ONE
Philology
For Brent Adams
I have about me the old book smell you love so well.
Dear to you as something rare, if cheaply acquired;
Closer than the uncut pages in what you insist we keep,
Unread, by water beside your bed—it was not always so.
To begin, I was no chapter in the book of dry bones.
It began with breath, breath because it rose and fell,
Cowering like a bird of prey over bright depths
In an unblinking room. There I grew dull.
I picked through the poems of others as a bird might
Pick at spoiled meat. A trope, I have heard said,
Is one hell of a way to return to us our dead. I grew
Historical—I learned to read at university with a scalpel.
I warmed to words, as the Florentine painter a freshly turned
cadaver.
The monk in the graveyard, the bones in his head. I found piety,
Even as angels that claw at grass on the green seabed
And gather the snow from once-mighty fish, snow that is slow
In descent, as slow as a diver changing depth, or footnotes
Depending from devouring lines we owe the scholar
That condescends, and gathers at the bottom of a page
To atone the least among the mighty dead. So it was,
When they brought me his still-warm name,
I washed my hands and read—I began dexterously,
Not with fire, as one might suspect, but after:
In a clearing in stone, whorl of earth and light in what is left
Of a burnt-place. There, adjoined sinister, a child, that is,
Clay you might meet in any vacant lot, off any busy street,
And hear drown in the noise of its own breath,
Or the newspapers blown sincerely about its feet, even
Over-hear make an end, against the dull insistence of a fan
On a ceiling, in an un-inspiring room, over the phone.
I now hear: children echoed in leaves, the anxiety of crows
Confined to balconies, the telephone in my sleep.
The only noise that’s trouble, says the doctor, is speech.
What is known: unseasonable laughter in children; converse
Among birds; or the breathless girls I now hear again pass
A crop of blue rock in wet fields, the glass they wear to their
elbows
And red dirt on their feet; the wet petals of paper flowers
They placed, weighed down with unfamiliar names, on my tongue
To press apart at the lips a smile they could acknowledge theirs?
Or the sound of a little earth ending beside you in your sleep?
(Where you open a name to read, your words must be no less kind
Than the surgeon’s unwavering hand, or the most improbable
Of his cruel-seeming knives. I turned the name in my hands,
More gently than the surgeon the apples he picked
To demonstrate biopsies at the kitchen table, removing all the
white
And not once breaking the red. I turned the name, gently, to read).
There is—it is barely legible—time, were we but larger,
To mirror the history of stone un-colored,
To remember and not chew shape from out this earth,
Unquiet flesh of our flesh, fever-sleep of rock.
I cannot say whose, but should we come, I cannot say where
Into such clearings, there will be dust, approximately…
…there is always dust. It is but the parenthetical root
Joining both our ends in his name. But if it is time that persists
Between dust and mould in the clearing, time enough to grow,
Before meaning escapes its word,
Earth the breath that binds it—were it but time—it might not be,
Not ours enough. It is not written. Opaque that I am,
I have failed before, printing leaves beside their reflections in
water.
I’ll not obtrude more into light interred with bone—once, it was a
name.
TWO
There, and from VT*, back to Boston Terminus
(Or, Where shall wisdom be found?)
For Hasan
No god of doors,
But a creature extravagant –
Like the quite-blind raccoon I love
Well enough not to name,
That does not stop at doors, but climbs
Every night, dragging its one stiff leg behind,
A little too mechanically up the stairs.
(The dead leg makes as little sound,
And is no more a thought) –
Something altogether wild
And familiar, to return thus,
As strangely as it left…
…I can remember now,
At a window, mistaking the voices of children
For screams along the failing banks of trash
Below, seeing a dog grip the girl by her throat
(Where I thought I saw the buds of white flowers).
“Don’t be ridiculous,
I refuse to believe...” said the father,
Shaving behind me (we were close enough,
However, in the glass), “that you have not once heard
The sound they can make if you add nothing
To what will grow stubbornly green
In the brittle clutch of what we have made…
…don’t be so bloody sensitive.”
That was not the first thing I learnt
Or the last time I failed to distinguish
Brute pleasure, at a distance, from pain.
There were the women outside the hotel,
Stuck to a wall along the street,
Their backs paper-wet in the rain.
It was not earth, but paint flaking off their feet
That colored my fevered face in the dull water
Between us. (I have heard stories where blue gods
Similarly afflicted, like as not, are similarly cured).
One unpeeled herself. I watched
Her hum into a mirror, and put on again the passing suggestion
Of a riper mouth: “I know that you have travelled,
And I should like to have read what you will read.
