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Field in Summer, and: Dialogue by a City Wall, and: Opening the shutters
- Prairie Schooner
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 78, Number 1, Spring 2004
- pp. 187-191
- 10.1353/psg.2004.0002
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Prairie Schooner 78.1 (2004) 187-191
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Three Poems
Meena Alexander
Field in Summer
I had a simple childhood,
A mother and father to take care of me,
no war at my doorstep.
Stones
sang canticles in my mouth
as darkness rose.Love, love where are they gone?
Father, mother, ink dark stars,
singing stones. [End Page 187]
Dialogue by a City Wall
He. I need to smell you.
Come near the window, the city hovers there.I want to be sure you're not a girl made of clouds
with only a wound for a mouth.She. You gave me a book.
You touched the red inkYou said: Look, that's my name.
Why did you tremble when you gave me that book?He. I know you already and it's not from any place.
You're the woman whose scent has driven me mad.I steer through pages packed with syllables and cannot find you.
Tell me your name, come let me write you.She. The instruments of war
are buried under water.Incense wafts from the curtained rooms.
A tall tree makes a fountain.On the leaves of the tree
outside your wall it is written:I am Sita and Iphegenia, Demeter and Draupadi.
I am not fit for burning. [End Page 188]
Opening the shutters
The faux windows are delectable
They were painted with a fine brush
Onto seventeenth-century stuccoA maid in a striped blue dress
Is hauling the shutters open
One by one in a serenade so stillI barely hear it.
She props up the shutters,
each on its metal polesmooths down her dress
pleats well below the knees,
ardent stripes on a pale blue field.I watch her from the crystalline
shadow of two trees
osmanthus fragrans or sweet oliveand euonymous europaeus
also known as fortuni, tree of good fortune.
In my grandmother's gardenthere were other sorts of tree
whose fragrance first forgotten
return in dream to the soundof a hand at a shutter's rim,
of tapping a palmyra fan
at the brink of a lagoon. [End Page 189]So to accumulate in noonday heat
through the commonest turning
chords of musiceven in excessive sunlight
which is what this northern hilltop
brings in late summerthe hours, diaphanous, winged,
laden with heat, churning
time past and to come,the burning heart not to be cast aside,
and what we recognise as suffering
at its own unspeakable pitchinching ever closer.
Through open shutters
we glimpse familiar figuresa man and woman and a child
their faces cupped in mist.
How can I knowthat in someone else's kitchen
she will take a knife
first to the child, then to herself?I cannot bear what she has done
I stare at the open shutters
weeping, as the maidwith a luminous flourish
and for reasons entirely her own
casts open the long door to the villa, [End Page 190]a corridor ringed with light,
at its very end
a Chinese jar still turning.On its surface centuries ago
An unknown hand painted
a woman in a long robegold hemmed with alizarin,
behind her another woman
and anotherthe very last
holding a boy by the hand,
leading him into darkness.
Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India. Her volume of poems Illiterate Heart (Triquarterly/Northwestern UP) was winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her new book of poems, Raw Silk, will be published this spring by Triquarterly/Northwestern UP.
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