Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music

WA S P S I N A GOLDEN DREAM HUM A STRANGE MUSIC poetry by Asher Ghaffar

WA S P S I N A GOLDEN DREAM HUM A STRANGE MUSIC Asher Ghaffar

ECW PRESS

Copyright © Asher Ghaffar, 2008 Published by ECW Press 2120 Queen St. East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, m4e 1e2 416•694•3348 / [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Ghaffar, Asher Wasps in a golden dream hum a strange music / Asher Ghaffar. Poems. isbn 978-1-55022-854-0 I. Title. ps8613.h34w37 2008

c811'.6

c2008-902417-6

Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book Text design: Tania Craan Cover design: David Gee Cover image: iStock Type: Mary Bowness Printing: Coach House Printing This book is set in Janson and Century Expanded The publication of Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp).

printed and bound in canada

We had no doubt . . . that the heart rocked with sorrow would at last reach its port. — Faiz Ahmed Faiz

What is the future of this Word without place? — Edmond Jabès

CONTENTS

INDUCTION Genesis

3

The Master Bedroom

5

On the Question of a Borderless Body In Possible Departures Delirium

8

13

Deduction

15

DEDUCTION Introduction to a Home Vanishing Mother

19

22

23

Notes to the Father

24

Notes to the Father (II) Mis/match Half-Life

26

28 32

Fitful Awakenings

33

CONDUCTION The New Sentence Stumping

37

41

The Great Canadian Spam Poem White Noise

48

Tiruvannamalai

49

Wasps in a Golden Dream Blackout

55

52

46

6

PRODUCTION Mapping the Furnace Room

59

Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music Meanwhile, a Continent Away Dog Days

70

Goodbye, Toronto

72

Desire Never Leaves Cellulose

68

74

76

DISRUPTION Predictably, the House Was Not There Sid

87

Between Fetish and Phobic Arabian Nights Chapter One Pre face Notes

98

113

116

119

Acknowledgements

121

96

81

62

INDUCTION

“All observed crows are black. Therefore: All crows are black.”

GENESIS

In the age of surveillance, the border is where one discerns the pulse of a nation. The border is the inverse of the wide expanse of the frontier where we envision ourselves as infinite and unruly — where we come to know ourselves, embodied in divisive histories. Jarred out of ourselves — we never knew ourselves until we were suspended between worlds. We gaze in two directions like Janus, god of gates, unable to budge. The border is where the fantasy of frontier rots. Remembering is a convulsion into wakefulness. In time we grope. In timelessness we explode. I was interrogated on the Indian side of the Wagah border and didn’t cross until the following morning. There, I witnessed a ritual that occurs every evening. I felt myself trapped at the precise place where my family crossed, did not cross, after the division of the two countries in 1947. On the Pakistani side, a few of my belongings were stolen by military police. I imagined stories. They emerged like billowing deliriums. I thought of possible scenes, crude sketches in my brain that darted back and forth like a bee pollinating two types of the same flower. I unearthed God. God deserted me. Watched re-run Bollywood films. Became untenable. Silence found me. I sought a form for the poem, but “what good is poetry at a time like this?” I desired to write a poem and a story. (These two desires grate against each other, angry, confused.) The stories attempted rotted and collapsed in guttural debris. I groped at the pieces, a logic, an altitude to scale. Body grew bat wings and splattered black blood against the wall. I became the voice of the dog, the aardvark — the genesis of “a.” When I was a child, I worshipped the illusion of a frontier, licked its wild exterior. I regressed. Molted. Became the fodder for their physiology and roamed in the fields eating the glass of their illusions until I exploded like a gutless golden calf.

3

I sought passage across the border so as not to be caught in the charnel ground of history. In the carnal ground, I collided with myself, was alive for the first time, felt my body close to me. My hands grasped the lush grass, nourished by the green of death, the possibility of an encounter with those who crossed over with the baggage of their dreams, which rotted into these leaves, this trunk of nothingness vanishing. Trapped in crossfire. Nocturnal rooms jarred open. I seek a form for the body in crisis, a form in alliance with the flight of bees. I search the archive for the voice that will break the density further. I seek a drive that is not the drive for death, but the drive for the everlasting life of fervour.

4

THE MASTER BEDROOM

The painters have taken over the house, or the painters have taken over his sleep. The house is large without furniture, or with furniture pushed up against the wall. His father is arranging the house like a feudal lord arranging a field for labour. The painters scrape, peel the wall. He wants them to take over the house when his mother leaves. The kitchen is clean and white. His mother has left jewellery scattered around the master bedroom. This room looks like a soup kitchen, the painter says. The kitchen was half-painted, as his mind is now, in rose. He is getting married, so the painters arrived, or his mother is getting married because she is arranging his marriage. He is already married to the walls they’re scraping. His mother is getting married without his consent and he is being scraped without the wall’s consent. He is learning to walk on water. The painters have taken over this house. The house is alive with the fumes of paint. The bride arrives. Let’s make it clean, she says.

5

ON THE QUESTION OF A BORDERLESS BODY

Only when the self falls asleep does it begin to inhabit the skin of a black bear. At least that’s how it was last night. He was making love to his partner in a cabin in the mountains and there were black bears surrounding it. The dream shifted ground and he was in a tannery where bear skins hung down like waterfalls. He was inside the skin of a bear. And the bear tore away at the skin. The bear couldn’t get inside. The black bear could have been his own blackness. A psychoanalyst would not pick up on that nuance. He would not imagine that a dreaming body could attack itself. A psychoanalyst doesn’t believe that a congealed race projects a body into the myth of race. Ever since he was a child, he knew he was meant to learn how to ride the tiger, like Durga. He is not a Hindu — much less a shaman. In deep sleep, there was insentient bliss. From this he discerned that the self has no fixed boundary. It could wander into other countries, into disparate yarns. It was unmarked in dreams. It didn’t belong to race or class. It was borderless. This doesn’t mean dreams lack historical agency. This doesn’t mean every dreaming body is cosmopolitan. This doesn’t mean that, lacking a passport, one can gather the sensations of a new world, or an older world. The body is fed by the blood of history — living off the accretions of others, existing only because some other body is non-existent, or absent from itself. This makes living mournful. Alternately, it lends some urgency to life. Every narrative crawls out of another, before arriving at a border. Every race crawls out of another, before arriving at a border. Narrative is a species of madness. Every narrative is a little like Oedipus wanting too much. Every narrative has the urgency of a death wish and simultaneously the urgency of immortality. He appears at the border. Appears at the border. He appears at the border at a moment of quest, only to rupture that quest with a clause. Only to be eaten alive, cannibalized. He could be his father’s body. He could be in a zone of indistinction — where laws are annulled, or where the Father’s body is the Law. The border transmigrates into his mind, so he can discern where he

6

came from and what he might be, as a threshold. If he is a threshold, if he can speak from two cosmologies at once, united into a cosmology of loss — linked chain by chain to rupture, which arranges itself into mutated syllables.

7

I N P O S S I B L E D E PA R T U R E S

1. The migrants who came to the new world were conquerors of themselves. They thought they had mastered what they had left behind. After Father died, I searched for the key to what was forbidden. I sought it in the wind between land and ocean. Was the wind a messenger from me to me? What parcels of letters did it bring to me, what messages did it refuse to convey, what nocturnal spaces did it jar open? I asked too many questions, and the question of all questions, which was a limb growing down from the sky and sprouting a new body in time: a ruined body, a body burdened, seeking its origins. I wanted to know the hand that shaped me. Thresholds are like lips unwilling to move. Father was about to cross over again . . . he always turned off the thermostat before he left. I took the bellows — gigantic lungs — and fanned the flames until the wind whirled into my head. The house breathed in winter, fire blazed up to the stars. The Big Dipper was the only constellation I knew. It was blue. Everything somehow became metaphorical in the furnace of my mind. It was not magic. I sought numinosity in the night. Blackness in the night without stars. Father used to point out the Big Dipper to me after revealing the names of trees: juniper, willow, maple, as well as the unnamable tree — the tree that wept, for it was without a name.

8

2. The languages that had been lost. The history that had been stolen. Double lives that clamoured in between living rooms. Thresholds are lips unwilling to speak. We reach toward the mimetic moon. Writing on the walls. Scribbling over the old letters, scrolls of wallpaper rolled up and ready to be devoured before they are discovered. Every day I sit at this table erasing and crumpling a stack of soggy paper. One can only imagine such a word that turns into a sponge. I pretend to touch my body. Am I absolved when I think the language signifies anything other than what was left and what we move toward as a result? When one looks back, the eyes falter with the feet and language slips incessantly into undiscovered rooms that pound on the head.

3. The pharmaceutical companies paid for New Orleans. The ballroom dancing was accompanied by Chardonnay. There is another ruined house, syllables torn, shrivelled fig trees, half syllables, grunts and barks. Over the wall, the moon-bone land of promise. There is another ruined house where leaves rustle . . . the moving abyss of canine utterance.

9

4. A trace of me was always boarding and unboarding a plane. I was eighteen the last time Father flew to Pakistan. When Father left, Mother placed newspaper underneath the logs we had stolen from the neighbour’s heap — newsprint crumbling into ashes. Mother came into my room the night before. Father had been tossing and turning — whiplashed by bed sheets. She told me he was having nightmares again — nightmares of crossing over, I assumed, although one can never fathom the body esoteric, only make faint guesses at what the signs intimate. We felt, in waking: silence like a weight on the house, a house that may as well have been roofless when Father left.

5. Fish me a vengeful language. A language of debris. Broken scattered images, fetch them. To piece, a room that is closed, open. Or something soft, the wind of lost leaves. Through a corridor. There is no old woman in the attic who mends the valved heart on a spinning wheel. There is no attic in this house. Humble hearth. Something soft. Threadbare. Something that unravels. There are the dreaming floor boards. The dead words. There are the backward and sidelong glanced utterances. There is the inching toward. There are the untouchable burn marks. There is a cauldron of seeds. Our glittering shame. Unspoken — speaking. I opened the door to the room with etch marks clawed into the wallpaper. The text was threadbare, the walls in shambles. Whatever was left of the will was unwilling. I felt responsible for the gulf between my mother and father. This guilt developed a space between waking and sleep. Perhaps it was because I was a middle child, or perhaps poets are created from threshold worlds — from languages left behind, their sanguine music lingering on the palate.

10

6. That night I dreamed of saving Father. He was drowning in a lake. I kept awakening to what sounded like a raccoon, tumbling the trashcan of shadows. At night, when the stars were like heavy lids laden with supernal light, I searched through Father’s doublebreasted blazer pockets. I found a stack of rupees, which I hid under my bed. I wouldn’t spend them, but keep them there along with a few cockle shells from Karachi until Father discovered it so that he knew I had looked for it. It was odd logic — but not illogical as Mother supposed. Not the work of an ingenious criminal mind. The work of the bellows: the work of the wind’s tyranny and magic. The myths of childhood unravel in front of me into a golden globe I hold in my hand and enter at will. I can travel to the celestial worlds, to netherworlds, to hell. The walls engulf. The walls grasp their own tirades. Between the walls, the ants build, rebuild. To leave a chair inside the room, so that last leaf can enter from the tree that is sprouting voices. I begin to weave this body into the song of ancestors. Those who were left behind. Those silent ones who rob my dreams and colon — ize my eyes. There is no leaving. There is here. The walls invade the body. I have pierced through to the other side, where the wind belches with bullfrogs on a road in Lahore. In an airport, or in a room. Does “I” matter if I am waiting again? Something other than an image will at last emerge from this room in the middle of nowhere. Tell us. Into yes and no. On this road that is no road. On our winding dispersal. Leaving. Waiting. Leaving. One ends up wandering. Waiting. Wandering. Trapped in leaving. Stationed here. In possible departures. Ever since I was young, I’ve seen how dreaming shaped the waking body. The ocean’s innumerable fingers grapple with and lend shape to the shore. As I matured, I desired to be trained by someone who could trace the finger back to the crest of dreaming and unlock the body’s history. I wanted to know the hand that shaped me. Thresholds are like lips unwilling to prove . . .

