parades continually wheeling of ugly vultures
in funereal garb. In their eyes, the Atlantic always looks besieged
by hurricane. Lunar maria means moon seas, but when I hear it
I picture horses, torqued female beasts who live on the moon
and whose manes are made of the roots of moon-trees.
I did not want to die, but I wanted to want death.
None of you ever knew how badly. I have practised at it.
At times I rehearsed like a dancer, surrounded by mirrored walls.
At others I moonlighted with movies set on battlefields
and abattoirs, pausing and rewinding until I could mimic
the motions of actresses who succumb to unexpected poison,
or shove knives into their bellies, or fall like Brueghel’s boy.
I pretended I was standing in a castle dressed like a samurai,
looking through a barred window, knowing the trees
approaching held a promise so annihilative my flesh
would have no choice but to accept. I pictured jumping
from the top of the mountain and I sang Love it Love it Love it.
On my mountain the birds shroud the pines, and the pines
make a spectral outline against the valley of Nyx’s body.
One afternoon here a man said to his son: All this has to do
with eons of time, water over and over, just cutting and cutting
the rock. From where I stand on its summit, I can touch
the Big Dipper and I can see its children, and another peak,
shaped like the back of a horse. It is shadow blue, the same blue
as the dying sky. To the Big Dipper and her children I sing a song
that asks if they are safe, and tells them that on forest floors,
dappled things of glass and light grow from knotted roots.
Sister, could I find you on that horse mountain? I wonder
if I want to. Have I made this world? Lover, a confession.
If I found my sister on any mountain, I would gather her
in my arms and take her from its back, singing lullabies.
Or else I’d take an arrow laced with a drug I’d made special
for her, and, standing close, push it in her unarmed
right flank. Instead of how to die, I ended up studying
how to kill. But the sculptor, she asked nothing of her dead.
Out of visions of them she made formidable metal spiders
she named Maman, Maman, Maman. Maman Maman Maman,
who live after the sculptor has died, have all lost children,
like my mother. Their domains are terrors – land-terrors,
water-terrors, terrors of the open sky. Their hearts are war-
grief. Terrors of trees in the joyless forest, of portent.
Sometimes in their homes are fires on floods, dire wonders.
Their children were all named Doe, which means that the plural
form for children of Maman is deer. For a long time I hated
the phrase I am sorry for your loss. I lost nothing. My sister died.
But loss is less of a euphemism than its users want;
New Poetries VII Page 4