A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel—
A Resonance of Emerald—
A Rush of Cochineal—
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head—
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy Morning's Ride—
— Emily Dickinson
'A Nostalgist's Map of America'
The trees were soon hushed in the resonance
of darkest emerald as we rushed by
on 322, that route which took us from
the dead center of Pennsylvania.
(A stone marks it) to a suburb ten miles
from Philadelphia. "A hummingbird,"
I said, after a sharp turn, then pointed
to the wheel, still revolving in your hand.
I gave Emily Dickinson to you then,
line after line, complete from heart. The signs
on Schuylkill Expressway fell neat behind us.
I went further: "Let's pretend your city
is Evanescence --- There has to be one ---
in Pennsylvania --- And that some day ---
the Bird will carry --- my letters --- to you --
from Tunis --- or Casablanca --- the mail
an easy night's ride --- from North Africa."
I'm making this up, I know, but since you
were there, none of it's a lie. How did I
go on? "Wings will rush by when the exit
to Evanescene is barely a mile?"
The sky was dark teal, the moon was rising.
"It always rains on this route," I went on,
"which takes you back, back to Evanescence,
your boyhood town." You said this was summer,
this final end of school, this coming home
to Philadelphia, WMMR
as soon as you could catch it. What song first
came on? It must have been a disco hit,
one whose singer no one recalls. It's six,
perhaps seven years since then, since you last
wrote. And yesterday when you phoned, I said,
"I knew you'd call," even before you could
say who you were. "I am in Irvine now
with my lover, just an hour from Tuscon,
and the flights are cheap." "Then we'll meet often."
For a moment you were silent, and then,
"Shahid, I'm dying." I kept speaking to you
after I hung up, my voice the quickest
mail, a cracked disc with many endings,
each false: One: "I live in Evanescence
(I had to build it, for America
was without one). All is safe here with me.
Come to my street, disguised in the climate
of Southern California. Surprise
me when I open the door. Unload skies
of rain from your distance-drenched arms." Or this:
"Here in Evanescence (which I found---though
not in Pennsylvania--- after I last
wrote), the eavesdropping willows write brief notes
on grass, then hide them in shadows of trunks.
I'd love to see you. Come as you are." And
this, the least false: "You said each month you need
new blood. Please forgive me, Phil, but I thought
of your pain as a formal feeling, one
useful for the letting go, your transfusions
mere wings to me, the push of numerous
hummingbirds, souvenirs of Evanescence
seen disappearing down a route of veins
in an electric rush of cochineal."
for Philip Paul Orlando
pp. 35-37
"The Keeper of the Dead Hotel"
Still bitterly remembered....the
labor strife at the roaring copper
town of Bisbee, leading to the Bisbee
Deportation in July 1917.
In one room upstairs
he reads late
into the night. Afternoons wake him
to voices speaking in webs. Nights
he lights the desk lamp in the lobby,
then walks into the bar and touches
the piano.
Drunk senators once gambled
here while their wives blurred
the balconies with silk. One,
an actress whose smile was an era,
came down the steps, turned
like the century to look at herself,
then vanished from the mirror
of the pine hatstand.
Letters arrived
for her years after. When he reads them,
he hears her whisper: "Something
has happened. What is it?"
No one answers,
but each night a voice cries out: "Fire!"
The copper mountains echo with rifle shots:
men on strike are being killed
in the mines, the survivors forced
into boxcars and left in the desert
without water. Their women are leaving
the city.
Each night he sees them depart.
Each night he hears laughter from the balconies:
braceleted arms, glasses filled
with the moon's dry wine. Each night
she still asks:
"Something has happened. What is it?"
But who will tell her? She is furiously
brushing her hair. Her shadow,
through the transom, is soft on the ceiling.
Who will tell her?
Every silence in the world
has conspired with every other. Unanswered
she is leaving this city again, her voice
pressing him back into the silence
of ash-throated men in the desert,
of broken glasses
on the balconies,
the moon splashed everywhere.