11

7. When I reach the border, they will push me over to the other side. With a wink of an eye, I will be freed from this ancestral torment. The ability to descend into a place awakened when I talked to Father the last time. His eyes were like tornados. Often I found myself trapped there, falling downward toward the house’s centre of gravity, if there is a centre of gravity to a place. Whether this was my imagination or not, I cannot ascertain. I often found myself buried between rooms, as though the room could not contain a body. Buried between conversations. Objects detached themselves from my mental grasp, melted into the semblance of memory. Their meanings formed from memory, now shadows of memory. Gravitating to the epicentre of a place, I was dropping into a dark hole. Room — the body appendage. Dropped from the memory of a foreign architect. As I descended, I began to turn a deaf ear toward the sounds in those rooms and their dead conversations. Then they awoke us. What is this unitary other, this amalgam of the house of theoretical abstraction? Bedrock where the self reconstitutes itself. What you fetishize is not one lost voice, but an archaeology of lost voices. Here absence belongs to the unlettered body, is not the domain of your primitive methodologies. The sense that fails in failing guides. Against a colossal groan at the heart of nothing. Once I dreamed that “the other” could be constituted in an open space until the earth opened up and we were nowhere to be seen. Now the text is inhabited by valved mouths bursting the seams of history. Before the Nightmare roamed the house with its atrophied legs, Father recited Iqbal’s poetry by the fire. Then he would leave for months without a word. A few weeks later we would receive a letter: “I will be back.” These four simple words were like inscriptions in the heart. They were like the knobs of a door into the blackness of a night without stars.

12

DELIRIUM

the flags lower folded ceremoniously bundled under arms of turbaned men voices trail off into the evening like the tail of fireworks a street dog wriggles under the barbed wire fence on the other side kicked on the other side silence blackout the crowds are dispersing the bleachers are emptying emptying through a perforation in the fence land mines line serene fields of wheat soon his teeth become canine sounds cross-pollinate refrain a stocky man unfurls a bandana it in the wind mustard-coloured kites will dot the sky in lahore memory goes this far gathering into fistulas gutting out into grooves syntax shot through with the refrain the ritual raising of the flags man pressing his fists to his waist the skin of a mango is bitter gun shots he awakens the body split and fissile he touches his eyes and vision burns up duplicitous in the mourning hour of the gods brahma murta he will arise and ritually meditate on the silence of the dawn

waves

seeds springing out

of the first spear of the sun come to prayer come to flourish it is different over there or over over there at certain points of his life he is carried away by this sound nerve endings antennas feeding off the sound like photosynthesis finally inscribed in his veins like an arrowhead his body becomes the ganges or the flow of the indus why do names change so quickly by the stories they tell or by the stories they refuse to reveal the scream stealing of tongue tips deserted

those speaking on the edge

13

at the edge of bustling cities buried there are rituals of forgetfulness upon forgetting the body meanders like a yarn searching for a pattern by the vedic hymn and the muezzin equally loud tied in a knot a possible love affair in a bollywood production by the stories the ritual cleaning would wash away into forgetfulness in a dream grandmother had given him a teesbeh to ward away the evil eye bla band he never learned the arabic meaning he knew the delicious sound his mother whispered wind in his ears the teesbeh pressed against his neck the moment before grandmother crossed over her body ecstatically rocking we gathered chairs for a procession of ancestors while grandmother fished bodies out from the air uncle massaged her tethered feet the sole bears the memory of crossing over the other side was the home she hadn’t seen in twenty years or the other side was heaven there is crossing over and there is crossing over there is threshold and there is threshing of the threshold there is scaling of the skies tearing down ladders erecting new ones angels descending ascending clothed in rote routines their fingers details appearing disappearing in dreams opening the eye of the moon allowing the vagabond memory through

14

DEDUCTION

1. Describe a body by the auditory space it environs, or does not. Describe a home that empties itself into a corner where pansies spill out of air. Where an animal has invented a corner that grows cankerous. Call it irony in a book she never read. A book of wind whispered in her ear. A book that clothes a gesture of affection. Something auditory environs space, the homing of a space that is opening and emptying to admit a scene from two vantage points.

By the Khyber Pass the brother hands him green tea and a gun. Guns fired at weddings are fired with brotherly affection. Space is where nothing conjoins and the absence of joining is a joining again.

2. There is no gable on this house on this house. There is no exterior, no mortar, no brick. There must be a form to encapsulate or deduce this. There are organs within organs, organs have no walls here. Organs are awall. There is a plenitude of space between rooms. Don’t trust the ceiling caving in. If the hallway is dark, it is because of a willow tree casting shadow.

If the hallway is dark, don’t trust the walls. If the hallway is dark, don’t trust the intestinal wall. If the hallway is dark, it is because

15

there is only interior — twisting, winding. Don’t trust the walls if the hallway is dark. The static is awol. Where are the larvae if not in the lacuna? Where is the border between the wall and the darkness (never a sepal)? The interior of the room is a stone’s throw away. The stone floor has no light fixtures. The bulb that might be on the ceiling is buzzing. Almost crossing. A door of perception is forever being cleansed. The window box of petunias is non-existent. The window is lying on the bed.

To love this space without its furnishings is another line of thought after we have drawn conclusions about her

whereabouts.

16

DEDUCTION

“All apples are fruit. All apples grow on trees. Therefore all fruits grow on trees.”

INTRODUCTION TO A HOME

He wants to invent a home where borders blur into surrounding prairie, river, anatomical maps. He wants to live in many places at once, but preferably in one place. He is tunnelling through a past coded in organs that refuse to speak. If they speak, they speak backwards and he refuses to arrange this. There’s sanity and madness at the Wagah border. Home emerges from simultaneous pasts intersecting and creating homes that never were, but here, in this space, it is possible to build another home every morning, to unimagine the border that is now locked. When Amritsar and Lahore were simply signs, the wrought-iron gate was seething tension underground, in the marble-floored room of an Englishman. Within the body is coded meaning, the flight of bats: “Blind and blindfolded sighted human subjects are able to learn to use echolocation to detect objects in their environment.” The tongue map navigates by echolocation. History is sensed, blindfolded, by nocturnal sounds, by recollections. Here at this border there are shavings of lost sentences dispersed when his father’s home was lost and there was no home to arrive to. Home is where wrought iron can melt into mirages or finally open if you have your documentation. He has a Pakistani passport. They will not let him cross. His father is on the other side. He was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease last year and a part was cut out while he slept. An anatomical map. Bite-sized pieces of his life floating in nebulous regions around the house. Possible answers at a yard sale. Potato nodules sprouting out of tired skin. His mother, dressed in a teddy-bear sleeping suit, with felt letters that said: Home sweet Home, delirious, pulling out a Hoover from the closet, sucking up the torn manuscript with hot air: The life of a pot-bellied meditator. Tearing up pages of journals. Carpenter ants were invading the family room. The plumber had gone missing that Sunday. They hadn’t excised

19

the belly button. It floated around a curved pool of pus, which the nurse, Marlene, cleaned day after day after day with ethanol. You have to force yourself to eat. Words were convoluted in those days. He ate one thing and it floated between stitched pieces of bowel. When he didn’t eat, the walls were blurred: translucent like a wet T-shirt floating on a laundry line, seen from a distance. Marlene shrugged her shoulders: It’s time to move on, get married to someone who can see through walls, someone with x-ray vision. X woman. The identification of a story began from disassociation and ended by incision. The water still flows through this country — backwards, you might say. How do the tone-deaf, tongue-deaf, move? Wrought-iron gates melt into mirages, into poetry, fiction, a border fluid. Wrought-iron gates melt into a language estranged. The attempt to tell a story can provide leverage to a maimed sail somewhere on the Atlantic, or in this nocturnal room about to become a space. Open the gate and enter Lahore. Enter his mother’s imagination. She was showing off her chocolate éclair on Napier road when a crow swooped down and took it. Enter children splashing and playing in puddles and a goat walking off to slaughter. But not before this August rain. Not before the shepherd is soaked right through to the skin. Not before he wipes glistening drops off a mane. Now detour into the mazed city of Peshawar. Before the Partition, his mother was in New Delhi and she has gratefully forgotten she was born in India. His father’s door remains on a hinge.

20

Leave the door open, we’ll not be coming back. Take this knife. Divide if you must, the Indus will testify. How to enter that world? This requires another organ of speech. Part of his intestine was sloughed off. It is that part which is speaking him.

21

VA N I S H I N G

We glided on skates in a semicircle, hands interlocked. Cackled like Canadian geese in a vortex of wind. When we spoke, the wind shredded our words. We chased the beaver into an untrammelled field where the jackpines tapered off into twilight. The snow uniformly swept the ice as though the lake was not always cracking, as though a voice was not breaking. Something like a fist emerged from four walls encircling the mosaic of our skin. In midwinter, Mother had arrived in Thunder Bay with a plaid skirt, a suitcase of dried flowers, a marriage certificate and an urn filled with ashes. Words rustled like splayed-open husks hanging from the catalpa. The incision of the wind, conglomerates of drift meeting drift. Remember when the electricity went out and Father’s fingertip curled like a purple tendril under the earth, dead to everything but the clacking tendon locked to the trunk? Smoke tumbling out of a chimney. That night, we argued about a point of history, cheeks bitten by a frenzy of cold as we listened to the wind listening back.

22

MOTHER

White of bygone wedding days. Snow unfurls a bolt of bridal cloth. The city is not destroyed, but yields. Here in these streets, in these streets, in these streets. Vendors of smoked chicken and clearings of the plow. She gazes into a window at bridal displays. People flock around her again. A ski jacket that kids gawk at, prod. White lines, before the Zamboni erases blade marks. White, after the dog pees on the snow. White over speckled yellow. White solo: empty guitar case with a layer of snow. In her apartment, there is one room unreserved for white mounting itself. To sit on the window ledge. To squawk and shit on black umbrellas. Consider the ledge collapsing the moment it is conceived, one syllable falls faint on the snow. She attempts the word. The walls flutter around like drapes. The sentence, snowy, clean, and her thoughts, flies swarming in the eyes of a stern preceptor. A perpetual aftermath of something untouched. The snowy owl unfurls its wings, swoops down on the field mouse. The mouse squirms, releases into a need larger than itself.

23

N O T E S T O T H E FA T H E R

1. The border closed at 4:30 pm. It was 4:15. The border guards were on lunch break. Beggars sold postcards for the ceremony by the run-down hotel on the strip where the hawker sliced a chicken’s neck. I fed the street dogs scrambled eggs and toast before the parade, bought a postcard. Watched a cow eating the rind of a melon. I could have leapt over a barbed-wire fence and got shot. I could have leapt into another time and drowned. I bought you a jar of pickles. When he was young he drove a plane through a thicket of clouds. He sat on the captain’s lap in the cockpit and wept when the plane broke through cloud trellises. The clouds blossomed like jasmine jaws. The British captain lifted him, and the stewardess gave him a cupcake that left a waxy aftertaste. The captain lifted him and placed him on earth.

2. The plane careened. There was a rumble. Beneath him something whirred. The captain gave him a lollipop. I steered the plane through billowing clouds. I saw an ocean between two worlds where flowers burst like paper rage.

24

3. Go to the flag-lowering ceremony, but you cannot cross. Here are your documents. The Indian border patrol laughed in his face, spat on their earth. Father, here are our documents. The tower finally crumbles and we are ever the Lord’s men. The cane sugar rattles mute vocables in your head. The plane is circling the Atlantic. Open the door, tear the hinge.

