Elegy for My Father; Rites of Sense; Black River, Walled Garden; and Pitfire
- Elegy for My Father; Rites of Sense; Black River, Walled Garden; and Pitfire
- Elegy for My Father
Father, when you died, your bones were brittle, fit to burn. They stretched you on a teakwood bench. Light etched your cheekbones, stoked your eyes, your thumbs were pale as love-apple fruit.
The sun when it splashed into the Arabian Sea made candles gleam in rows all along your ribcage. Kneeling at your throat I heard a fever bird call.
II
One night returning late, I was a loudmouthed teenager then, I caught you at the dining table, fists clenched, forward bent in darkness.
Do you love me? I asked, needing God knows why to know. Some things need not be said, you replied. I heard the sea roar in your bones. Of course, you added softly, under your breath. [End Page 49]
Smoke poured from your cigarette. I learnt to read a kindness in your clenched fists, the nicotine scents misting mother’s vase of iron colored roses.
III
You were the age I am now, a man for all climates, hot streams, monsoon rivers, the indigo sea. When they cut India in two they made you choose.
You were in Karachi, a young man trained in meteorology, that science of precise instability.
Learning to measure the pour of wind, tor of sunlight, warm shards of gravity.
Twenty-six years old, jaunty in peaked cap, Starched shirt, gray flannels, the best the local tailor could provide. I imagine you like young Gandhi, eyes fixed to a mirror,
adjusting collar and tie, wanting French lessons, dancing lessons, surrendering to the equipoise of knife and fork.
Then came the barbed wires of Partition, the misery of packed trains, crude bloodletting. [End Page 50]
And ever after England, with her rationed eggs, garden parties at Buckingham Palace for visiting students, Bible classes in Keswick.
In those hills you feel God so close, you whispered, sitting up in bed. In your ribs I heard The thud-thud-thud of an animal heart
that means to keep pace with the terrible light of God.
IV
When they laid you on the bench Our kinfolk knelt on mats, sang of grace that slips through black water to a country that has no shore.
However hard you row, Jehovahis a sun without source.He will flood you with light.
At your open grave three priests beckoned me. The oldest child, I had to cover your eyes.
I bent over your body, drew out pale muslin, folded it over your face. [End Page 51]
If this is the end of life, the three priests sang, what use are gnanam, dhanam, kavya? Princes and potentates have come to this crawling on all fours.
After I covered your eyes a warm rain fell over teak and mango trees.
We turned eastward away from the open grave, fronting resurrection.
V
Father, it is a year since you died. The past makes sparks and fragments pour in my eyes.
I am in another country, east of ours, an island at the rim of the South China Sea.
The land makes a rampart, a broken glittering geography. Who stands behind me?
Memory believes. Can knowing remember? Someone with white hair beckons me.
She sings an air I do not know. She kneels under a rain tree, flings grain of sticky rice into the sea
as the sun soars into that darkness Plotinus sought When he mused on the soul, [End Page 52]
its very shape a flaming mystery. There, there, she sings. Your lips, throat, eyes,
where are they now? What light will etch us close? There, there, she sings
pointing to a cloud streaked with pink, a leaping indigo wave, Almav avide, avide, avide!
In memory of my father, Kannadical George Alexander 1921–98 [End Page 53]
- Rites of Sense
In twilight as she lies on a mat I rub my mother’s feet with jasmine oil touch calluses under skin, joints upholding that fraught original thing— bone, gristle, skin, all that makes her mine. All day she swabbed urine from the floor, father’s legs so weak he clung to...
