Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

MONICA FERRELL

MONICA FERRELL Monica Ferrell’s first poetry collection, Beasts for the Chase (Sarabande, 2008), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in journals such as the Boston Review, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, and Tin House. She is also the author of the novel The Answer Is Always Yes (The Dial Press/Random House, 2008), which was a Borders Original Voices Selection and named among Booklist’s Top Ten Debut Novels of 2008. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and “Discovery”/The Nation prizewinner, she is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Purchase College and lives in Brooklyn. The daughter of an Indian woman and a white American man from the South, Monica was born in New Delhi and raised just outside New York City. Confessions of Beatrice D’Este When you consider all I have left behind, The ermine ruffs, glasses that sang out like sirens At a finger’s tap, silver fish traveling Upon gilt plates like ruptured silk or mercury, When you recall my long afternoons, sunlight Trailing along the floor like heavy velvet, My pearl-crusted carriage, jester, my guitar, What should I miss? Remember, I was also a mother, Two sea-horses once swam out from my ocean. I was even devoted. I hovered like a cloud At the cribs’ edge, watching their limbs grow tight. Day after day, my white face played parasol Sheltering those saplings and the fantastic dreams Assembling on their bodies’ trunks like greenery. 194 And yet only dregs of that elixir stain my glass, All that has all faded, gone from me in heat; Now I wonder: what were they truly, so young They could not return the river of my love But a couple of trembling puppies, blindly licking? Though I shall always wish them well, I have washed My hands of such salt. The thing I miss came earlier. Listen, when the doctors finally carried me Wrapped in linen and sprinkled with camphor, I saw a scene frescoed on my eyelids’ vellum I hadn’t imagined for years. I thought I’d lost That errant gem, yet like the oyster Found it neatly pearled within when my hinge Flew open in death. It’s simple, really: The first night my lord laid me down in our bed He slit me wide as a flower’s green calyx. Then, bending back my branches for grafting, Skillfully he pinned me. Later he blessed my hands And kissed my lips like departing snowflakes Before falling back on his pillow, a monument Of impassive sandstone I knew to leave alone. Watching him snore, at first I felt hurt But then a girlish filament of fire Made my whole body flame. Do you see? Lying there in the sheets, my body beaten Thinner than gold leaf, I had become bodiless Vapor, a musical note, a vanishing point or door: He had used me so completely I was seen through. The Coin of Your Country When I take my scissors to your shirts, I am frightened: not that they will whimper MONICA FERRELL 195 But that they won’t understand the violence I mean. That kind of violence is the other side of love, Bright as a light-saber and permanent As the angel’s swords above Eden Barring that couple with a final X, That violence means a love strong as death. Once Sie ist mein leben, you said, meaning me And I took those words personally And knocked upon the door of my heart Until all its birds flooded to you, in a rush— Like the Iroquois, I tugged on our peace-pipe, I wrote your name in smoke. Then went home With my pockets rolling in shining glass beads, My pockets so rich with the coin of your country. In the Binary Alleys of the Lion’s Virus Sorrento, your sun is light yellow lemonskin, your sky Purling out like a farther surf on which I ride away From that secret in a German town. I left behind A dragon of enigma to fester there without me, I left A small god ticking like a time bomb: a tiny jade statue suspended By magnets in the vulva of a prehistoric temple. Here In the oyster of your mornings I wake as lead. Once I was a knight Who rode out in search of grail, now...