25

N O T E S T O T H E FA T H E R ( I I )

You are returning to Harappa this winter. Day 1. The past is dust. Day 2. Each year rain and erosion bring up new pieces to the surface. Day 3. Corbelled drain at Mound ET gateway. Day 4. You think you could become a Buddhist. Day 5. You feel like a Buddhist. I dream of the Bengal tiger again. Mother guides it out of the house, the screen door rattles shut. I lock Door B. The tiger tears the door off its hinges. I negotiate with it. When I awake, there is the thinnest veil between waking and sleep. I pour butane over the tiger and light it. When someone says “Holocaust” I can get a handle on dreams and pretend to stop them. I can create a border and a new country. I write this to a past when I was continually looking forward. Here you flint this dream and make a metaphor of a tiger in relation to a past I don’t look forward to. If the tiger swallows me I want to be swallowed whole. I throw a match on it. The next moment it becomes a figure of your silence. Once I wrote a poem and placed it on a banana leaf. A Brahmin priest took 50 rupees and placed a ghee candle on it. Mumbled a mantra. Placed it on the Ganges. Those words flickered on the black waters whose shore accepts the dead. The bones on the shore become bone china in England. Why does a Muslim turn to the Ganges for a myth? Because it was almost the Indus. Because all rivers come from a myth. Because the left bone is connected to the right bone. Because I couldn’t reach the Himalayas where borders float. Because I didn’t believe the Ganges was a strand of Shiva’s hair. Because the femur is connected

26

to the tongue. Because I needed to know what it was you felt when you believed an ablution was an ablution regardless of water being tainted by what a maulvi claimed. — Return to India and bring back the gleaming dust from Sind. Bring back an hourglass. Describe a poet in Pakistan. Make the Indus into a scribe. His mother gave him a knife that said Al-Batin. — Kill if you must, the Indus will testify. Morning mist over Mound E in Harappa. Each year you bring back the same news.

27

M I S / M AT C H

“The body leans heavily into language. The body that leans heavily into language. It is, to begin with, an uncertainty. It is, to follow, a savagery. It is, to begin with, entropic. Widowing text.” — Nathalie Stephens The train is consumed by the darkness of Delhi. Fires are scattered around hovels with aluminum roofs. A woman hangs laundry on a guard rail. The train is swallowed in the mooring light and he is still travelling across, unmoored. Delhi disassembling. Tracks and more tracks in space, tracings of a finger. A chai wallah sings. Figures of speech. A language of coinages. Flies breed and yield. Try again in another tongue. The beggars are herding. They sit between train cars and he feeds them rice on a banana leaf. He is a traitor. Father. You deserve a longitude and latitude. We deserve a match. A match just missed. A train that is boarded for Lahore. It cannot cross. When the train comes to a sudden stop, the mind moves across, momentous. From Amritsar to Lahore. The chai wallah and generations of singing. People board and disembark. A man defecates. A pastoral of arrivals and returnings. Boardings and dislodgings. Ankles with bells. The sound of a home is real or imagined. The main faculty of the house in Canada is the attack. Moth-eaten saris from weddings in Karachi. Don’t say a picture doesn’t speak. The lack of walls. I dream of a spiralling staircase and pictures of Krishna. I clean the glass over the picture. Evoking a past. Cleaning glass meticulously. The old man by the well is murmuring om in Jaladhar. The main faculty of this house is the attic.

28

His foot went through the ceiling. He was chewing betel nuts. Blood trickled off his lips. The living room was amalgamated with the kitchen. A past that deserved revision. Deserved an addition from a father who chainsawed the catalpa branch he was sitting on. In Pakistan the kitchen is a place where we roll chapattis and create our own menu out of salt. The walls are barred in Islamabad. Mother said it was an asylum. She was the centrepiece of attention. She was the centrepiece on the mantel. Every object sounds in space. On the mantel there are no hues, black and white excised from a picture past. The inability to define dust mite. He might inherit a microscopic eye. The problem of germs was solved by Pasteur. The microscopic ear listens when the father climbs down a staircase. On the walls there once hung pictures of Krishna in a dream. Those stairs ascended and he was meticulously cleaning. His father descends the stairs into the basement, because his successful son, a veritable relic of his own success, has taken over the family room. A pure memory is a fossil. And memory needs a mooring image. A dream to live on. Scratched pebbles from Jinnistan won’t do. . . . And the water floods again and I must save a father drowning in a dream. A dream that requires a contrite eye. To bridge a mother tongue and fatherland. An imbecile bridge. A bride without a chamber. Without a calico pillow sheath. Another night without intercourse with a past, or a night with a whore in Lahore. I want to dream in Siraiki. I want to want not. I want no souvenirs. There are sounding walls. A mother who was always returning to Pakistan and a father who turned his back. They switch places, as though they always played each other’s part.

29

Mother says: Who wants to remain here? Uncle tells her that anyone who is sane returns after success. But when you are transplanted you grow in all directions. Success runs dry, transmitted like an arm or a leg. Walls become a fluid intensity and your eyes are aquariums, Father. Pupils that float in diaphanous membranes are always returning. We are a middle child. The sound of a wall that could not be erected. There could be a pleasant arbour, a gazebo, a trellis with latticework in India without an Indian to chase away crows all day. You are leaving again: success runs dry. You are leaving and we scatter crows, hired servants, for one pound a month, with blackened tongues turned stone to chisel a lost language, a lost word. We think we can dream in Siraiki. The lack of walls means we want to be swallowed in a father womb. I want to want not. I want no souvenirs. The attic is composed on clothes. We are composed on clothes. Clothes hang off. . . . There are no arrivals. No returns. There is space. Tattered sounds of foreign words. — Angrez, they shouted and threw stones at us in Muree. We climb a mountain again, unnamed by our language. Defecating. Our inheritance. To use English is a contra diction. There are no black bears or hangers on the mountain where we hang clothes. I want to be attacked. Layers in the attic are a muffled speech. Static between words filled with walls we imagine. To engulf a wall, or be engulfed by a wall. That’s the question.

30

There is dreaming: neurons splayed open without a brain. Absence breeds an auditory tongue. It just about gathers the walls as they vanish. Imaginary wells where a Baba chants om. A refrain. A possible frame. To clean meticulously. Details. There are dunes and dune buggies in Dubai where you set up a tent. I mean, buy an apartment between worlds. You explore Bedouin culture in a jeep. I always said we had gypsy eyes, or gypsum eyes. I want to go back, board a plane. Become supersaturated. To maim a word in English is to maim myself. Accretions of sounds and dormitories of dust mites. Allergic reaction. Immunoglobulin E, replacing “I.” To acquire eyes that can see in the dark is to acquire wings that flit across borders in space. Each word grows an attic that eats itself even as it is cut. Narrative is always only an audition.

31

HALF-LIFE

He attempts to forge himself again and bore into the absence of white. An optical illusion. A forced smile suggests he has a short half-life. Twinkies buried in the Nevada desert have no half-life. So goes the urban myth, passed down, turned over. “Twinkie” is the dream of the urban purist. Holisms split in Tamil Nadu. The elephant struggles with bells around its neck while the priest worships it with sandalwood paste. If you want a blessingful touch of its trunk, give me Anthony struggling with the devil in a bomb suit. Or COD. His enemy is his best suit. Decide on a tie. Build a temporary lean-to in space until space collapses it. Shorten the breath slightly. Feel the pacemaker pace slightly too quickly. Trip yourself daily. Build up a daily holism with the most obvious hole. Thread a frayed needle. Begin again, say da.

32

F I T F U L AWA K E N I N G S

1. the lantern is snuffed out by the hotel guard what is a lantern a hymn a place of gathering or a narrative of oil diffused into air what is a fan the fan spliced the air in swift incisions measured increments of time passing before the necessary morning in the first narrative he wrote in kindergarten after the excavation a dactyl sits on the edge of speech silence or was it a dragon? miss buzzbee said demons were believed to live in asia minor they discovered iron and the art of working metal by fire — i will be a paleontologist he signed his name across the book digging for dinosaurs he would be a digger for lost objects he started in the backyard with a spade digging up mullein he moved on to a shovel he aspired to operate a bulldozer is the border pretend you don’t understand english as E said when a beggar accosted him for placing his ski bag on the ground enemy territory as his aunt said enter chai wallah read the chai wallah in fiction he sells postcards for the flag-raising ceremony it is low season he forks out bribe money to keep his business the british rode their high horses left crap in their wake

2. on the other side we saw a graveyard through a prism as though a daydream of scents united a whole landscape into a word a phrase a thing behind the scents and imaginary floral walls graves and unmarked mounds with burnt-down stubs of dhoop mother hastily put out dhoop and we understood why incense mourned behind the scent of jasmine were row upon row of chiselled words

33

commemorated british soldiers the graves sprinkled with rose petals left at the heads or feet of the deceased but we couldn’t tell where they were located there were some small mausoleums elaborately laid with tiles and faded verses from the koran we searched for a stone shaped like a pen when mother put the dhoop out and gestured to me i emptied the bag of rose petals at grandmother’s feet underneath their soles the constellations mourned and then we walked on the pigeon-shit-stained marble shrine of the saint of lahore collecting our lips we bought the quails freed them found necessary buried objects that weren’t there the quails returned to their nets we unearthed our stranger lips

3. the dog wriggles under the barbed-wire fence kicked on the other side silenceblackout the present tense buried in a brown crayon layer a pterodactyl sits on the shoulder of a sphinx waiting to carry him home

34

CONDUCTION

“Conduction in metals and resistors is well described by Ohm’s Law, which states that the current is proportional to the applied electric field. The ease with which current density (current per unit area) j appears in a material is measured by the conductivity σ, defined as: j=σE or its reciprocal resistivity ρ: j = E / ρ.”

THE NEW SENTENCE

“Where is the border you will not cross?” — Ron Silliman Chapter one regurgitates the new sentence for lack of any other direction. Chapter one uses parataxis for the wrong reasons. Chapter one is receding to chapter one. Chapter one is a body rather than a langue. Chapter one exceeds discourse. Chapter one revels in inversions that make no sense. Chapter one is monstrous. Chapter one is a wall attempting to speak. Chapter one could be original sin all over again. Chapter one should be the ultimate catharsis. Chapter one could be a river that changes names. Chapter one hums like wasps in the ear drums. Chapter one should praise the new sentence. Chapter one attempts to construct a rhombus. Chapter one shouldn’t produce numinous illumination. Chapter one believes in an end point. Chapter one is apocalyptic. Chapter one could be the Gospel of John. Chapter one is all about indeterminacy. Chapter one might bleed more. Chapter one surges toward the end of the mind, halting before hitting the wall of history. Chapter one might love more. Chapter one should break all rules. Chapter one should not make grammatical sense. Chapter one should not mention ontology. Chapter not should not mention Ibn Arabi. Chapter one doesn’t believe in voice. Chapter one glides across the glassy water and eventually sinks like a hanged woman. Chapter one believes schizophrenia is radical poetics. Chapter one won’t look further back from the point where it touched the new world. 37

Chapter one eventually becomes a loyal subject of the state. Chapter one is endless deferral. Chapter one is the albatross of modernism. Chapter one is usually white. Chapter one is usually male. Chapter one is usually middle-class. Chapter one will attempt to remember Auschwitz by recollecting that colonialism made Auschwitz possible. Chapter one will leave an empty chair in the house where a body tells the beads of time until there is a new world. Chapter one will leave the door hanging on a hinge so the spectral presence of history can emerge and inhabit an empty seat. Chapter one is the empty seat. Chapter one rises into new senses. Chapter one looks as far back as it can before it breaks the beads of time. Chapter one writes to reach a standstill. Chapter one writes to reach a living silence that alters the cells. Chapter one awakens periodically from its somnolence. Chapter one believes silence is the living presence of a new being. Chapter one believes silence produces a subject that is neither loyal to the state nor to the self. Chapter one believes a revolution is near. Chapter one believes the body is a microcosm of the whirl. Chapter one ends where chapter one begins. The body contracts. The body expands. The body wants to dream. The body wants to love. The body wants to grasp. The body wants to possess. The body wants to build a house here. The body wants to take the house apart brick by brick. The body wants to laugh until every house crumbles. His body is an earthquake. His body is a tornado.

