We closed our eyes and prayed,
knees sunk into the soft sand,
our ears trembling like bats,
our lives translucent geckoes
with irregular pulse;
but after the ceremony,
after the rituals were done,
we could do nothing but push on, northwards.
At dusk of another day our heads
were heavy: overripe fruit, chapped lips,
hungry hearts and thirsty hands,
and we fell to treachery,
clasping knives in unknown ways
Reading Heaney’s ‘Nerthus’
for S. Ben-Tov
Afternoon sun of Ohio’s August
daubs the classroom with early rust.
Eight of us bristle, apprenticed
to nail the world to its sentence.
Poet’s poet, our teacher hands us
a copy each of Heaney’s ‘Nerthus’.
A chill creeps in me as she reads.
From Heaney-soil, that concrete dark,
an unseen ash-fork staked in bog:
my first portents of winter north.
*
We have all heard the name
but not Heaney’s Great Chain of Verbs.
We stall. And do not fathom
the quiet mesh of kesh and loaning
that lull and push of middle-voice
that verb say
the long-grained never static
of the poem’s non-finite aesthetic
Walking home with Mandelstam
Bowling Green, Ohio
This sky placates no single crag;
no rock, no stone, but sods that lie
ploughed and turned and hard and black.
Snow patters like stars on my hood.
My breath is yours from Leningrad,
Osip, barefoot, walking ahead.
Crows rise against the falling flakes.
Underfoot, fresh snow crunches like flak
in black-and-white films with battleships.
Learning to walk the ice comes slow
like permanent revolutions
in their cold glut of time,
but I know I am walking home
through second snow
with Osip Mandelstam.
Mingus
Orange was the colour of her dress
then silk-blue too fast run fields
flit flit flit cymbal-rapid the horn
flicks to slow down rumble drum tinkling
roll like laughter to a steady field
through field there’s a waltz in there
role snare stop then the flowers fall
through her eyes dress flicks languid the
bass here my heart throbs throbs then
thrums and peeks a mouse my hand beneath
the dress orange against the no silk-blue sky
floats like a fair when I die
happy-go-lucky us folk we cannot shake
the sadness of her dress bass like a fish
under my skin the horn swings one-eighty
degrees the world gone wild like
the shadow of her dress spinning over me
bright polythene to the sky we hang
like litter from the fence bass bass stumble
swing free horn page through me finger
finger swing finger
touch the tender root of history
Stars of stone
Today the stones I know will nick
our skulls, then knock our souls
from us. It is so. For under stars
that are but burning stone,
we held each other. Named for light,
Nurbibi clung to me, her back
against the flat roof of my house
warding off earth, hanging
under heaven. Face-down,
I gripped her shoulders, smelled
the stone roof through the rug.
Nurbibi may have stared
over my shoulder at the stars,
those burning bits of far-off stone.
And she may have seen four men’s eyes
hanging above us in their own,
unmoving flame. Eyes of stone,
heads shrouded in swathes
of scripture. So I, Turyalai,
am bound. And on my knees.
And Nurbibi, in whose loins I sought
some God, is now almost at one
with earth, buried to her waist
next to me. We wait
for the seekers of God
and their ceremony of the stone.
Men we do not know will come
and let stone speak, first in whispers
then in what they must believe
a chattering of angels
when the crowd erupts and rocks arc
but in parabolas far short
of reaching God, that must return
to earth. Men who do not know us.
Men who cannot know
that even as we wronged my wife,
in union we created God. In come-cries
caught in the throat, we made Him.
And made Him ours, gave Him some voice
even as He was in the still of night
as He is now, inchoate
before the hard and burning stars.
Turyalai and Nurbibi were accused of adultery and stoned to death by the Taliban in November 1996.
Southbound: leaving Chicago by Greyhound
I’m back here, interfaced
With a dead phosphorescence;
The whole town smells
Like the world’s oldest anger.
– Yusef Komunyakaa, ‘Fog Galleon’