We might even have been friends,
In the next room, or in houses quite like these
…if further down the street.” I would not dare
At the stairs or at the door, and remembered instead
The way she had looked at me, as girls mostly will
As through some benign and un-sorrowing thing.
She did not turn in the hall,
So as not to disturb her hair in the mirror
But said, “Dust we are,
And so must remain among the blinking things.”
Her smile reached and did not touch her eyes,
As a crack in glass its unblinking brim.
She could not have seen mine, for I saw it reach
And, in the mirror, do nothing
And not perturb her face.
Years before I cried for the dogs I saw on the street
And not their boys, taking them to have been familiar-
Enough, creatures bound to have begun life at home.
Hours before, I took fans receding from the perverse ceiling
In the station for windmills. That was the first.
How my father had laughed. He was quieter,
After, forced to roll up blackened windows
In the car. “It is a precious and too finely-edged thing
…’perspective’.” I did not know the word. Or my mother
When she spoke up behind me, indistinct,
I thought, as fifty ashen-mouthed doves:
“I do not want him to have to die here.”
The driver looked at her in the mirror.
“Don’t you worry, doctor; what do we know
Of what he will remember, of who he was before
And what he is after? What if he is as one
For whom acts cast no shadow?” I heard him then,
And looked for my face among the faces in the mirror.
It would not, as faces frequently will not, come into view
As something definite you might later choose to forget.
The car ever after to me has been a breathing thing,
And the uncanny man that drives it the only one
To body the un-still heart of it. What do we know?
Where? I remember
Words the enigmatic one said to the archer,
Set into the glass of a window above my bed:
“We are as moving parts in an engine idling.
Remember that, and so do as you will.”
* VT: That is, Victoria Terminus, a landmark railway station in the city once named Bombay, opened in 1887. Now renamed, improbably, given the Gothic architecture, ‘CST’, which is ‘Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus’.
SONAM KACHRU is a Kashmiri and was last seen working towards a PhD at the University of Chicago as an international student. Kachru is at present completing a book-length project, Make Humans Again: Voices From Kashmir, an illustrated book of contemporary poetry translated into English from Kashmiri. Initial work from this project has been accepted for publication in Another Chicago Magazine, Greater Kashmir, and Words Without Borders.
Philology
For Brent Adams
I have about me the old book smell you love so well.
Dear to you as something rare, if cheaply acquired;
Closer than the uncut pages in what you insist we keep,
Unread, by water beside your bed—it was not always so.
To begin, I was no chapter in the book of dry bones.
It began with breath, breath because it rose and fell,
Cowering like a bird of prey over bright depths
In an unblinking room. There I grew dull.
I picked through the poems of others as a bird might
Pick at spoiled meat. A trope, I have heard said,
Is one hell of a way to return to us our dead. I grew
Historical—I learned to read at university with a scalpel.
I warmed to words, as the Florentine painter a freshly turned
cadaver.
The monk in the graveyard, the bones in his head. I found piety,
Even as angels that claw at grass on the green seabed
And gather the snow from once-mighty fish, snow that is slow
In descent, as slow as a diver changing depth, or footnotes
Depending from devouring lines we owe the scholar
That condescends, and gathers at the bottom of a page
To atone the least among the mighty dead. So it was,
When they brought me his still-warm name,
I washed my hands and read—I began dexterously,
Not with fire, as one might suspect, but after:
In a clearing in stone, whorl of earth and light in what is left
Of a burnt-place. There, adjoined sinister, a child, that is,
Clay you might meet in any vacant lot, off any busy street,
And hear drown in the noise of its own breath,
Or the newspapers blown sincerely about its feet, even
Over-hear make an end, against the dull insistence of a fan
On a ceiling, in an un-inspiring room, over the phone.
I now hear: children echoed in leaves, the anxiety of crows
Confined to balconies, the telephone in my sleep.
The only noise that’s trouble, says the doctor, is speech.
What is known: unseasonable laughter in children; converse
Among birds; or the breathless girls I now hear again pass
A crop of blue rock in wet fields, the glass they wear to their
elbows
And red dirt on their feet; the wet petals of paper flowers
They placed, weighed down with unfamiliar names, on my tongue
To press apart at the lips a smile they could acknowledge theirs?
Or the sound of a little earth ending beside you in your sleep?
(Where you open a name to read, your words must be no less kind
Than the surgeon’s unwavering hand, or the most improbable
Of his cruel-seeming knives. I turned the name in my hands,
More gently than the surgeon the apples he picked
To demonstrate biopsies at the kitchen table, removing all the
white
And not once breaking the red. I turned the name, gently, to read).