38

The body lives in clouds. His body lives in drought. The body wants to write prose. The body wants to write a paean. The body conjures up an indistinct memory of a woman who makes the blackest tea. This woman could be the body. This woman could be his grandmother. This woman could be a rainstorm. This woman could be hail. She could mean finding too much, finding too little, finding not enough. Memory becomes deranged. The senses are obscured. Narratives expand in his mind. When the palm closed in prayer the world closed with it. When the palm opened the world opened with it. When the song rose the palm was emptied. When the empty emptied the song lay down and died. When the died emptied the bread was born, when the bread was born the world was with it. When the senses were scandalous the world was too. When the myth fell the body fell with it. When the body broke the bird awoke. When the enemy knocked at the door he became the bearer of good news. When good news was emptied the road unravelled. When the road unravelled the building crumbled. When the building crumbled the song emptied. When the song emptied the ribs scrambled. When the body fainted the longing subsided. When the subsiding emptied the enemy entered. When the enemy was revealed the song entered. When the song entered the song entered. In the whirling night he found the semblance of sense. In the vertiginous sky bloomed a lotus flower. Behind the palace of defeat the hovel of wisdom.

39

When he locked himself out he was at last free. In the raging night he lost his voice. In the early morning the night cast its still sombre shadow. When the leaves fell the butterfly emerged from its sheath. When the pollen fell the highway unwound. After the angel told him his nightmares would cost him his life he gladly offered his severed head.

40

STUMPING

1. — Say snake, said the speech therapist Why do I stummer stammer? Uproot this stump: it’s all black; tear it from the root. I

She shells sea shells on the sea shore. We were on the Arabian sea pistachio shelling. There was a drowned rig, the hull jutted out of the water. There was a place to rest the dreaming head. A drawl and hiss pulled at the feet. It wasn’t safe where the bees buzzed backwards. — Son, you can’t keep the shell. Have some snake: pistachio.

2. On the Arabian Sea he couldn’t sit on a camel hump. He could watch his musical feet on the Arabian Sea. He listened into the shell of a turtle. He could hardly hear a word on the intake of the feet. The pines in Swat encrusted with snow still loomed. They prevented the world from drowning. I

41

We had flown an Air Safari with Genghis Khan. Khan had climbed K2 with a piccolo. There were burnished mountains like stakes that sprouted fire. He could almost live in the clouds of a place. It was safe in the air. The plane could veer around the mountain. — Finish your samosa.

3. Mother arrived in rain and sleet. She arrived with dried flowers and plaid skirts. She didn’t take the storm windows off. It was spring, a new sense was awakening. I

She sells she shells on the sea shore. We were on a ledge, staring into Surprise Lake. She burrowed her fist through granite pebbles, searched for something: a sea shell. A shelled “c.” She stumbled on Khanada. He listened into his shell. — Son, don’t make a fool of us. Throw the shell back into the sea.

4. The lake was vertiginous that night. Sounds spiralled in from the wardrobe of her memory.

42

She stood on the divide. The crests of the waves heaved. She took the shell out of her pocket, fondled it when lightning struck the harrow. I

She placed the shell against her cochlea. We were on a ledge, someone was shouting mayhem in the water; a windsurfer’s arms gesticulated. The waves clustered up like gleaming mail, encircled him. She couldn’t hear him. — Throw the shell in and make a wish.

5. You can’t live in a shell. She threw it in before he could raise a thumb. He was miming in the water. They were on the sofa talking in low tones about his speech impediment. He was robed like a king in the skin of a panther. I

We marked the edges of the plot with a rake and erected a small fence around it. It was spring. Digressions were dying. A rose garden girdled the stump. (The stump on the front lawn, chainsawed clean.) — Mom, why is your closet lined with shells? — Line them on the close it floor, son.

43

6. Uncle arrived in spring. He arrived with wooden boats carved from teak. He taught us about the Nina, his Pinto and the Santa Maria. It was spring, progress was happening. I

Father chainsawed the willow into a stump. The new rose bushes girdled the stump. We marked the edges of the plot with a rake, erected a small fence around it. — Don’t worry about those rots. We’ll build around them.

7. When he was younger, he let go of a helium balloon. It knocked on the pearly branches of the tree. God was at home in the birch. God was a forensics expert. I

He took a Fresnel lens and directed the sunlight to a single point on the stump. Burned his middle initial into the socket in the rings. At night the stump was touched by the rain of willow pollen. When he snuck out, the screen door screamed shut.

44

8. Annunciate your middle name on the Arabian Sea. Inscribe it on a wave in the Arabian Sea. — We don’t like our middle name. It is a lower caste name: we are not landowners. And we don’t have a middle name. I

— Say snake, said the speech therapist. Sneak a letter from your father’s pocket and the drawl will emerge from a pocket. Hide the bill under mounting letters to God.

45

T H E G R E AT C A N A D I A N S PA M P O E M

(for an American) Sorry for the spam. I’ll send you some lamb and a bolt of white linen. A lamb tied up to a box that is drawn, or was it a sheep that needed a home? There was a picture of the sheep in the lamb’s minute eye. You can draw a lark, but I’d prefer you make a river. When a sheep wears a fog suit, it becomes a shackle. If you prefer a shell, there is a tube through which hearing collapses. Sorry for the spam. I’ll send you some lamb and we’ll dance like pirates looting one another. How rich when we dream up a magnolia inference. (That’s abstract.) How derelict of you, of me, to rob one another. Sorry for the spam. I wish I could conceal you, but Johnny’s apple seed is spitting out other little seeds perhaps to dig, dug, shrug. O I’m sorry to disturb your busy life. I live on the edge of your ear. I’m a little speckle that broods on your pancakes — the burnt ash. My friend is a lawyer and a poet. He was the disappearance of a poem, even as he screamed. Beam him up, Scotty. My friend is a sister, although she confesses to other relations that need to be made clear. This is clear. She lives between a lamb

46

and a lamp. Well, I have to confess I created her because I saw within her the possibility of a granite neologism. Refrain: Listen, I bear no shame in paltry confessions. I’m a blacksmith’s son. Named dawn, defoe, or foe. Something like river water. If you could cup me, you would see some resemblance to yourself shattering. I am selective of my friends. I disturb them with silence. They think that I swallow them. I’m not really a bear, as you claimed. I haven’t the slightest claw. And the tummy is not distended, but indented. I promise to be a heart, Mother tried to carve me into a lark. There is no end to the pews, this plum seed is bitter. You could speak to me and this would all be speckled. Maybe metaphors are for caves. Maybe Plato was a metaphor. I want a line from you.

47

WHITE NOISE

He strings and unstrings his age-old lyre and his rasping voice transmigrates into another brain like a grape vine growing malevolently along this voice, that voice. Each voice crushed. The wine flowing through the veins knots the body into the sense of his word. His fire-beating temples burn our first and last word down. Our senses, trodden, crushed before memory scattered, so he can speak only once. In a zone of incoherence, where the last word leaps, he turns back, releasing his last word. Echoing through the underworld, where his voice is born and dies. His flesh, now charred by centuries on his lyre — his life recedes to where abdomens are ripe apples. He is invisible again. Frantically, we attempt to locate ourselves in relation to him. He is witnessing us. We are born like lice on his skin, voices he reaps with his harrowing sun. He shapes our voice into his lyre. The wind paves through our bones. The sun burns his chord into our ear. We outlast his voice until at last he falls like a cleft willow, struck by black lightning.

48

T I R U VA N N A M A L A I

the best thing to do now is to invent a narrow road to the wagha interior the journey is the mapping he can walk across the border blindfolded and still be in space a darkness attempts to extinguish another darkness as he tunnels underneath the border he sees maps scratching on clay from callused hands that work the earth the hands of the men in amritsar hands that groom the earth maybe they are the reader’s hands palm readers the snow at the edge of the mind is erasing all the previous footprints as the hands dig this pilgrimage to the palm at the end of the mind he returns to the mazed temple city of tiruvannamalai from the top of arunachala from the edge of fiery rock blackthroated monkeys unearth vessels of ghee

49

tiruvannamalai was gutted out

the narrative is out of order its sign says

for the first time in months

you cannot defy gravity

the remainder of an old scalp

meticulously at work on it

washed away

monkey wrench

grey flecks

merging with the mountain

loonies

the meter man is opening a bolt with a

emptying it of quarters

the parking meter is out of order and

the barber had mistaken him for a brahmin

i guess a brahmin

the meter man is unscrewing his mind in search of a pattern

he inscribes the meter with

don’t speak the same language as a barber

scratching

he prods it

speaks to it

cajoles it

asks it for assistance beats on it but it will not open he was circumambulating

snow falls on his eyelashes

traffic passes

the hill when the rain started on jarcaranda flowers until it sounded like one hand clapping he passed the last lone earnest

cars slow down and watch him pick at it the bolt

tourist

sannyasins and the jobless

is rusted shut and will require wd40

chanting krishna bhajans in dilapidated temples with torn pictures of kali her foot poised on the rib of shiva this requires another journey to india

he passed a woman pressing rice into flour

the store is open and he asks for wd40 the woman smiles considerately informs him they have run out

in a stone bowl

pressing urid dahl of wd40

the storefront is aquamarine

he gets into his buggy searches

50

into flour he wanted to circumambulate

the back seat

find a pound of ghee from

the mazed temple city her thighs but doesn’t recognize that ghee could loosen the bolt because he is fixated on wd40 he zealously shaved his head

he went to tiruvannamalai in search of his myth

after spending a day in the cave of a saint she bowed down to him as though he was a brahmin arunachala was created out of a puranic myth he searches through the back seat and finds priestly

a fist pressed in his skull

signs to more signs leading nowhere

left a tracing

the parking meter will need the hill is called the heart centre of the world

in the kali yuga it is said

have turned to stone a transplantation

better yet

a replacement perhaps the father saw this red hill and tears welled up in his eyes the blood of the knife released at the foot of a waterfall

washed

in the torrent where he tripped and plummeted

a beedie stuck

between his two front teeth

51

WA S P S I N A G O L D E N D R E A M

The days are no longer sequential like tapeworms. The day opens up, the river flows in all directions. Hemorrhage — the landscape now. Everything is still still. Wasps in a golden dream hum a strange music. The autumnal image provides membrane for the mind again. The sirens wail through the empty street, autumn’s last song, perhaps. The last autumn when he saw fire, seeing was believing a thing could burn. Remembering the body acquiring shape, a point of discomfort in the abdomen. The fire converged with the fire truck, converged with the bodies of men who dragged their hoses through the woods, sprayed out the fire. With a burst of rage the water flowed out. The fire devastated the lean-to, cast it in the image of a place that began the chaotic sequence. The event. The here. The there. Not proper to build a lean-to in these woods, paki. We learned to build a lean-to after reading a Boy Scout manual. In case you are ever trapped

52

in the great white north, be sure to bring an umbrella. Who can say the architecture of the beginning could not be extinguished? Replaced by another image — for example, the trunk of another autumn in another place, the first image, unfettered. The image had a compulsion to engulf. They put it out. Somewhere else it burned. When one grieves, an epicentre is lost. When one is seen, the desire to move is encumbered. This follows the movement of ecstasy, a knowing that descends like thumbs in the head with the insistence of something godlike. There were intimations of new beginnings, fireflies bursting through blackness. A child who located a box of fire, but could not unlatch the clasp for fear it would transform into a viper weaving through frost. There is a kind of alchemy to the image that is not entirely logical. Every autumn, the fire returned, the stench of decaying leaves permeated the aria.

