Figure Map at Tide Drafted

8/8/2019 Figure Map at Tide Drafted

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Figure: MAP (AT TIDE)


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Alternatively, fragments from memories without the experience otherwise

necessary to account for them.

Sonam Kachru (December, 2010).


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--"And if the seasons defeat our garden?"


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ONE


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I

what fear after the flowers

If our eyes recede

And we ebb, with unfamiliar light,

Against discolored skin, at tide

The cutting shores

Of crueler seasons?

Here are yet mothers, and every bit as kind

As the stranger sea; we are taught, and teach

Our children to live as at the ends

Of cut stem or leaf, or at the break in bone

With the wit of calluses;

To take their tea with salt,Wash one another clean with mud.

Here are mothers, with a knife

To keep under the pillow of a child at night

To sever them from sleep, if their sleep

Be unkind, or in the least inviting: to forgive us

Should we trespass in the light of morning

With a too beautiful, even unmarred face

Even as we forgive those who recede

And do not wake.

What if this is not light we once knew


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To gather to it all that is bright

In a clean room in a swept house,

In the splendid accord of flowers

Pressed to absolute, almost up-to breath,

Condense at the window above the translucent flesh--

Her first turnips;

Or knew to abound,

By un-mute edges in spring,

In water we drew from mirror-blank wells,

Moldy taps set in mottled walls, to remember

Something of winter.

Still,

The light is not nothing--to show us nothing

Of the nothing new with us--

But is some scaled thing

Or unwelcome thought, coiled

In a damp corner in a fevered brain,

Alive to all that un-still still lives

And passes through us, and is caught

As little dust in little light.


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II

Here is the country, if any, for amateur theology.

For, doubtless, God wanted this blue country,

Eventually,

To tire, of the gravel-throated songs

The drowned hyacinth songs

O,

O, O,

But he kills me every day...Did you see him this fall

Embrace me to winter?

And tire of her tears

That flowed as prayer in her rivers

And as ash in her songs;

Gently whetted songs

In crueler mouthsall heartless birds

Our stones no longer breed

From the thirst of snow,

The silence in reeds.


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III

Know that it was not so, Witness,

Or is it martyr? Sip, and between sips

Remember: it was not like that at all.

We carried no gods on roads away from snow.

Children, disjointed at dusk, I remember,

But no fossils of paisley or dew of pearls.

A blackened cup, but not the samovar, with

The testimony of a blackened case for cigarettes.

In her untidy eyot of hands:

Glissade in dirt a broken-backed bird

Gathered to itself in her garden,

The only almond eyes I ever lay beside;

And no crop of gods.

Of the skin she carried she made herself a winter mask.

Quite shut in with memory of new snow, fed on echoes

Of water from yesterdays snows she remembered.

It fell into her lap, there where we slept, with her endless hair

And the first thoughts in her swept head, like unclean feathers

And snow from birds, to the floor of a cage she did forget

To clean before she left.

I heard it collect,

With the crocus feet she let lie on a broken chair, to drift

In the bitter surf and the bitter shade, withered,

As she might have said, as a walnut in unclean dirt

On an unfamiliar street, dried in a foreign summer.


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Only three days I lay beside all four pathetic feet

Of exile earth in hermute to mirror this,

Now unframed earth of us all, sublimed

Breathing only the naphthalene

That clung to her to the end of her attic days

In her hair and on her breasts and on distinct fingers

That held her pale hands, once, in mine.

I do not recall, Witness, or Martyr, the gods

You insist she carried away from you with their homes,

Leaving you, your windows in your arms, out of doors.Know that we carried no roads away from snow,

Only a memory of snow, and what was less, if more than enough

In a little room, her broken-heeled regard for dead-end roads.


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TWO


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So long as we can say This is the worst.

The worst is not

Where we can say, This is the end,

Unless it is not

An end but the beginning of worse.

Who can say

When it begins to end? There must be time,

And ours enough, to begin an end.

In the end he was bound to have written us

A book of time,The drift and not the wreckage.

This was one way, after all, to come to rest where he was,

And close without beginnings or ends


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II

When he left, he took with him every door to his house

But not the walls, and begged us to sink every word,And make no ripple

In the gravel-colored waters in the mud-cold lake.

Let us not speak of worms.

I cannot hear enough of landscapes, or eyes.

Some winters we stayed home and nevertheless

Lived apart, as vultures, to ourselves.

(But in a little room, a girl let down

Her glowing hair. Small comfort

We did not drown--we were deserts

In her shade. She sang

To water our stony heads:

Ill not go back on the road I came.

But the moons a fool, and Ive got no change

In these pockets. What shall I give

The man in the ferry? Ill not go back, no,Ill not go back.

Songs are not like houses,

She said, but paper boats

In leaky rooms.

