I remember your joy in life.
I remember your laughter.
The sound of it is like something just out of ear shot now:
I can’t hear it, but I almost do.
I remember you wanted to go everywhere.
You wanted to see everything.
I wish you had.
A Return to Words
For a Lost Language: Poems
Mango juice for the ghosts
If I use words, I wonder, will you disappear?
If I speak to you, will you hear me?
Are you there only in what I cannot say?
Are you there only in the silence I keep like
something I think I can hold?
Saturday, we are waiting. Someone is coming. Someone says she is coming and doesn’t come.
We wait.
Aunty—who is my age—brings us mango juice and lays cardboard out on the steps for us to sit.
I squeeze the first bit of juice out for you.
I believe in ghosts.
I believe in you.
I want to show my world to you.
I don’t know if you see it.
I want to show you the baby’s rash at the shower we are going to.
I want to show you the vice principal.
That she says everything five times. The same jokes again and again.
I want to show you her saying the principal is praying too much and not taking care of his wife.
She means in the bedroom.
She spells it out for me, in fact.
She says he’s not getting an erection.
Our principal!
I want to show you this.
Can you see it?
If I tell you it, can you hear it.
If I love you still, can you feel it?
Frankfurt, the Airport
Frankfurt airport. Photo credit: Hessische Flugplatz GmbH Egelsbach.
7 April, 2007
Leaving Frankfurt,
its patches of green grass,
the stand of trees beyond the runway.
This is Sunday—
a whole day since I left.
You can tell it’s spring,
as we fly low over the trees
that are just beginning to leaf out—
there is only a pale green tinge to the brown
of the branches,
and the evergreens among them
clump darkly together.
At the airport, the telex woman
asks me
where I’m from—
India?
I exchange all of my American dollars to buy a teddy bear,
scruffy and coarse,
in a blue “Germany” sweater,
and for a cup of coffee I’m .20 Euros short of paying for.
The French man at the counter takes my money anyway—
the scatter of coins spread like leaves.
He counts them—
un, deux, trios—
and says, “I’ll take it.”
And then, “Cream and sugar are on the table.”
I wonder why he’s come to work in an airport
of another country
so far from home.
But I am far from home too.
I know the reasons you might want to leave.
Fear as a Habit
Image credit: Henry Medals
When the dangers you are afraid of
turn out to be
no longer
real,
you begin to imagine new ones.
Creaks in the house that might mean something,
a funny feeling somewhere–
the heart, the back, the stomach, a little finger.
It doesn’t matter where.
The habit of fear has set in. It doesn’t leave so easily.
My Head is Dead
I think I killed it today.
Bashing it on things.
I have answers now,
but nowhere to put them.
Tomorrow, if you ask me about it,
I will have lost them again.
And I won’t be able to start over.
There is nothing left to think them up with.
Another Bird, May 31st
Another bird, Friday, quarter to seven in the morning.
It’s full daylight at that time.
It used to be
the sun was only just then coming up.
What is it about the birds?
Do the children find themselves trapped in the same way,
unable to find their way out again?
And fluttering, exhausted, to the ground.
And can I
scoop them up in my hands, their thin bones like glass in my hands,
and take them out into the day again, the light
they are searching for?
I Woke Up Today, Surprised
I thought I would be dead by now.
It left me, assuming that,
unprepared. No Boy Scout, me.
I never would have survived the cookout.
It left me
still 20 years back. Never thinking
to look ahead.
To plan.
It left me
Surprised by the very fact of being alive.
The Sparrow
There was a bird in the hall today.
I picked it up in my hands.
Moved it out of the way.
Birds always feel like so many bones when you hold them.
A Return to Words 