53

The aria becoming the firemen, rage flowing through their hoses. The element was indelibly marked by the experience. Nothing lingered but a sense of solidity into which the body anchored. Nothing could be defined until it was reframed, or broken — severing a body. Attaching itself to the expanding image propelling him along a distinct, wayward pathway. After seeing fire for a second time, in an entirely different context, the ghost of semblance was not severed. To feel what is building — burning is perhaps the first experience.

54

BLACKOUT

A heat dish buzzes like a dying fly. He wants to dissolve the sky’s encasement, gaze down into the house and record its intricate design. In a lulled hour when hydro workers tamper with wires. A magnetic silence flows into the living room, conducts and composes bodies. Gestures moving restlessly from sign to sign. The silence conducts or conquers the body. We began as minstrels and later — a maelstrom of cheekbones. We dissolve. We rebuild. We become denuded, empty vestibules for a historical figure who liberates history from its mind-tussled movement. The cedars rowed in the air, whipped back and forth by blanched lullabies. We want to be born not already muscled. The language created the rhythm for a cheekbone. This is your specific species. A gentleman speaks of eternity as white radiance. If one transverses cultures, there is still a language of splitting off into vastness. We skirt the surface, listen in to its imponderability, feel its weightlessness.

55

Eternity sears other words from the body. We are the children of the black earth spreading cephalic seeds, planting wing’d seeds in your mouths. He wants to create a space where memory is led back into an incarnate vastness. A memory that liberates words from their cycle of birth and death, the wheel of the world stopped. The snow does not stop changing shape and crystalline form. The mind crystallizes a moment stored between the silence of the cells and exuding. The snow conducts the silence and is made of the stuff of silence. One learns to love the form of that which makes one still.

56

PRODUCTION

Production: The magician produces something from nothing — a rabbit from an empty hat, a fan of cards from thin air, a shower of coins from an empty bucket, or magicians themselves, appearing in a puff of smoke on an empty stage. All of these effects are productions.

MAPPING THE FURNACE ROOM

As a child he had a passion for mapping and demapping the house. Destratifying, stratifying. Imagining maps in his cobbled mind. He walked around the block with a question that had been bottled in the furnace of the house. A question like “Who am I, here?” Inflammatory question forged in the furnace of the house when he filled a glass pitcher with distilled water and clambered over a mountain of photo albums to arrive at the distiller. In my little brother’s dreams, I went back to Thunder Bay. I was terrified arriving at the absent place, the buried gable. This would add another scale to an already bat-like existence — where stumbling was the same as walking through the heat of another place. If one kept oneself open this long, either the heat would sear or the cold would make the bones release stories. Either way there would be stories. The furnace room was where we kept distilled water, picture albums, clippings of father topping his class, but never getting a job because he wasn’t white enough in Pakistan. He was no gentleman, bric-a-brac and Tommy Mugs, antique maps. The floor was cold and uninviting and there were skis and imaginary mountains as soon as he walked in — objects could yearn in absence possessed by an independent life. When doors closed, those doors could open into another room: a hinge could unhinge another place. Dogs could run in dreams when their paws twitched; the furnace could die and when it did there would be a fight and in the argument a landscape vast as an atom — a disappearance into maps — or there could be tropics. And we could love white. And we could act our parts and change our names slightly, but those lost letters now live in another room unhinged, where there is no furnace and the heat could kill you.

59

2. We could, in secret, hate our past. We never arrived, never having left. And always we would leave a door open to a past, to a bullock cart, a servant, congenial conversations in the living room. The grammar is still there, but the words would be for our children to figure out. We never taught them a mater tongue. We never tongued them. We weaned them in white. Already space is auditory, clacking hinges, a furnace humming in the morning, bamboo frames (somewhere else). Already space is a mackerel slipping from fingers back into sugar cane clattering, hexing the way a sentence could move if it remembered. A word dismembered is a new member of the family. Plates underneath the earth could quake or cleave and forge another signature. We shift from India to Pakistan to Canada. There are scattered clothes of a dead brother, whose name we must archive. There are sounds that twist and wind, arriving nowhere. Father says something like: I should have had one more wrinkle, but I desired immortality. Before that I had intentions to send money home. So I told my son he was useless. In 1947 I was a child. In 1947 I gave a speech for the formation of a new country. In 1947 I will never grow old. . . . I killed a Hindu. . . . I may have thrown a knife in the Indus. The Indus eats away the shore, an autoimmune disease. I release bodies from my mouth killed on a train from Jalandhar to Amritsar. There was confusion — now I am — Someone tried to get on a train to Pakistan and he was shot dead with his left leg left dangling

60

from the platform. These are portraits now draped in white linen and the snow covers my tracks. I am a detour to another room. I could unwalk and unwalking could mean mapping backwards. Let the heat melt and I’ll find my feet. Winged, perhaps.

61

WA S P S I N A G O L D E N D R E A M H U M A STRANGE MUSIC

The roaring fire engine through the deserted heat. . . . sums of brilliant bodies stacked pyramid-like, chained to a leash of drum rolls. Those bastard sons and daughters of your country wrecked and ruined in Massachusetts before it was brain. Brooklyn Bridge was clogged, iron queen and supple girder when they fell. Was there ever another time? Solemn is the rain, the shadow, tum, tum on the fern and fallow, lit up like magnesium in the brain. Unspeaking that for now. Wielding this serpentine body within bodies where footprints once planted shoots. You can’t plant a shot in a gun metal a cyst of brotherhood sky

62

2. I think we may have an ant problem. The ants haul the sugar crystals to their burrows. Try mute poison in the brain. The ants haul the sugar to their swallows. On the table, arrangements of spilled sugar, fractals of another text made tropical in a bloody Mary. A body satiated, full of another hunger. There is a mosaic on a table; the table, chiselled of tumours. This is not prognosis, but flesh leaping back with cysts and boils to be planted — fall flat on their lines. Maps on skin traced with red henna. Blood lost its distinctness on a hand. A winding path to another text. Dislodged from an easel, draining in a sink. A canine scent for another text, glimmers like ribs. A winding path to another sense: She is not, he is not even as a tongue is cut out, a tongue. Hold a discreet corner, watch it clamour with life. Delphiniums spill

63

from terracotta. In the cabinet forks and knives and teeming ants. O strange body set to sea . . .

3. When he was a child. Laughter, the remains spiral down from the wardrobe of faintest memory still tinged with the scar of beauty. We stumbled on a buried gable behind Kmart. The remains of a transfiguring tongue. Get a handle on the tropes, son. Red embers therein. Remembers in. A gathering. Only sounds can gather the unnamable image. Yesterday, the body was its own ancestor. Shadows fragment into light. Grandmother gathered the mahogany chairs. Grandmother fished bodies out of air.

4. the street is unpacking memory emptying vectors of sleep fire neurons memory exfoliating emptying nouns drip out of maples the streets pile up with silence a coded life the glass eyes of the doll were torn out I had to learn to love the rag doll prison the bards turn in bedsheets cotton will not swallow them body is being kneaded by something benign or perverse something is vanishing a memory of something

64

or what? do you want a trip to kashmir or what? on the I-90 if the eye audibly sees backwards, does it see the back of a sign or a careening toward the carcass on the wayside? the deer ran into the absence or the I-90 ran into the deer to hear in infinitesimal silence is to become silence organic form inhabit languish endless layers of sound spot of time an island on the highway oasis on the I-90 the economy of digestion could eat the fucker orchestrations of blood

no escaping

to lose a piece of earth is to lose the organic form of the body body fuelled by an alien sound this is why the eyes hear feet torn casket of sun bursting infamous eyes the car could float at the moment of impact the car will not float the guts spilled on the chalice in the first place the chalice made from sandstone if you could make a room of dust and simulate a storm glass fragments words fly around vultures above a white storm when they swoop down the words are not torn but swallowed interchange vulture and word memory recedes without a tongue to remember memorabilia the same a year ago rag doll living is a movie daddy’s little cutie i replaced a marble for an eye dangling

hot time

65

from the forehead flagellating toward a vastness always making vanish what touches it if not recoil

5. father fell from a catalpa his left eye

now he has cataracts in

fireworks spilling into steel sky some guy with a gallon hat is playing an anthem on a banjo in north hampton somehow this light speaks to hearts else the sky is falling

somewhere

6. dupont subway station script of forgetting sopped on the sole that familiar of leaves sandalwood put it on the forehead it will clear the mind city is where shadows weave ships remember someone half-turning in the turn again lanes leaf still attached to its umbra in the fall find the other side of the curled leaf inside the comb-like leaf a layer of frost picked from the mind scab-like spectres of another autumn when leaves fled from trees the way mica holds light in one interval the outermost layer sheds the way shadows pile up breathe through intervals and split or soften the stone now the wind blows in two suchnesses

66

faces fall in fractions the lakeshore is cool words receding into foam debris bottles half-cut to cool a heating engine a heating lake minaret reflection or a ziggurat father fishes the bodies of women out of the well out of his welling eyes those bodies inverted photographs developing on the tongue father stood unperturbed in the living room the lamp dimmed

now

the moon is dim he doesn’t flinch turning toward his office a dime in the well his back turned dimes rust no charity picks them up. Should put exotic fish in the well fish see in those depths we sink tied to our music why does the body remember this moonlight?

7. Every night we run screaming, but we can’t scream. If we do scream innumerable hands gather us up. We remember that time like ink smears on postcards.

67

M E A N W H I L E , A C O N T I N E N T A W AY

You who stand in the doorway, come in, Drink Arabic coffee with us — Mahmoud Darwish The crows are a continent. Black-throated minstrels measuring silence falling from cursed lips. They gather names into barbed beaks, scatter them at the edge of cities where the lawless roam with empty paper bags scattering winged seed from their mouths. Those names, like shard, enter into the bodies, which suddenly heave, born again. They howl about the next meal, the end of time and roads that lead to hellfire. We measure the bedrock, calcified rhododendrons, paleolithic penumbra. Travel into bone marrow, through stainless striation. When our blood falls onto this city, we prepare our tote bags, travelling tyrants. Empathetic to a pin drop. The name of ours caught almost, almost terrible. We will not hear it turned inside out, frozen for a moment at a threshold. We will not hear absence upon fossilized absence, the last footsteps to leave the room, the strum of blood through vessel upon vessel. How the body persists, building itself on the tomb of labour.

68

We huddle together at dinner parties in wonder at the cracked surface of crème brûlée. We would like to burn a gorge through our sleep until everything that is monstrous is hollowed out, as the monsters of waking greet us. The saki arrives and serves our blood. A windpipe humming inside our bodies hollowed out. The saki speaks of the yawning gulf between nothing and nothing. In the age of names, the nameless are peonies. In the age of corrosive birth certificates, song of the ravaging multitudes. We hole ourselves away, kneel and shout the word across a crumbling ocean trough. We will build another silent empire of meaning. We will not wail a world away.

