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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810152397 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2013 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 140 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Birthplace with Buried Stones
Poems
By MEENA ALEXANDER
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2013 Meena AlexanderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5239-7
CHAPTER 1
KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.
POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of leaves. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at the hour of evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment's pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold ...
Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids ...
—ITALO CALVINO, INVISIBLE CITIES
Morning Ritual
I sit in a patch of shade cast by a pipal tree.
Each morning I read a few lines from The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Where did Basho go?
He entered a cloud, and came out the other side:
Everything is broken and numinous.
Tiled roofs, outcrops of stone, flesh torn from mollusks.
Far away, a flotilla of boats. A child sucking stones.
There is a forked path to this moment.
Trees have no elsewhere.
Leaves very green.
Lychees
Terrace deep as the sky.
Stone bench where I sit and read,
I wandered by myself
Into the heart of the mountains of Yoshino.
In one hand a book, in the other, a bag made of newsprint—
No weather-beaten bones here
Just lychees bought in the market,
Thirty rupees per kilogram.
Stalks mottled red tied up with string,
Flesh the color of pigeon wings—
Sweet simmering.
Sunlight bruises air
Pine trees blacken.
Where shall I go?
The Dhauladhar peaks
Are covered in snow.
Red Bird
These lines are for a child who counts out potatoes
And hands them to his mother,
She rinses them in the village stream—
Freckled red of potato skins, the color of the bird
Whose name is marked in long inscriptions, in copper plate
In a kingdom south of the mountains.
Bryant Park
Striped umbrellas lift in the breeze:
Two girls, one in a red shift dress, the other in white.
The one in lacy white has tight hair,
She spreads a fan with her fingers.
The fan is painted with swans and catalpa leaves.
The swans have lifted beaks.
I think she was part of Basho's snow-viewing party.
I'd like to sit in Bryant Park in midwinter, and catch the snow,
Skaters too, looping on ice, lolling gestures of the man
Who proposes to sing a song with my name in it,
Five dollars flat, recession rate.
a woman called Butterfly gave Basho a piece of white silk to write on.
It helped him a lot.
I think she had fish-shaped eyes, like the girl in the scarlet dress.
You are far away as the mountains of Yoshino.
Give me your hand, maybe then I can write a poem.
I want to add: I cannot live without you
But I am doing it anyhow.
Near Sendai
Butterfly blown
Into a mountain hole,
Wild iris cradled in darkness.
Cover your nose and mouth if you can
With bits of old cloth, drink iodine too—
Children bright and burning.
Let your shadow lead you.
Carve this line into cold rock
In memory of the place where Basho walked.
Bamboo
I stroll in a bamboo grove,
Birds pepper colored cling to the branches.
By the tomb of Sikandar Lodi
Your shadow comes to me—
A man in a lungi
Who is starving himself very slowly.
Blood, spittle, sandalwood, phlegm
What the body expels—
Flesh has a scent,
You beside me, forever (lost).
Suite 19, Viceregal Lodge
In my room a screen,
Pale silk in tatters,
I undress in the light of the mountains.
On the terrace monkeys dance.
One keeps a mirror in its claws
Another a burning orb
A third has its face blacked out:
On its head a cap with a snarl of blue
You once gave me.
Monkeys gnaw buds, topple flowerpots.
Stand in the way of the flowering jasmine
I hear you whisper
That way I can smell you
Even when I'm gone.
Landscape with Ghost
Two glasses, one chipped, a bowl with a crust of salt,
A bitter flash in air—
Lord Curzon's daughter whispers in the deodar leaves,
Unravels her hair.
Monkeys dart through clouds, they are long tailed and bear no malice,
Some are winged like cherubim.
She loiters in the corridor where princes were forced to stand,
She refuses food and drink.
Where is the lover she met at Scandal Point?
Below them, wild horses galloped, manes flaring.
Dear Diary,
I do not know who he is anymore.
I do not like your hands.
They are too foreign.
She needs Hanuman with his herb of healing
But the clouds won't part.
On a rocky path where squirrels leapt,
She creeps past a mass of dead bees
To reach a mound littered with cut hair,
Plastic bottles, filaments of ash.