An unfamiliar figure).

Some winters we carried tea and fried bread to friends

In the clutch of stones. This was before

They left us, out of our depth,

When their eyes were variegate, stuck

To flaking stone and lives the maker of ends

Left behind on painted walls.


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This was when their mouths disinclined to rubble,

To what truth lies with pleasure in a time of leaves,

And when our ears remained, at their leisure,

Words meat.

(But let us not speak of worms). They have left us

A matter of climate, a sort of taste in the head, and

Leaving, placed their words just so in our heads,

Like misshapen statues with unfinished eyes,

Arranged to be counted,

Like half-recollected breath.

We proposed to make a book of itFor them to live in, a book un-housed,

A history of empty scenes un-walled,

A book victorious, like no monastery ever built.

They took the book with them, but left us each

Written on a pebble: Your superstitions bait worms.


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III

One alone among them returned to us in summer,

Fleshed in the skin of a cow, carryingOn his back, with a crowd of books, stones

With the faces of familiar gods

Through which he spoke indistinctly:

Come gather, you who remember

The lake is not deep enough for winters bones

Now the dogs have found your wells.

My roof is broken. After little water, the journeys

Over. I am broken, but you are louder

Than all the spinning wheels of winter--

Now theres a noise to keep you from unhinged sleep.

(Whatever that might mean).

He looked long but did not meet a face he remembered

In the crowds that gathered like water wherever he slept.

He left the city of bridges and found a girl who lived in a stove

With hair and a mouth of fire.A year she was to him a crossing, only to die a distended bridge

Over falling air, further down the river.

He passed her in autumn for the woman who lived in the rock,

With skin like water and a tongue like dust.

When he passed into the rock, he left only his skin, his books,

A few stones and his mouth, though there was not room enough

In the rock to hang a man between them. She had (it was later

Said) only this to say: to spring a trap made with love,

And not get stuck, youll want knowledge, or cruelty, or both.

Undressed, he lived

And the rest of his life watched a boy


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In muted-white stone grow between them in a corner.

The woman left them only her smell, indistinct as the colors

Of urns, for air.

When one died (as one does), the other stood

And passed over a body with a face that he knew

And a stone mouth wet with the smell of her. He left the rock

But leaving no longer remembered which he had said he was


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IV

Are these human, the faces you see

Indistinct, as cut stalks in wet grass,

Or something else? When they speak

Is it audibly said?

Or do their words drain in your throat

Alone, and wrenchLike bloated dogs in flooded gutters?

Are they yours,

The urn-white children that come and go,

Inspiring, in corridors, a little dust

To whispers under a discord of tables

In a rind-thin hall where men brood,

And do not discuss, like scholars,

Lesser conspiracies? Is it moonlight

You overhear

Undo blue shadows on the walls

And never once face

The children who made them,

Or the sound of restless wings

Beating against stubborn nothing?

Your room is a fit of doors, but like no poem

Ever written.

I might have been one of them

Rotting at the table, waiting,


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THREE


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I

Spare us your mapmakers bold,

Your historians gauze-thin colors.

Have we not fore-suffered all,

In every insufficient palette?

Our city sleeps opalescent.The memory of the unwashed face

In the cinder lap of unthawed winter

Of the re-splendid goddess

Drowned in the arms

Of her timeless lover,

God of tears in things,

The answering swell of strong brown waters--

The city bears the name of every city ever broken.


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II

In this country, after the flowers, I cannot remember:

Was it doors or windows you carried in your arms,

Or the willow bats under ferans once children pretended were AK-47s

Or the landmines they had our children carry before them

On roads away from snow, into buildings without air: to burn

Their stillborn shadows into our dislocated memory of stone?

So much in this country now depends from air.

Allegedly, a most peculiar affair,

To have you feel as you do

When your brain is a rifle

With an inconvenient safety, only to turn

As did the loaned barrels, into the lit ends of cigarettes

And the questions they forced

With all that smolders in colors

(In rooms without end and without windows)

And watch slip, duly beneath

All the answering colors of your skin.


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III

Was it then bitterly said

(Given the husks, in a dry month,

Of green almonds in his ripe mouth):

Are we human?

Or bitter to hearThis side of the receiver: Who

Said "human"?

He heard, as if chiseled

From his still smile,

An unfinished mouth

Profess in stone

We have given

Each man for the ferry his due.

What man hanged shall here fear

The colors?Then finish it with me:

Do you give a damn?

And the answer, profuse stone


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IV

You made room in my bed,

Mother, to lie with all the seasons.

It was not yet winter before me,

But autumn in the gable windows,

When the one with a stain of blue

Through his throat (His eyes like rain),

Waded like a stork through the wet leavesAlong my bed, and every honest mask stitched from air

Above my head. (His face made with all that is indefinite

In the faces the clowns in spring knew to bring us).