69

D O G D AY S

Men drenched in sweat, a prayer call wove an arabesque in his childhood mind. The canal running through the city smelled like shit. Scratch that. The canal was shit. Dogs were unleashed in the dark streets by the canals. Arabian Nights a swat away. In Northwest Frontier Province. Perched in the air like bright monkeys. Helicopters dropping bags of rice. As quickly as they emerge, swell, implant and disperse. Sucked back into an ambrosial lamp. Sucked back into an electrical tumour. The air is plastic on the tongue. The map of a province, a clearly cut diamond of sound. Pathan children rob the convoy trucks. Everyone loves a mango in a poem. Or a talibanized child stealing bags of rice, gazes clamour around a un convoy like ants around methamphetamine. Just yesterday, Hitler took the child’s passport. He bowed down to Hitler and thanked him for giving him one more day to locate it. He was watching a film of Pakistanis whose passports were stamped by black Afghani boot legs before being sold on the black market in Karbala. Before they were shipped off to Guantánamo. When he awoke, he broke off, into the sun of the Self. The Sufic sun could never dawn in the body. That Sufic silence was death to any sort of being-in-the-world. The body is a mine. The body walks over itself and explodes. When he was a child, he always had this sense, looking through the clouds: there must be a way through. Through the eyes of child, the clouds denoted the amazing effects of a tangled consciousness.

70

One can never break off because in dreams one is saving a drowning, displaced father. At night we dream in scalding water. A slow-motion picture that comes to life as my father walks down the stairs. What are the stairs down? He envisioned them as a grave. The slow and memorizing walk down into papers, allergy journals, rice spread out on a granary floor. Yes, that’s how it always was, dreaming in closets. As soon as one emerges from the closet, one grows new aural senses. Ears become eyes. Eyes become touch. The senses become a recipe from a house torn down, a distraught man-as-child drinking curdled milk in Amritsar where he met two Canadians and gave them his Atwood.

71

GOODBYE, TORONTO

In the Toronto Star the alleged terrorist’s eyes appear red. She scours the photos at Abu Ghraib looking for clues and emerges from that short-lived project with a bag over her head, eyes torn out. Take the rag off your head. This is how she slowly loses her sexuality. You can see through the redness of his eyes, with soup in your ears and sand in your eyes. Choice is a matter of taste. We are gentle men breeding black babies from tongues, alien words. We are pipers who strife the sea. The plane circles the Atlantic and we drop black silence. Because the mass came from energy, and the Prophet(s) were energy. The in-between was theorized as a realm of smokeless fire. For this reason, it obeys one moment and rebels the next. You can’t kill your double. Arabian Nights was translated by a Victorian sentimentalist. Fingers grow enraged. Trace scribing. Memory knows no limit. Present to itself. Present to the body, resurrected. The shards of history shine. The body undammed. Undamned. One leg lodged in ghostliness. Goodbye, Toronto.

72

We will not mourn this empty city. This flowering house, deflowered.

73

D E S I R E N E V E R L E AV E S

Desire rarely erupts through metal. It erupts through eyes that attach to metal. Erupts orgasmic. And thus, the body is born burning. Disgorged eyes, pouring out skin on skin, epidermal schema. There is electricity in metal, bodies conduct it, repelled, indifferent, attracted — torn like a man who cannot stop mourning his doll in The Sandman. How does one forgive iron, molten through the veins, erupting through the head? If the statue of King Edward were melted down into Canadian currency what would replace him? A memorial garden for interned Japanese? . . . if there was a space to collectively mourn. There is always the invasion in the house of dreaming. Hello, nice to meet you must be an angry oriental mask The statue stares through us, laughs, transplanted from India after the Partition. The aesthetic orienting the body, grating, grinding, a word in a smelter. Then the surpassing, we hope.

74

There is no surpassing. What do you get when you place metal on a tongue in winter? A real love affair. I orient myself to stone tablets. Moses on morphine. I want to tongue you, King Edward.

75

CELLULOSE

1. I tell you this in the disturbed time of speech which is poetry. These are the unhomely spaces where we play our less distinct harpsichords. Our instruments made from the pigments of our flesh. Our organs turn noiselessly away, harvesting all the elements into the fifth, which crackles like birch bark, floating in a tomb of singing.

2. You cannibalize our history. Turn over our leaves for a new day. Unforeseeable layers interrupt. Something sequestered from the night, touched your barbed fingers. Wanted to scribble loss over your body.

76

You wanted to make your whiteness breathe something other than quiet hysteria. And so we envisioned an intestine from the bark of a rabid dog. And so our ears were erect — keenly aware how the shredded rind of a lemon sounded. And so our ears leaned keenly into febrile darkness, reading generations of silence fallen from pursed lips. Our notes, the guttural surf drawn from the ocean’s green sibilance.

3. Then the silences dissolved like a sugar doll in your senses. You declared: Decomposing has no opposite, is feeling expanded bereft of pattern lifted into language. A cosmic music emerges from my bowels.

77

DISRUPTION

Disruption: a method of execution in which all four limbs are pulled simultaneously with animals or machines so that the body is torn apart.

P R E D I C TA B LY, T H E H O U S E WA S N O T T H E R E

Predictably, it didn’t matter because the beginning was a farce. Predictably, he believes that narrative can organize the filing cabinet. Predictably, he tried to subvert in a dream and fly above himself and circle a broken, black and stringless lyre. Predictably, his ashes were scattered in Baghdad. Predictably, his ashes sang. He is in search — for a lost music. He is in search of a lost music. The lost music of a lost body. His circulation drums inside his veins. He wants to destroy something or build a stone tower. He wants to run up a mortgage and run himself to death paying for it. He is imbricated like a gutter tile. He could invent a self to inhabit. Last night, he returned to Thunder Bay. Last night, Terry Fox was frozen like an iceberg. Last night, Canada switched bodies with the United States. Last night, he droned like a swarm of bees. Last night, he met the Indian man at Tim Hortons who said he was writing a book called The Good Life. Last night, he was shooed away with a shoe because he asked the man where he lived. Last night, a roof looked like a mast for a shipbuilding empire. Last night, the ground beneath his feet. Last night, his body morphed into the stranger who comes into a hushed village peddling knives. Last night, the man stamped on a bush to make sure it wouldn’t catch fire. Last night, absence was like a cleavage of tongues. Last night, the man asked him if he was possessed by a language. Last night, a rainstorm of bedsheets. Last night, the man thought it was demeaning to ask where he came from. He understood how minds are undererasure and the good life comes to be. When trace becomes scream. He’ll tear this space

81

down in a couple of months and finally leave poetry behind. Poetry is for poets. He wants to vanish into another relation. The current flowed against him. At the GO station, he almost walked into the belly of a revolving door. Every night something eats away at him until he is both occupied and occupier. He’s been tracing fingers in the sky.

2. The body is found in relation to the trace. The trace is agency. The trace is (r)evolution. Bitterness and brilliance. Coming to mean purity is inverted, knotted. Alluvial deposit where “salt is purified.” He wants to mine the slippages. In history. He can’t drive the poem. The poem is driven out of the trace. The poem is always an organic relation. The trace can grow like a fibrous plant. The trace can appear to transcend. But always he will find he is a digger. Always he will give up when language takes over. When history becomes beloved. Reading Glissant. Hugging the text: For the salt it means. Brilliance and bitterness once again. Lights in distress on its expanse. Profusion. The theme, knotted with foam and brine, is pure idea. Monotony: a tireless murmur cracked by a cry. Thereon the delta — is a river where the word piles up — the poem — and where salt is purified (Glissant). crystallization of past in present meeting oneself on the genuflecting tongue what is the function of “monotony” in the poem? bitterness

82

and brilliance sight and taste intermixing eyes and tongue the tongue concealing/revealing? the eye does the tongue dim the eye gazing at the “pure idea” at the moment of the pure idea’s conception? the self marooned by “a tireless murmur/cracked by a cry” a profusion of meaning process/ed gathered in the trace harvest histories sequestered penumbra water only after body has erupted and settled ashes césaire’s volcanic body a paradoxical renewal lush green petrified wood traces floating up as still lives are broken a ground beneath stepping stones to a being that cannot be without being tasted denied sight at the very moment of being tasted shadows chased into the water drowned and arising as waiting monotony rippling at the gathering hands of water

3. A child comes of age in the time of nation when she discovers bodies disembodied, drowned, emerging from the waters — singing, tasting the brilliant and bitter purgative of time. Within the gap that constitutes a nation in an originary act of pure violence — floating isles of monologues and bodies tracing their remains. Each bodily trace meeting another singing and reconstituting a collective body. A child comes to be when she speaks the gaping hole that once constituted his wholeness and laughs at a city

83

of crumbling stone. A body is not a snowstorm, a manacle or a chain. If it is a chain, simultaneously a severing. 4. The body kneads its own language, gathers its flour like a whore. There are no exits from the body. No orifices to turn to. No apertures left for the hemispheres to move toward. The music has died in the world. Open the door, Friend, so I can spit on your image again.

5. There was a time mourning and singing were communal acts. We will attempt to untangle two disparate, acidic burn away of faces and feet. The tongue learns to genuflect muffled speech. We began the narrative when we were transmigrating into language. Father was born, or ill-conceived, between three wolves. Our feet could not clench a clod and claim a miracle.

84

6. Narrative means to present a body schematic. One must at last present a body habeas corpus.

7. Father in a dream believed in new land, which he left and is leaving.

8. Walk over a mine. Explode to find the intercultural dimensions of metaphor.

9. I searched for God and arrived at my father’s door in a foreign country. I became the door for him to myself. I am the hanging hinge of your burnt-down house opening to you. You walk through and unscrew me.

10. Father crosses over. He is crossing over in his sleep. We type a delirium. Night is nothing but night. How many times do I have to repeat this before I become a fascist?

85

11. We began this narrative when he saw the last child sit down after the national anthem, dispersed. When the last child left the room, the room was peopled with those he had never heard of. By songs there is a river song we could bathe our bodies in. We will make river metaphors that root and cross into anguished sleep. O Canada of hinge narratives. O Canada of opening and closing doors.

86

SID

Friends, lovers and broomsticks! As you begin to disassemble your body. What is a brown body? Khan also said that his “driving motivation” was Islam. As you begin to forget how you drive. I knew him as Sid Khan. As the fire between the moribunding skin of your bodies. Here was a Muslim publicly respected and admired. As you begin to wrap the kite thread back into the ball of your gut. Khan appears to have negotiated himself. Pull the kite back in after it kisses the cumulus. What is a kite? There is “an enemy within — but its nature is highly complex.” As you pull a switchblade out and reveal a comb. What is a comb? A head shot. As your body goes through the windshield. What is a windshield? Physiological perturbations are organized. As you revisit the 7/7 riots in Bradford. Stuart Williams stating that he wanted to “blow up” Bradford’s mosques with a rocket launcher. As you stood quietly when a paki was bashed. What do you get when you stick a paki in a microwave? As you went to a training camp. Dave Midgley confessing to pushing dog faeces through the letterbox of an Asian takeaway. As your boot was caught in quicksand. This debate is now closed. Friends, lovers and broomsticks! Who is speaking you? Are you babbling yet? Are you white? Do you want to enable the “other”? Do you know your “other” yet? Do you own your “other” yet? Have you packaged it? Have you frozen it to the wink of eternity? Do you know your gut yet? Do you own your gut yet? Have you packaged it? Does your gut sing or does it play lullabies? Have you played that game where you climb up the CN Tower and fall gently to the ground like a maple leaf? In French, the