For John Hudak
pp. 60-62
from The Half-Inch Himalayas. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University P/University Press of New England, 1987.
'Postcard from Kashmir'
Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.
I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.
This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won't be so brilliant,
the Jhelum's waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.
(For Pavan Sahgal)
p. 1
'The Dacca Gauzes'
...for whole year he sought
accumulate the most exquisite Dacca
gauzes.
—Oscar Wilde/The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:
a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. "No one
now knows," my grandmother says,
"what it was to wear
or touch that cloth." She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from
her mother's dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.
Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys
were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.
In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,
and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,
my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only
in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.
One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.
pp. 15-16
from The Country Without a Post Office. New York: Norton, 1997.
'"Some Vision of the
World Cashmere"'
If I could bribe them by a Rose
I'd bring them every flower that grows
From Amherst to Cashmere!
--EMILY DICKINSON
I
But the phone rings, here in Amherst: "Your grandmother is dying. Our village is across the bridge over the flood channel, the bridge named for Mahjoor."
"There's no such village!"
"She had a terrible fall. There is curfew everywhere. We have no way to bring her back. There is panic in the roads. Our neighbors have died."
There never was such a village...
"We are your relatives from her mother's mother's side. You've heard of us! We once were traders and sold silk carpets to princes in Calcutta, but now we are poor and you have no reason to know us.
II
I put the phone down in Srinagar and run into the sunlight toward her cottage in our garden. Except for her dressing table mirror which Sikander, so long dead, is polishing, the army has occupied her house, made it their dingy office, dust everywhere, on old phones, on damp files, on broken desks. In her drawing room a clerk types. The colonel, dictating, turns around. My lost friend Vir! Srinagar is his city, too, he wouldn't have ordered its burning. It's not him. Someone else with a smile just as kind, the face of a man who in dreams saves nations. Or razes cities.
"My grandmother is ill. Please send someone with me. Please, someone with me in one of your jeeps to the village."
III
In her room the sun shines on her father --- a painting from which he stares, unblinded, at even today's sunlight.
Just then through the back gate some villagers and her dead brother are bringing her slowly through the poplars, by the roses. I run out: Thank God you're alive! She is telling her brother, Be grateful you died before these atrocities. My small home a dark office! How will I welcome you?
IV
The mirrors have grieved in her absence. They run to greet her at the door. It is her home again! Sikander has turned on the radio: a song of Mahjoor's in Raj Begum's voice: "The whole universe is worth nothing more than your shadow." And I'm holding her hand in that sun which is shining on all the summers of my childhood, shining on a teardrop in which windows are opening, amplifying her voice, and she is telling me, God is merciful, God is compassionate.
pp. 35-36
'Ghazal'
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar
—LAURENCE HOPE
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight
before you agonize him in farewell tonight?
Pale hands that once loved me beside the Shalimar:
Whom else from rapture's road will you expel tonight?
Those "Fabrics of Cashmere---""to make Me beautiful---"
"Trinket"---to gem---"Me to adorn---How---tell"---tonight?
I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates---
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.
Executioners near the woman at the window.
Damn you, Elijah, I'll bless Jezebel tonight.
Lord, cried out the idols, Don't let us be broken,
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.
Has God's vintage loneliness turned to vinegar?
He's poured rust into the Sacred Well tonight.
In the heart's veined temple all statues have been smashed.
No priest in saffron's left to toll its knell tonight.
He's freed some fire from ice, in pity for Heaven;
he's left open --- for God --- the doors of Hell tonight.
And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee---
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.
p. 40
'The Floating Post Office'
The post boar was like a gondola
that called at each houseboat. It
carried a clerk, weighing scales,
and a bell to announce arrivals.
Has he been kept from us? Portents
of rain, rumors, ambushed letters...
Curtained palanquin, fetch our word,
bring us word: Who has died? Who'll live?
Has the order gone out to close
the waterways...the one open road?