Mother, autumn will crisp our sheets.

It will eat

Past the leaf-shaped lips,

The leaves in his mouth,

The leaf-shaped eyes, and

The grass sewn in with his hair.

Mother, the one with the stain

Anoints my mouth with what smolders

In colors. He has broken every face on the wallBut the indefinite face of winter.

The shadows on the slatted ceiling

Are as proverbs in your mouth.

Your knife he placed with the rushes,


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And I am shuttered--Mother, I fear

Come winter they'll have us commit stones

To memory--to grow

Where we grew, against spring that was

Lucent, in the garden of long knives.

Do you remember his name,

The one that quiets the dancer,

That can rend his indefinite face, as the blue

Through his tenuous skin

Autumn's latter colors? Am I too young

To remember? I taste again the words

In my throat, words you had me swallow

Like stale bread, and remember your eyes

Recessed, like flowers from winter air:

For what was green in the mouth

And the parched reed

They recommend water;

Blood for its hollows, pale corolla

In quick fires:

The color of Autumn's Crocus,

Stained with Spring's Wilder Madder.

It is best to be as wind

And not water, come ash;

The blue vein of Winter

In stones, come Summer


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FOUR


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I

Each summer we welcome the rattle

Of transient birds in restaurants.

You can overhear them, at dinner,

Emollient, converse

In houses that float on the water, or behind walls

On segregated lawns, until they pause, as one,

Like porcelain that rattles before it restsAt the lips of tables exquisitely carved.

I have heard their ragged claws extend

To a page, and, insincere as snow, caress

The cinder tongues of resident birds--to trace,

Again, every word they smothered in sighs:

'O, what a comfort to hear humans again

In a time of secessions, surgeons and spoils'.

I have heard the compassionate rattle

And what it must mean to hear them say--

'You cannot know how much it means--

O, but that we should no more speak of paradise

But life, or, dare I say it here--Cauchemar?'

There is seasonal wit to whet the keenest voice

That ever drowned in sympathetic smiles.


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Smiles more profound than bone-ash in porcelain.

As savage, more still.


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II

It is summer. Open the boy

No bigger than a stone

That becomes the pebble

In the toothless mouth of a timeless river:

You will find in his head the harvest sky,

Wider than the whitest furrowIn the sleep of grey fields, after the fires;

Concertina of holes across his chest;

A scatter of stones buried before him in spring.

Everywhere, the smell of graves:

hamin ast o hamin ast o hamin ast,

The earth our gardeners inbreathed

To exhume us, on the third day, no house

But the first bouquet of the garden to come,

As is written in the book of gardens, given earth

And time enough of martyrs,

and rival Shalimar

...agar firdaus

bar rue-zameen ast, and it is autumn

And the guns subside, and after, the stones,Even as our leaves subside, to fire un-numbered

Then is our brittle harvest,

Our ash-mothers to gather

Mouths that, parted from eyes, fill with colors,

The unbearable likeness of indefinite ruin,


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Immemorially weaned on indifferent fuel

To be fed more intimate fires

Till all that is of light in voice return

To ash,

And crisp words reduce

In hearth-cold mouths, to name

Just how it is with the air that is honest

About burnt rock, in the burnt fields.


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III

So much, in this country, now depends from air


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FIVE


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I

Winter is not colorless, if for a time being indistinct

As a miniature on marbelized paper, or a poem

Insinuating a desolate, mud-colored duck

On dissolute veins of ice in a rust-colored river.

Winter on a plate is indefinite, buried with the leaves

In the aborted shade of a walnut tree: with a mirror under the skin

Of a walnut, dates from an unwashed calendar

And cowries in the hair of fresh flowers--their bloated stems

Salted in cold water

...These we packed into snow

With all the eggshell care our barbers knew to extend

The unopened vein in every boy

That ever burned through fevers in winter.

He knew (when their skin

Took on the look of glass-dark turnips

Obscured through the clouds of oil, flushed

Against the shoulders of brine brown jars)To subdue them, even as we knew

To pack the spiced fish-heads in clay with a little snow,

To leave them, to the cold, to congeal--


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Winter knows

Only such intervals of relief

As are struck in cold air and expire

At the limits, like a match by a cigarette

In a shriveling mouth (it is no season for the unsteady),

Or wink out, anonymous,

Like girls they now find with reeds in their hair

(And not accidentally, for truth, it is said, in winter,

Prefers to dwell at the bottom of eyeless wells).

Winters relief can be

To dissipate, as my thawing wordsIn your steaming mouth

If indifferently said, (as something, that is,

not even dead) or the unintended wilderness,

At my cheek, of a grandmother's warm

But graceless breath.