There is—it is barely legible—time, were we but larger,
To mirror the history of stone un-colored,
To remember and not chew shape from out this earth,
Unquiet flesh of our flesh, fever-sleep of rock.
I cannot say whose, but should we come, I cannot say where
Into such clearings, there will be dust, approximately…
…there is always dust. It is but the parenthetical root
Joining both our ends in his name. But if it is time that persists
Between dust and mould in the clearing, time enough to grow,
Before meaning escapes its word,
Earth the breath that binds it—were it but time—it might not be,
Not ours enough. It is not written. Opaque that I am,
I have failed before, printing leaves beside their reflections in
water.
I’ll not obtrude more into light interred with bone—once, it was a
name.
TWO
There, and from VT*, back to Boston Terminus
(Or, Where shall wisdom be found?)
For Hasan
Houses are machines to live in.
The Crow-like One
The Crow-like One
No god of doors,
But a creature extravagant –
Like the quite-blind raccoon I love
Well enough not to name,
That does not stop at doors, but climbs
Every night, dragging its one stiff leg behind,
A little too mechanically up the stairs.
(The dead leg makes as little sound,
And is no more a thought) –
Something altogether wild
And familiar, to return thus,
As strangely as it left…
…I can remember now,
At a window, mistaking the voices of children
For screams along the failing banks of trash
Below, seeing a dog grip the girl by her throat
(Where I thought I saw the buds of white flowers).
“Don’t be ridiculous,
I refuse to believe...” said the father,
Shaving behind me (we were close enough,
However, in the glass), “that you have not once heard
The sound they can make if you add nothing
To what will grow stubbornly green
In the brittle clutch of what we have made…
…don’t be so bloody sensitive.”
That was not the first thing I learnt
Or the last time I failed to distinguish
Brute pleasure, at a distance, from pain.
There were the women outside the hotel,
Stuck to a wall along the street,
Their backs paper-wet in the rain.
It was not earth, but paint flaking off their feet
That colored my fevered face in the dull water
Between us. (I have heard stories where blue gods
Similarly afflicted, like as not, are similarly cured).
One unpeeled herself. I watched
Her hum into a mirror, and put on again the passing suggestion
Of a riper mouth: “I know that you have travelled,
And I should like to have read what you will read.
We might even have been friends,
In the next room, or in houses quite like these
…if further down the street.” I would not dare
At the stairs or at the door, and remembered instead
The way she had looked at me, as girls mostly will
As through some benign and un-sorrowing thing.
She did not turn in the hall,
So as not to disturb her hair in the mirror
But said, “Dust we are,
And so must remain among the blinking things.”
Her smile reached and did not touch her eyes,
As a crack in glass its unblinking brim.
She could not have seen mine, for I saw it reach
And, in the mirror, do nothing
And not perturb her face.
Years before I cried for the dogs I saw on the street
And not their boys, taking them to have been familiar-
Enough, creatures bound to have begun life at home.
Hours before, I took fans receding from the perverse ceiling
In the station for windmills. That was the first.
How my father had laughed. He was quieter,
After, forced to roll up blackened windows
In the car. “It is a precious and too finely-edged thing
…’perspective’.” I did not know the word. Or my mother
When she spoke up behind me, indistinct,
I thought, as fifty ashen-mouthed doves:
“I do not want him to have to die here.”
The driver looked at her in the mirror.
“Don’t you worry, doctor; what do we know
Of what he will remember, of who he was before
And what he is after? What if he is as one
For whom acts cast no shadow?” I heard him then,
And looked for my face among the faces in the mirror.
It would not, as faces frequently will not, come into view
As something definite you might later choose to forget.
The car ever after to me has been a breathing thing,
And the uncanny man that drives it the only one
To body the un-still heart of it. What do we know?
Where? I remember
Words the enigmatic one said to the archer,
Set into the glass of a window above my bed:
“We are as moving parts in an engine idling.
Remember that, and so do as you will.”
* VT: That is, Victoria Terminus, a landmark railway station in the city once named Bombay, opened in 1887. Now renamed, improbably, given the Gothic architecture, ‘CST’, which is ‘Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus’.
SONAM KACHRU is a Kashmiri and was last seen working towards a PhD at the University of Chicago as an international student. Kachru is at present completing a book-length project, Make Humans Again: Voices From Kashmir, an illustrated book of contemporary poetry translated into English from Kashmiri. Initial work from this project has been accepted for publication in Another Chicago Magazine, Greater Kashmir, and Words Without Borders.
