Mother, Windblown (A Suite)
- Mother, Windblown (A Suite)
Je cherche la chanson, je dois la retrouver . . .
—Marie Etienne
1. Housekeeper
Where is your life,What has happened to it, old shoe?
The ruinous everyday,How to cope with that?
To have given birth once, twice,And before that, to have borne witness
To a clot of bloodDrained into a china bowl.
It was up there in the mountains,Where we loved each other
Close to a forest of whistling deodar,Deer too, ears pricked up.
2. Metal Mirror
To turn,As if memory were a mirror (how trite it sounds). [End Page 181]
But birds are pecking the airInside out
A squall of pigeons and parrotsOn loose stones
Hammertoed quail, and horsemen,Desperate for conquest
Racing past women threshing milletIn the city of Iltutmish, in the year 1230
Then and nowMarkets crashed, painted birds flung back.
3. Interlingual
No, not that deaf, grave past,Rather to be here where I have gone on
Saying yes, yes—always yes!To reel backwards
To be gathered (as the vagina bleeds)Into unerring lightness.
Later, the mottled part,The hair-speckled part
Bejewelled and puffed up(Who made these colors?)
TranslatedInto a mother tongue
Which no one can hearFor very long. [End Page 182]
4. Himalaya
Once a seven-week creaturePaddling inside, scraped out.
Twice, a nine-month creatureThrust out, wailing
Boy and girl, sticky and sweetAll sucking mouth and shit.
Later we were motherAnd two children who had no boat
To cross the dark riverFerocious fastness
Wind pleatedAt the foot of the mountain.
5. There Is No Subject
It still hurts inside,Light pulled up out of me
And a great light pressing down,I don't know how else to put it,
Ribs thrust open.The future impenitent
Who will teach you patienceScarlet sash
Culpable in beautyO extravagant umbilicus, [End Page 183]
Empress of all festivals.In the mirror (needful now)
A doe shorn.Quivering flesh,
Her work done.Or not, not ever.
6. Coda (Sky-Water)
Borne north in dreamsThere are lights in the sky, driven lights
I swim freely(Ponder the adverb)
Through a ring of goldEncircling a boat
Timbers splintered—Winged boat
Found in a Jardin des Vestiges,What the Phoenicians fled
As death came calling.On a cloudy slope
Deer nibble cut stalksOf deodar and chir pine. [End Page 184]
Syllables tumbleIn a milky river:
Babbling motherFont of memory..
Meena Alexander's works include Illiterate Heart (Triquarterly Books, 2002, PEN Open Book Award winner) Raw Silk (Triquarterly Books, 2004), Quickly Changing River (Triquarterly Books, 2008), and Indian Love Poems (Everyman's Library, 2005); Fault Lines (The Feminist Press, 2003); Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (South End Press, 1999); Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (Palgrave Macmillan, 1989); and two novels. Poetics of Dislocation is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press (Poets on Poetry Series). She has received awards from the Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundations and the Arts Council of England. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center and Hunter College, City University of New York and currently serves as an elector of the American Poets Corner, Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.
Note:
In the year 1230 CE, Iltutmish completed work on a victory tower, the Qutb Minar in Delhi; the Jardin des Vestiges, once part of an ancient Phoenician settlement, is to be found in Marseille. I visited both (scenes of migratory civilizations) during a long journey from which I have just returned. [End Page 185]