Winter in a granary is a winter wife to hold in a corner,

The drift of lepers the color of day-old snow

In the gravel, whispering, under the window,

A pair of cowries on clumped eyes.

Winter on a plate, however, was for us to succeed

At ash in the new year. But do not press the ash

For the colors in winter, if winter's colors are winter's no longer

But belong with the wolves you have begged a lover

To feed in her dreams,

When you have felt,

As ash in snow, or the raven

Silhouetted in sibilant white branches,

Envy at hearing tell

Of a past, and for a time, even


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Nostalgic, for time

That must come into view without you.

Winter is no memory for the desolate present.

Winter are the hours that crouch like no animal

...and will not spring.


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II

Winter is a rumor of more voices,Orphaned in barking snow.

Do not strain the ash this winter.

There is not room enough.

Disarrange, instead, for him

His secluded eyes,

That their blue may flower

To thoughts of sky in her constricted head.

Water the foliate lips, autumnal and still,

If you seek atmosphere

But do not water the rasp of echoes

Along the bare corridor, in the shadows

left by these, that were never

Children, or seek to confine them

In the inner courtyard,

like the wandering dog

We tied through a blue afternoon

With white rope to an un-watered tree

And watched, spurred to affection, dilate,

Or, uncomprehending, lessen, ever in spirals

Bound with the wet leaves to the dirt floor.

We watched him rehearse

For us our devouring parts, auscultate

An indifferent geometry --


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It was enough

To have been, at least once, this banal,

And this cruel. But not indifferent.

We labeled the resulting figure 'memory'.

...it is true, we had the skill once

To confine more unnatural animals

To dusk, in the warp and sleep of leaves

Of gardens begun, as we,

With indefinitely many knots

--tied at the other sideTo the shore of colors--invisible

To all but the most cunning

of knives

Or fingers.

These we had made

To press against the eye a suggestion

Of life, of some stubborn seed

In a growing thing, to proliferate

An un-seamed semblance

To live past all memory of life

In the marvelous dead hands

That caught, in empty shuttles, a touch

Of the half-widowed light

that will neither live nor leave,

To one side of the colors.

There is not room enough.

Winter is a rumor in the fever-sleep in colors,

Whispers in the undressed lap of senile light.


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III

It is not yet winter in the courtyardWith his furniture and the painted feet

Of un-skinned gods,

But not the maple tree.

The willow-tressed balcony,

But not its reflection in the brown water.

The hyacinths are at the bloated cheek

Of the reflections of hyacinths

Along the parched river. They have waxed,

As an uncertain smile

Pressed through the oily cheeks of touristsShrinking from a window in the blasted wall,

Shrill voices drowned, but not by water.

In the shade hyacinths drink from shuttered lips.

There is little of the light in the courtyard,

Strained through teeth in a papered mouth,

An unblinking window.

Here water and eyes are blanched, with the season,

In the receding court where a boy saw his first onions


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Advance, his colorless eyes a crowd of eagles

Subdued with the bare leaves of a still maple.


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SIX


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Brine in a glass eye is to remember

And can be stained with any color

You can remember enfold

(As when flowers begin to sink

Beneath their reflections in water)

The impression of a receding eye.

Pickled with brine in eye-bright glassAn eye is more like a flower than ever.

Children with glass eyes ought not to throw stones.

Stones are to milk with mouths winter brought us.

Flowers, by the mouthful, are to be chewed to silence

And not swallowed;

If children with glass eyes throw stones,

They will break, and not extend,

As the smell of flowers through a room

When cut under water.

Children with glass eyes do not break in water,

But will not keep. A flower in a petrified mouth

Keeps longer than the boys bowered in the reeds.Choked with flowers in summer, the river exhaled them

Like urns.

Grant them

That we may require no more


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SEVEN


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I

(Blessed be the makers of beginnings)

We open at the mouth, in no way hermetic.

But have a care with the leaves

When you pour over us; if you answer

Ash in a stone mouth

With rumors of a book of waves.

We have eaten of more than one book in the garden.

It is rumored we will eatNo cautery again, but a book of sutures

Written in unbroken ligatures

Stitched, with a vulture's quill,

Through tongues stiffened with bark.

These we owe hands

Less steady than those of the coroner,

More kind than those of illegible time,

Grown old

time's untimely work,

Fleshed in the carrion grammar of crows.

(Blessed be the makers of beginnings, milkers of stones)


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EIGHT


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So it was I went before my ancestors a mirror.

They were crouched as windows

In an airless room;

Their eyes seemed to look

Through glass, as a glissade of glass seen

In a shuttered window to a darkened room.

We held between us in our teeth

The still threads of recognition.

It was enough to see

Them see themselves, and to see

In them myself unseen.

It was enough. To see...


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Figure Map at Tide Drafted

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