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  • Landscape with Figure Turning
  • Supritha Rajan (bio)

What I have to say will not take longthough it took me a long while to arriveat its saying. I stood on a field—

blond from relentless sun and bereft,like the first of kingdoms, of all architecture.It was a field, almost entirely, of my own making.

I say almost because you also were there—youwhose motionless ear without whichno field could be reckoned nor habitable world

cleaved. It took much labor to make the fieldif trust can be called labor, if the stitchingof one image with another took measurable time.

The work began thus: in my left hand I held,like the sole gift ever to be given to us by gods,the palette of belief, and the hole through which

my thumb ought to have grasped the paletteI instead brought close to my eyeas if the hole represented an immaculate spectacle

by which to see the field. I cried someas I looked through the hole and began painting—not from sadness, no, but because I had waited

a great while to speak and knewthat I would not go unheard because you,you at least would be listening.

On one side of the field I added a cloudlessblue sky and, on the other, a river shimmeringin midday sun. I could see standing on the bank [End Page 67]

farthest from me, the family I was born into—mother, father, siblings—the archaic paradigmof everything I would ever hate and love,

lust, fear, and mourn. On the bank oppositeI placed the family I chose and toward whomI oared as the lengthened figures of

mother father sister brother repeated themselvesacross the river’s surface. I rowed for many yearsbefore I reached them and underwent

the usual calamities: betrayal followed by expulsion,shipwreck and near-drowning, lay blue-lippedamong the rushes until found by peasants

who revived and renamed me as their own,and then one day, clad in foreign garments and barelyrecognizable, I stood reconciled to the family

who once falsely abandoned and betrayed me.You know well this parable and the plot of my lifefell neatly into it, as did the feelings

that accompanied them. Only the bodyin which they unfolded was mineand, therefore, singular. Or so I believed.

For I conceived the body then to beconclusion, the end arrived at after a seriesof inferences. I stretched speech

taut like a bow and let go its arrowstraight into nearest flesh. But then one night,while my family slept under a tree by the river,

I sat up sick with heat as if the stem of a flowerhad made itself suddenly rigid along my spineand my face were its bud turned and opening

to moonlight. I leaned into my lover’s earas pink and white blossoms fell on uson our children on the river on the hollow chest [End Page 68]

of our boat and whispered Because even this bodycannot belong to me and just like thatI exited one parable and entered another.

You know the outlines of this one too.A man leaves his family in the middle of the nightwhile they sleep. He travels to foreign countries.

He accumulates wealth and women, becomes heavywith meat, fruit, nuts, and wine until there is no openingin a woman’s body he feels tempted to close

nor animal in him with slackened mouthto feed. Blank with fullness he again abandonseverything, walks night and day

until he reaches a blond and trackless field.I say man because I do not want you to picturea woman in a yellow muslin dress and white apron

turning her head with longing for a failed romanceor caressing her stomach with shamefor the knowledge she ought not to have acquired,

and also because the hole through which I seelike any instrument of sight comes with limits—no—is its own limit and only men, we know, are permitted

such journeys, only men free themselvesfrom desire by acting on all...

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