87

CN Tower is à la. Will you burn the streets down? Will you chainsaw a tree onto a power outage? Will you grow a beard? Will you wear a shalwar quameez? Are you an abcd? Are you a Desi? Is there a difference? Do you walk or do you stagger? Do you lawn bowl? Did you fight for your brothers in Chechnya? Did you groan when you saw the rumble in Karbala? Did you rejoice when you saw the twin towers tumble? Were you confused enough? Did you see the Vietnam veteran in rags by the television watching the woman jump out? Did you feel him more than you did the woman? Was he real enough? Are you ashamed of feeling old? Are you ashamed of your umbilicus? What happened to the white Vietnam veteran at the moment the twin towers fell? What happened to whiteness as a working concept? Did you see the man shuffling the burka across the street of screaming cars? Did the fern saplings shout? When did you first hear that the sky was pregnant with drought? Is that a metaphor? Do you wear baggy denims? Are you old enough? Is this your locket of hair? Is this a fairy tale? Would it make a difference to the ballot count? Do you carry a paper bag on the subway, just in case? What school of poetry do you subscribe to? If you buy a condo, will you put a dome on it? Will you hybridize the crack in the sidewalk after your eyes leak out? Friends, lovers and broomsticks! Do you walk aimlessly? Do you carry a loudspeaker that transmits your thoughts? Are you before yourself or after yourself? Are you decultured or emasculated? Do you read Barthes backwards? Do you chitchat to a wall about Barthes on the toilet? Did you eat your baggage, or did it eat you? Do you know that barley averts the evil eye in India? Is it baggage, or is it God? Decide on a tie. Before you fly back home, did the bread rise? Why do you fly home and take a boat back? Do you build model airplanes? Why do white boys fly? Do you pack Egyptian sand in test tubes? Are you a material fact? What of the white boat? Take off your dunce cap. Will you disassemble, Mother? Is there a generation gap? Will you bomb the fuck out of your model body now? Do you care enough? We are a target because of who we are and how we live, our society, our diversity and our values — values such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Have you read Al Jazeera for a month? Are you old

88

enough? Does the lyric arise in bodies such as these? Do you sympathize with their demands to withdraw the troops, or do we draw the line here? We’ve got a live one. Devise a Title. The daylight of opening a dictionary. Education is trauma therapy. It’s a long story. In the beginning there were no words, no worlds. There was whirling and there was a birthing and babbling. Listen closely and I’ll explain. Or complain. But you’ll understand. Bear with me, I have no clues. I’m trying to devise a title. Deeds done. Confessions. Interlude. Notes torn from a journal. Take a rest, dear reader. Take this water. The poetics of “ethnicity.” The poetics of “misidentity.” He was diagnosed with malgnosis. The poetics of psychic explosion. Or a journey toward the absent ileocecal valve. I swear by God I have to come to terms with wanting too much. A discernible past, for instance. A narrative. An operative poetics. A nice girl. The list goes on. This particular poem has a purpose, albeit at odds with the Muslim God. The Hindu God. The Christian God. In addition, there is an assembly line of men with overalls under all the parts of machinery. Genetic machinery, that is, and they’re trying to screw things up. This is not a complex. I swear by God it is a knotted — Procedure. The Muslim God doesn’t like similes or similitudes. On the other hand, the Hindu God is complex. I have to come to terms with wanting too little because of a slight complex, I conclude we’re both lost causes. You one and without an equal and I packed off to figure the arithmetic, to search for impossible beginnings. God answers in all forms:

89

I swear by God I’m an earwig. I’m everywhere. I love wax museums. There were many of us at the beginning of time, and we kept digging until we fell through the sky. If you’ll believe me I’ll make you a wigwam and we’ll sail Medina to the Dead Sea. Listen, I’m on welfare, so I hope you’ll consider my well fare and also get your penny’s worth of narrative. It will breed inside your brain. I sit on a dragon’s back and we’re about to take a journey through the gut. A journey denotes a beginning a middle and an end. We’ll all heave at the ileocecal valve, I swear. This is a catharsis. His Mother: He relives her disembarking / a plane in Thunder Bay. (It was winter, the snow was piled up at her husband’s door and then —) She carried a suitcase of dried petals. There was a husband she had met in Lahore, eloped with. This was/is all arranged. The narrator wanted her to become what he needed — a mother tongue. He wants that she wants to not con/form into a blizzard. That’s a figure of his speech. Not a mater tongue. This space is an arrangement. He needs to go to Lahore to see a whore. That’s foreshadowing. I’m giving you a clue to his whereabouts. Hope you’ll believe me. Narrative belongs in a wax museum. As I said, I want to be domesticated, but more like a dog. I want to be wise, but otherwise. I want to be ignorant and backward. I don’t quite understand why this is the case. I have faith in fools and lunatics. I want to write well-constructed rhetorical and backward tracts for a season, at least. Edging toward the extremities of language, one day my analyst said: One day you will babble. That was the day the lightning clapped and the sparrow followed me in. I am anal, yes, although you’d never know I was a prince in my previous embodiment and before that a laughing rafter of a house that fell on a clatter of forks and knives. Words for me are animals, animal noodles. Other bodies lunge toward me. Yes, I am moaning and mooning. I want my self to be dished out and slaughtered like the monkey brains in Indiana Jones. I’m impressionable as hell. Words and their structures are

90

the ghosts of new bodies. I live in about a hundred bodies. A hundred different times and places. A moment ago, I was a sannyasin walking in India, dying an ochre robe. I have never before felt myself bow like that toward stone. I understand the dynamics of nostalgia, don’t get me wrong. I’m not nostalgic. I don’t know where I am. That’s not the problem. Ecstasy cannot be packaged. The Godhead belongs partially, unanchored, to texts. Auras can’t be photographed. He’s a fool, a chameleon, a lost dendrite. I tell you he’s old now since you met him, fashionably unshaven, à la bin Laden with crooked eyes and a quiet, introspective demeanour. People eat him for breakfast and bloat. Friends, lovers and broomsticks! The wise fools are the mercurial. The wise fool sits on the dung heap and disassembles his wise folly. In other words, she finds a whole in her thinking, which reaps all sorts of benefits. Like life insurance. Or an advance. The sannyasin sits on a dung heap and meditates his “wise folly” and becomes a wise fool. Later he would rather be the dung that attracts the fly and maintains his animal body. He wants to wring the necks of a few people with verbs. I want to “ing” like a flea that breeds on a grackle. I want to be your very own lullaby. I’m moslem and muslin and muesli. I’m trying to find a bridge to the sense of eating myself. To the gerund. To the hoax of a poem. To the hoax of thinking it’s all a hoax. I believe in attention seeking. I am a child in need of a lullaby. I believe in madness, but not in a regressive sense. I believe in regress, but not in a progressive sense. I belong to the stars and grackles, to the owl and the mouse. I belong to the moon and I shed my body on the light of the whip. I’m not a song of myself. I’m not the stranger that breeds inside your brain. Not a derelict. A dog licker. I’m your angel with the wings of a fly. Send me all your belongings and follow me. Send me some grass. Preferably not leaves of grass. Send me your cranks. We’ll make a new wheel. A sphere for your sorrow. The gut is the centre of gravity, but I never studied this in India. I learned from a Russian Orthodox priest. Consider the Philokalia. It outlines the art of navel gazing. If you’re searching for an operative

91

poetics, consider the navel, which would bring you much fruit. When Judas was a priest I was on Mercury, quietly considering panic. Now that I’m Rudolph the reindeer, I hope you won’t travel to Mercury. Listen, I want to reform, to be a speed reader. I want to make a loaf of bread for the road. When he met his father’s hands in a breadbasket, he knew it wasn’t his father. Abdul had mutated into Abraham. The gut was a road if you consider that the road is unhinged in three places, possibly more — we’ll investigate the matter. Here are the statistics, you do the Gallup poll. We’ll meet each in the flagpole. I is woven, I is woven. He was woven he was woven. No the stitches are — don’t trust the gut when cell division is occurring. This is getting psychoanalytic. Bear with me or don’t, I couldn’t care less or could. I am telling you that this is the story of a body that never birthed. He tried rebirthing. Rebirthing is called rebirthing because many times the suppression that rises and is released is related to birth trauma. When rebirthee(s) have released enough suppression (usually in 10 to 20 sessions) they have mastered the breath and feel safe enough with the process to rebirth themselves whenever they want. Rebirthing killed his pay cheque. I questioned the beams of the house I was unconsciously constructing. Here’s my last attempt at lyricism: Little child who made thee Little child who made thee? Who made the meadow for the bees and laughing water for the trees . . . Who placed the cosmos in thine eyes that I could gaze into thy sky and ask little child who made me? That was in another room that continually intrudes upon this telling. Bear with me, I have no clues. Perhaps paint a picture of my Motherland. If you’d believe me, I’d be mimetic. He has to button his butterfly. He’s trying to release a Romantic, but he’s cocooning again. This is an arcane branch of linguistics, so you’ll

92

spare him the audition. Keep your hands to yourself and consider alienation the theme of this narrative. Keep your eye on that and you’ll be a cyclops with a reasonable mind. He’s a 12-dimensional misnomer. Dear reader, you will always be a familiar place. I swear I’m not being facetious, Mother tried to carve me into a skylark. You should get your pennies’ worth, we all agree. I’m an old soul wise as Mercury. I could tell you why Orpheus turned his back on Eurydice in Hades, or perhaps I’m misreading. I’m the best misreader I know, so I know you’ll trust me. Or why did Alexander Mackenzie turn his back on me when the streetcar screamed through the grid by the fern saplings? Why did Ben Franklin walk back from the auditorium where a sermon was being preached? Because he knew that written word travelled far and wide. It needs to be transplanted, supplanted. It’s all happening at this instant — the narrative, I mean. Spare me the audition, I am a trustworthy statue. This is an arcane branch of linguistics. I’ll elucidate at this juncture, where the colon meets the Indus. Don’t grope with the trope; consider it a gift, or a trump. The gut has an ending, but then there are the drain pipes and the echoes in this house, in this house. Note the rhetoric: I could tell you my name, but I’m a slow learner, so you’ll understand and we’ll miscommunicate. Sorry if I’m being ungrateful, but endings have new beginnings when the sewage drains. So sue me, this piece of gut is oddly disjunctive, but you’ll study the endoscopy report, I trust. When I try to conjoin words to guide him, I become a homing instinct. I want to decode an anatomical map, though, so I trust you’ll fly with me through the gut to a third body. I have an axe to grind in your brain, like the additions to our house. There are ins and outs of creating a house. Excuse the slant rhyme. In case I’m misreading you’ll understand the beams are slightly in order. The laws of this house are the beginning of the narrative. Don’t worry too much about the picture of a woman in domestic bliss. She’s frozen on the wall and requires a heart transplant. The laws of this house are an audition, don’t panic with these additions to your house. I want to make a conjunction of Ganges with Indus, but those are up in the attic. The attic is a bedroom if you understand how space moves. Trust me, you’re in. The Indus travels all the way to India, but changes

93

names like the layers of the gut. In a dream I became the moving eye of obstruction. On a stormy night I learned the ins and outs of echolocation. Clap on, clap off, clap on, clap on, clap off the clapper. That’s the theme of the family room. Consider the totem pole on the mantel. It is here where I served the Pontiff bacon for breakfast on Ramadamn. Come, I’ll pay the tip, you cover the bill. Give me a mater tongue and I’ll try to join Ganges with Indus, the family room with the bedroom. Anastomosis occurred last year. We’re still investigating the missing piece of narrative. The hallway was dark on Christmas. Find the walls with your ears. If you’re a critic you will see. Ah. Screw the bees. I want to be strung now. I was bored in the sign of the bull when I was conceived by a mother. She tried to open a door once, but the white of the snow made her slip, see previous snow poem. I want to write Hallmark cards. Earmark me for the military. I was born in the sign of bull, if that bears any claws. The trine of a square is a conjunction, crack that and I’ll give you my Vedic astrology chart. Don’t mention the trip. In the haystack was a humanist, after he realized he was beast. I hope the spell is contagious. I hope it bears resemblance to your third body. We’ll get to the narrative in a moment, but before that be able and cane sugar. The laws of this house are an audition. They will collapse the moment you examine the walls. The Venetian blinds are a riddle if you care to open them and see outside. The side of the house is a maniac if you believe in personification. Consider the Lollards. I have a slight complex. The darkness is where all the fruits are. Read this parable and you’ll be able. I’ll tell you a story about a journey to Hades when Hades was a cell. That’s another story that always tries to supplant me from the snow. You see I’m at the door when my mother tries to open it. She just won a lottery and my dad told her to spend the winnings on groceries. Be here and now is an apt aphorism. It gets you through the day if you believe in a here. I have this strange hair that’s slightly obnoxious. The dna. I mean. Spare me the audition. I’m a trustworthy statue. I hope you’ll bear with this complex because falling apart is what a third world loves to do.

