Poem, and: With the Rímac Down Below

Poem

While the light shines and as the breeze rouses the branches and makes the wind-chime swoon, what else can I do but love what casts a shadow and bears bulk, shadow that darkens the bottom of the pond, shadow that resounds with the equanimity of stone, of time running in place, the petals of a flower awaiting a knock on their door. I must become as patient as water— I almost said, I must have become a patient of water—, knowing who I am even as I change, knowing what ails me as it keeps me sated, as the earth’s pull drags me, as the sun shuns me or rends me. I tell myself I am the pine’s stubborn blood. I tell myself I am the wind that blows at my back, that the wind will tire, and I will spin away from what passes through me, that a voice will stand below a window and sing my name, a sound, a bay, a whole ocean. Having all the time in the world, what else can I do but love what fades? Having seen it gone and having seen it return, what else can I do but see to the elements in your blood and skin? Having not felt justified, having seen so much of the sun’s work, its coyness, its obstinate reach. I’ve started a fire, sat in the poinciana’s shade. Night changes things, there’s no other way to say it, and night too changes. What else to do but wait for night to change me? Having been lonely, having chosen silence to ordain me, not even thunder could shake its words before me. Having heard my limbs conspire, having heard their vows, what else can I do but love the shadow that persists, that makes things stand still? Having become a question, having befriended my sadness, what can love do to me now, but be a reminiscence, standing below her window, my life a sound, the first vowel of a cautionary tale? Having seen and having heard, desires mutating old new to old, having the one bed, the one window, the same letter I write to everyone, having broken through chains and grammars, and your sweet arms, your hair smelling of coconut, your hair with the bitter mud of henna, your hands smooth, warming my skin, having now ascended, what else to do but love the shadow that extends below?

With the Rímac Down Below

Could I have seen what I saw had my arms been elsewhere, had they some myth to map their quest for mooring?

What would I have seen, I who loved her reminisces in ease of circumstance— she who hid behind her father when her mother’s anger frothed—

my own father blocks the sheikh from beating his own son for some mischief—the son years later becoming one of them—

and she privileged to lie beside her grandmother, say the night before Eid, you and cousins stacked on a big bed, and the coming from another city and the falling asleep and the being among them sweating their familial sweat, the youngest wetting himself beside you and the having to nudge him awake.

What would I have seen in that present of child and kin, in a new city reeling in disappointments, in the way of finished worlds?—

another child perhaps tucked into her grandmother’s bosom while her younger brothers pined. She’d landed upon sequence, the sundial destroyed by conquerors who tore a wall shaped like a jigsaw so that history is made.

She’d faced the subsequent plateau, she now the captured princess, the market full of hawkers, the sheikh years later carrying a flag, his moccasins worn to his calloused soles.

You remember the son’s shame who’d become one of them shouting discounts on shirts and sneakers.

You remember her shame before a gynecologist: “I’ve carried nine bellies,” telling him half the truth.

“When were you born?” a lover now asks, not after the first time you...