I Just couldn’t stop breathing you.
Night, you never came easy.
I had this apparition, there was this sea of family.
All from the long gone.
Wrote this in a letter to you,
‘I remember saying, “I can smell that piece of flesh
melting behind your neck”. I remember the frown’
You know when you forget your signature.
at the bank.
(later in Mexico. Red passes a piece of paper Andy has forgot to carry, from the back pages of the Bible left for Norton to discover, while escaping Shawshank)
I look up, again, at the cold moon
pressing its face against the windowpane,
sucking the edges of the corner table,
closing the language door.
In sleep,
I am walking to the graveyard
waking every insect
not in sight.
And mornings
always full of father
splitting an anthology of breaths,
now capable only of bloodline
in my wife’s womb.
When I die— in winter
of all seasons
Bury me in a mosque
near my home
in the vicinity of a tree-temple
So when they come
dragging it
they will also find a corpse— frozen
waiting to be bristled
Then a season later
compose a railway track over it,
carrying all the faces I’d have not known
all the faces I could’ve ignored,
And when they come
burning it
shower them with icicles
And when you have a feast
following their retreat
do not whisper my name
So the faces wouldn’t know
I could not build.
I have signed, O my enemy, your death–warrant Agha Shahid Ali
(Nov 27, 2011)
On sister’s birthday, to Sana
Little wheel-like things crisscross
on city midnights, and
where I coil this
nothing tracks down to you.
In fifteen years
I have not pinched orange skin,
snarled at by an amnesiac cat, or hid
between parents’ quilts.
It’s permanent to have you
traffic-spotting behind that green gate,
your small head next to mother’s waist
in holly patterns on the kitchen wall,
still clay-parrots on the windowsill
a blink away before you sleep,
on an unexpected rainy afternoon,
for healthiness, I confused
a bitter pill into your mouth:
at the mouth of thinkings gallery
not all hours are full of fears.
Where I coil this,
frayed white sleeve-edges scuff
distinct hair on my wrists,
like hasty men of conurbations
brush faces on local trains,
a camouflage of time in my bedroom,
every day of this year, sheds skin:
my other half is a condensery of lost language,
consisting of you.
(Nov 5 – Nov 8, 2009)
For once,
before dropping unconscious
in the parking lot,
acquiring the right to ask
how much rage I have
she is unable to decide
what to wear on father’s funeral.
I too have redirections,
any dislocated bookmark
drives me crazy.
IMPERMANENT SCAPES 