In the gorge below,
Two women raise firewood in their arms.
Smoke rises
From a fiery tulasi plant.
Lady Dufferin's Terrace
In the old Viceregal lodge silk paisley and damask on the walls,
Rosewood staircase skittish on damp rock.
Rajahs stopped to water their horses, British armies dithered in heat,
Cattle crept uphill.
On unequal ground the shadow of wings—
Restless calligraphy.
Afternoons I go downhill in search of bottled water
And Britannia biscuits.
When I was a child ayah gave me biscuits to dip in tea
In a house with a mango grove not far from the sea.
Beauty swallows us whole.
I try to imagine your face without stubble on it.
In Boileauganj market I step into a pothole—
It's filled with shining water,
Desire makes ghosts of us.
Earthworms glisten in papaya peel.
Merchants squat in wooden shops
Hawking hair oil and liver pills.
A lorry with a blue god rattles past.
Krishna's right hand
Is stretched in benediction.
His eye, bruised.
Come twilight I sip cold water,
Stretch out on a chaise longue,
I am distracted by monkeys
Clawing stone pineapples on Lady Dufferin's terrace.
A cloud floats down, covering us all.
I turn on an oil lamp and write to you:
Dear X—Where are you now?
In the mess on Observatory Hill
They serve us rice, dal, and sliced onions.
Also green chilis, the color of parrot wings.
Lady Dufferin Writes to Her Mother
I ride along the edge of a precipice holding up a parasol.
—LADY DUFFERIN, SHIMLA, 1886
Miss Gough was a white cat complete with claws,
And Lord William, a Chelsea Pensioner hobbling along.
Mr. Rosen, beard dyed black did his Afghanish walk
With a lady in a sack—on her eyes, a bit of net to see through.
Children stuck noses against glass—
They saw me in orange, a Sheridan picture,
Stiff bustle, starch in my hair.
Did they think I was a Himalayan cockatoo?
He comes to me in dreams, Queen Victoria's munshi,
Little Indian chap who serves her well—
Why waste your time taking tea with a woman
Who dresses up as a white cat?
He was speaking of Miss Gough at our Fancy Dress Ball,
The one we had in the Viceregal lodge last week.
—Think of our poet who nibbled salt of the conquerors
And suffered so when you lot sacked Delhi—
He muttered the name Ghalib, adding something
About souls of the dead poking out of dirt as tulips do.
That night I slept badly.
At dawn I got the maid to make my water very hot,
I slipped into the tub with the golden claws.
In the garden a poplar swayed in the breeze,
A boy thrust his goats up rock.
Poor child, his head streaked with filth.
At our ball, Mrs. Bliss was the White Lady of Avenel,
Hair flowing over silks to the polished floor.
I never saw such hair before, as if the setting sun
Had crept into her skull and burnt it.
Now the munshi whispers in my ear—
See how blood glows in the Beloved's cheek!
Dear Mama—Where is Killyleagh Castle,
Where Clandeboye now?
Worlds swarm in me.
Soon we'll be spirits in this land we've come to.
Mountains hang under clouds,
And a light I cannot name wells up from the ground.
CHAPTER 2
The Territory Argent – that never yet – consumed – —EMILY DICKINSON
June Air
All summer I wanted to hold tight
To what I felt was the truth—
A penurious thing.
All I had was our breath, an unsteady pulsing
With holes enough
For a swallow to fly through.
I remember one in our room
Hovering by the portrait of someone else's ancestors,
A girl skirts askew, eyes half shut,
Seated on a tricycle.
Behind her, hands cradling her shoulders,
A boy bruised by paint.
The bird swam by the gilt ceiling
Then startled, dashed itself against the window frame.
After the beating wings were done
Hills clarified in darkness.
Bits of light fell from the sky.
We watched not knowing what it all was,
The air hurting us into happiness
We never really thought was possible.
Sun, Stone
From a hot stone
a grasshopper dropped
Into your palm,
You held a green heart, beating.
This bitten cliff is calanque—
The word in Provençal
Comes from kal,
Stone in your mother tongue.