And then we saw the boat being rowed
through the fog of death, the sentence
passed on our city. It came close
to reveal smudged black-ink letters
which the postman---he was alive---
gave us, like signs, without a word,
and we took them, without a word.
From our deck we'd seen the hill road
bringing a jade rain, near-olive,
down from the temple, some penitent's
cymbaled prayer? He took our letters,
and held them, like a lover, close
to his heart. And the rain drew close.
Was there, we asked, a new password---
blood, blood shaken into letters,
cruel primitive script that would erode
our saffron link to the past? Tense
with autumn, the leaves, drenched olive,
fell on graveyards, crying "O live!"
What future would the rain disclose?
O Rain, abandon all pretense,
now drown the world, give us your word,
ring, sweet assassin of the road,
the temple bell! For if letters
come, I will answer those letters
and my year will be tense, alive
with love! The temple receives the road:
there, the rain has come to a close.
Here the waters rise; or each word
in the fog awaits a sentence:
His hand on the scales, he gives his word:
Our letters will be rowed through olive
canals, tense waters no one can close.
pp. 52-53
____________________
'After the August Wedding
in Lahore, Pakistan,'
we all---Save the couple!---returned to pain,
some in Massachusetts, some in Kashmir
where, wet by turns, Order's dry campaign
had glued petals with bullets to each pane---
Sarajevo Roses! A gift to glass,
that city's name. What else breaks? A lover's pain!
But happiness? Must it, too, bring pain?
Question I may ask because of a night ---
by ice-sculptures, all my words sylvanite
under one gaze that filled my glass with pain.
That thirst haunts as does the fevered dancing,
flames dying among orchids flown in from Sing-
apore! Sing then, not of the promising
but the Promised End. Of what final pain,
what image of that horror can I sing?
To be forgotten the most menacing!
Those "Houseboat Days in the Vale of Kashmir,"
for instance, in '29: Did they sing
just of love then, or was love witnessing
its departure for other thirsts--- the glass
of Dal Lake ruffled half by "Satin Glass,"
that chandeliered boat barely focusing
on emptiness--- last half of any night?
In Lahore the chanteuse crooned "Stop the Night"---
the groom's request--after the banquet. Night,
that Empress, is here, your bride. She will sing!
Her limbs break like chrysanthemums. O Night,
what hints have been passed in the sky tonight?
The stars so quiet, what galaxies of pain
leave them unable to prophesy this night?
With a rending encore, she closed the night.
There was, like this, long ago in Kashmir,
a moment --- after a concert --- outside Kashmir
Book Shop that left me stranded, by midnight,
in a hotel mirror. Would someone glass
me in ---from what? Filled, I emptied my glass,
lured by a stranger's eyes into their glass.
There, nothing melted, as in Lahore's night:
Heat had brought sweat to the lip of my glass
but sculptures kept iced their aberrant glass.
To be forgotten my most menacing
image of the End --- expelled from the glass
of someone's eyes as if no full-length glass
had held us, safe, from political storms? Pain,
then, becomes love's thirst--- the ultimate pain
to lose a stranger! O, to have said, glass
in hand, "Where Thou art---that---is Home---/Cashmere---
or Calvary---the same"! In the Casmir
and Poison and Brut air, my rare Cashmere
thrown off, the stranger knew my arms are glass,
that banished from Eden (on earth: Kashmir)
into the care of storms (it rains in Kashmir,
in Lahore, and here in Amherst tonight),
in each new body I would drown Kashmir.
A brigadier says, The boys of Kashmir
break so quickly, we make their bodies sing,
on the rack, till no song is left to sing.
"Butterflies pause/On their passage Cashmere---"
And happiness: must it only bring pain?
The century is ending. It is pain
from which love departs into all new pain:
Freedom's terrible thirst, flooding Kashmir,
is bringing love to its tomented glass.
Stranger, who will inherit the last night
of the past? Of what shall I not sing, and sing?