The same sun strikes us
Here as in your childhood,
No elsewhere.
A man is casting off in a boat.
High above
A woman clings to a tree,
Her wild skirts blowing.
She cannot see him
So she imagines
The man with trousers
Rolled up,
Stepping into a boat
With a single
Transparent sail.
The figures on the wharf
Grow tiny.
No one knows quite how
They sang in Provençal,
Or how on the calanque
In the green wings
Of her skirt
The love notes rang.
In the Garden of Freemasons
Gnats flee into thickets
Swans too, in search of periodic water.
I brood on Jibanananda das, poems tucked
Into a notebook, returning from the book fair,
Struck dead by a tramcar, aged fifty-four.
On tendrils of dirt, in the spot where he fell
Spirits cluster. Children sing to each other
Tossing balls as children do,
A mechanical bird tethered with wire
Circles a stall of neon-colored bras, panties too.
Needing a place to wait for you
(Chowringhee undid me)
I sit on a flat stone in the garden of Freemasons.
What did the poet say about swans, nine of them, mystical?
He did not know why there were nine
Vanishing into trees, but that there were nine
He was sure.
It's dark in your city, clouds cover the moon,
The House of Freemasons tilts
With the weight of gnats' wings.
Under a crystal chandelier,
When he's sure no one is looking,
A man with red hair polishes his own shoes.
Don't go away, think of the poem
I hear you say—
It's all you need to do now, or ever really.
Landscape with Kurinji Flowers
A forked road leads to no season that I know,
Footpath dusty, sideways drifting into a coil of bushes
Pistils milk-mad, mouthing—
Love one another or die.
Feverish imaginings surely, trying to figure out where on earth we are,
Here in the only place we have.
Time's lapse, a torn shutter,
A click hoisting us into a landscape
Flicked by clouds, a blaze, a scattering,
Harvest scored by bees.
The ether of longing dragged in my mouth
And in your mouth, the taste of mine, utterly secret.
We are made up of place—
Corpuscles of soil, reamed with chalcedony
Dirt of broken blood vessels, cliffs scarred with bloodstone,
Gobs of gunfire, grenades' catarrh,
Red runnels of water, an offering to the gods
Who barely speak to us anymore.
Years from now, where will we be?
Sitting in sunlight on warm stones at the edge of a wall?
Pacing a hospital floor
As the wounded are brought in?
Or, in some terrible dream of home, rinsed clean, sky-blown
Shot free of a stumbling story?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Birthplace with Buried Stones by MEENA ALEXANDER. Copyright © 2013 Meena Alexander. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Experimental Geography 3
I Morning Ritual 7
Lychees 8
Red Bird 9
Bryant, Park 10
Near Sendai 11
Bamboo 12
Suite 19, Viceregal Lodge 13
Landscape with Ghost 14
Lady Dufferin's Terrace 16
Lady Dufferin Writes to Her Mother 18
II June Air 23
Sun, Stone 24
In the Garden of Freemasons 26
Landscape with Kurinji Flowers 28
Damage 29
Cantata for a Riderless Horse 35
Mother, Windblown 41
Boy from Rum 46
Nocturnal with Ghostly Landscape on St. Lucy's Day 48
Jerusalem Poems
Teatro Olimpico 53
Nocturne 54
Cobblestones and Heels 55
Indian Hospice 57
Garden in Nazareth 59
Impossible Grace 62
Mamilla Cemetery 64
House of Clouds 71
Song for Isaac 72
III La Prima Volta 75
Autobiography 76
Water Crossing 77
Summer Splendor 79
Migrant Memory 81
For My Father, Karachi 1947 84
Birthplace with Buried Stones 86
Question Time 89
Afterwards, Your Loneliness 90
Plot of Tiger Lilies 92
Lost Garden 94
Stump Work 97
Star Drift 101
Graduation 1949 102
Reading Imru' al-Qays on the Subway 104
On Indian Road 107
Elegy 110
Stone Bridge 112
Snow 113
Sita's Abduction with Shadow Puppets 114
Red Boat 119
Acknowledgments 121
Notes 125