94

Knock knock. Home is a koan where the buffalo roam down by the sea. I used that line before but this is not a performance, so you’ll bare with me and keep your hands together. This is not the Hummingbird Centre and I’m no whirling dervish to entertain you. I’m anxious as hell to tell you about the trinity of gods I worship. That was before I became an ancient mariner. I have to release allusions continuously. Anyway, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva and you could make a parallel if you believed in generalities: Father sin and holy Ghost. My teacher always said I was a good misreader. They sent me off to a school of reform, but my Blessed Mother believed in miracles. She always said a door would open. Look at this. Allah was on welfare. (I do care for your welfare.) Don’t kill me, I’m not Rushdie. I have no spells to weave, I swear. I have a slight complex, but you’ll believe me when I say you’ll get your penny’s worth of narrative. It will breed inside your brain. I’ll tell you right here and now that this is still slightly mimetic, perhaps phenomenological, if you could swallow that pill. I swear by God I have nothing against big words; in the beginning was the big word, or the big bang. One giant fuck in space. The Gods must be crazy throwing all these Pepsi bottles from airplanes. I see beauteous forms all around me and I agree with I’m Forester. We should get rid of narrative and settle for the essentials. Mystic contemplation of transubstantiation if you could only breed a word. Golly God, I’m slipping. A sole without a foot — I was just thinking if we let go of allusions, then we may settle for animal noodles. If we tell all our friends, we’ll be a whole bunch. Maybe the silence of not knowing is where stories lie. I have a Sphinxlike face. Crack this riddle and I’ll give you a medal. The day two worlds never join is my birthday. I’m Mercury herself mediating between Hades. But Hades has many names that I won’t generalize. I’m not Indian, I swear. I don’t want to simplify this or draw any parallels, a beam to a home. I’d rather settle for martyrdom, silence can be martyrdom, but this is noise. Are you listening? Crack this one.

95

BETWEEN FETISH AND PHOBIC

Praise be your name, no one. For your sake We shall flower. Toward you. — Paul Celan 1. We war. Inherit sweat. Almost touch. Behold the interior spiral of a rose. The marrow in the bones. Sense with the stigma of (desire) a rose. The eye’s organ O origins . . .

2. What is the organ of an origin? The spinning vortex of the body, stilled. We are weaving each other’s gravity. Or

96

the smooth surface of a bone elongates. Slapped on a slide: osteoblasts and periwinkle; disorganized bone, primitive bone: arrested. The doctor clears his throat, declares his diagnosis: “Sarcophagi: a flesh-eating stone. The salamander bakes in the sun until there is nothing left but the gaseous elements in its stomach.”

3. We will be made whole on paper, signed and documented. Made whole before they lock the iron gate. Meet me at the parade.

97

ARABIAN NIGHTS

1. That night, he is led up the narrow stairway. “Do you have the next part of your story?” “Yes.” His blindfold is undone and words spill into blackness. When one is blindfolded, one becomes acutely aware of the sound of footsteps, doors slamming, doors opening, spigots dripping. When the spigot drips in staccato, the djinn arrives and is under his command. When the clock strikes 12, the scenario reverses and the djinn has complete control over him and directs the motion of my arm: “Left arm up! Swivel your hips!” The djinn is ruby-throated and wild-eyed. The semblance with Dionysus crosses his mind. The djinn has an immense beer gut and can sprout wings as he pleases and appear like an angel bowing to the golden cascading mist above. He says: “Hallo, I am your djinn.” He has a cigar between his two crooked teeth and documents in his hand. “There is another like me who is located in your left foot.” A rug appears woven out of the five elements, and the djinn flits away like a firefly on the crust of his half-awake eye. Dogs experience the same feeling when thunder clashes in the sky like war and all those soldiers of sound gather in laggard ears, beginning their silent conquest of the mind. He is not blind during the day, but he might as well be. He is split off from the rest of the house in a nocturnal room, strangely familiar. He focuses simultaneously on the minute tasks of my fingers and sounds from below, an unfamiliar voice shouting for food.

98

From the barred window, he sees a crumbling brick wall with indecipherable graffiti and an alley below that. For the first time since he’s been here, he spots a man taking a piss in the alley. His eyes are riveted on the deft and unselfconscious manner in which the man relieves himself. The urine joins the rest of the sewage. He peers at the statues of Ganesh, which appear simultaneously benevolent and menacing. At times he imagines every room jam-packed with the stench of Ganesh — at other times Ganesh doesn’t seem so cruel. He is simply an elephant head attached to a body with mice at his feet. Of course, the statue is dead and inert, but he associates it with the command to put it together again. Apparently, Ganesh was created when Parvati and Shiva got into a quarrel. Parvati was taking a bath. She allegedly created Ganesh to guard her house from intruders while bathing. When Shiva came to the door and demanded entry, Ganesh would not allow him to pass and so Shiva slashed Ganesh’s head off. Later, he begged Parvati for forgiveness and sent his soldiers out to locate a new body for him. The first sleeping living creature that Shiva’s soldiers came upon was an elephant whose trunk was attached to the head of Ganesh. Yet there is no clear reason why the tusk should be broken off. Some scholars suggested it was a writing implement, as Ganesh was often invoked by artisans before beginning any artistic task. The story unravels from the centre of the peach pit where the fire once erupted. Seed pulped with the prescience of burning. Each life begins with a bloody fruit.

99

He begins to type, crossing out certain words, rewriting — this constitutes the story’s threshold.

2. Jaladhar was an imaginary city and imaginary cities are, in a certain sense, lost cities. These imaginary cities are fuelled by a certain human necessity, like iridescent lanterns that illuminate dreams. These cities are formed from an urgency to locate origins, the urge for a myth of embodiment. In absence of place, there is pain that exists from the memory of what a place might have been had it ever existed. One wrestles with a traceless landscape as one would with a chimera. The fact of leaving is a flung-open door. He is leaving still with suitcases flung open in mid-air, urns of ashes and bone falling from the skies, mothballs and laundry dropping from the sky into the ocean, shadows lusting after the bodies that belong to them. There is great mirth upon arrival. His family is welcomed as settlers on a land that was never theirs and they gracefully drown. We remember an imaginary place through the upward thrust of language. Even when one is an exile from the tongue, the distant echoes of tongue still form the body with an inarticulate sheath. This body exists within another body, just as sap exists inside the trunk of a tree. We intuit our place in the grand scheme of things. On the silence of page. One begins again. In articulate. Vibrating. Yet. The imaginary city had ceased to be his on the day he was born. It was imposed on him through various cultural rituals and expectations which themselves became landmarks of the imaginary landscape. It was his father’s city and, by umbilical extension, his city.

100

Before he arrived in Lahore in actuality, on his second birthday, the city existed as gestures, in qawwali concerts in the basement, in buried accents. If one followed the buried accent like a dangling, silver thread, one could reach a pathway to half a heart. In other words, what lay buried was a way of being that was expressible only in Pakistan. Language became linked to a certain feeling and a certain way of projecting the body through space. At times he crawled toward this. At times he walked out of himself. This half-tongue is what one yearns for when one opens a map and lays it on a floor. Finally, the map is abandoned and the images take shape as a river that runs up and down the spine. As the river moves up and down the spine, the worlds of dreaming fructify. When being is not granted in full capacity, one scours the surface of the earth in search of it. All those memories came to naught upon arrival. One begins to decompose with the refuse of dreams. Djinns of God’s mercy. As one decomposes, vapours issue forth from the thighs of djinns. The djinn lives off our wasteland. The djinn becomes a glutton from our undigested histories. The djinn ransacks our hearts and lays waste to our kitchen. The first time he saw a djinn, he was at the Arabian Sea. His mother was behind him wearing sunglasses and sunbathing. There was a turtle prowling around, almost camouflaged in the white, immaculate sand. He placed his burning feet in the ocean. The ocean spoke to him and drew his feet in. The sound of the ocean on his feet was mesmerizing. The ebb and flow hypnotized his feet, drawn back and forth into the lulling.

101

Off in the distance was a ruined, rusted ship whose keel lay buried in the depths. He imagines the border has its own anatomy. He imagines that words are misread here, identities mistaken for shadows. Shadows mistaken for identities. Words swallowed into non-meaning. Above this place there are whorl winds of angels who circle it with golden trumpets. Those angels are colonels in the British army. They are sawing off his feet. A scream issues from the soles of his feet. He begins a silent conversation with my severed right foot, which has become the prized possession of his djinn. This is the djinn he can control. The djinn arrives at night when the spigot is dripping and asks me what world I would like to create when he opens his eyes. “What happens when the haunting is all exhumed? What happens when the angels subside into the oracular silence?” his severed right foot asks the djinn. “When the haunting subsides, history will be wrenched from our memory and we will shine with untrammelled blackness,” answers the djinn. A path expands from his brain onto the desert sands. “Or not be wrenched. We will keep a seat here where mourning percolates up from blackness,” quips his severed left foot. He turns around and re-enters the logic of language. Between the sand and the room there is one door that is black and one door that is white. He enters through the black door, which doesn’t even seem to be a door, as it melds with the darkness of the room where he is counting statues. He is to do an inventory of every statue he has repaired. His severed left foot and his djinn get into a battle. His severed right

102

foot argues that his djinn is attempting to sweep history under the rug. His djinn tells him to read Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights. His right foot starts walking off into the desert. Mere facts are not enough when depicting the exploits of djinns.

3. There is a lighthouse shaped like a dome on an evanescent ocean. The lighthouse shaped like a dome is not so much a place as a trace on the ocean’s surface, a thumbprint caused by waves. Why not consider all human beings emerging from a shipwreck? Toward the end of his life, his father never ceased talking about returning to the old village in Jalandhar. Everything that would not articulate in life would scream in the afterlife. He had long since abandoned meditation, or prayer. He wanted to know what happens to a body when the memory of the place it once believed itself to belong to vanishes? These questions were, however, peripheral to what eventually opened up as a result of his questioning. He traces back to the place where Father had told him about his previous marriage. He walked to the Red Light District and then to the place where he was swallowed. He moves his chair back to the table. The sounds of alley rats begin to take on monstrous shapes. They, too, begin their silent conquest of his feet. He imagines the room is infested with rats. He imagines the next text he will write. The protagonist is kidnapped at the Wagah Border.

103

He wonders why he has not heard of a Rat God that shows the way through darkness with a certain precision, an incisiveness perhaps lacking in the mole. While he walks in the dark, accustomed to darkness, everything is vivid and clearer than in the blinding light. He tears another attempted page of narrative, scatters it out the window with another message: “I am a Canadian citizen. I have been kidnapped and I am being held captive. Please contact the Canadian embassy and give them the address of this house.” Somehow his Canadian citizenship seems void at this moment. Somewhere, a lion in a cozy air-conditioned office on the twentythird floor of a glass building will read his plea, send him into a deeper prison. He darts his eyes toward the door and notes the shadow of the fan on it. He is being watched by the fan. If he makes a wrong move, it will topple on his head. While he assembles the broken trunk of Ganesh, he imagines himself walking through the upper rooms in the house. Those rooms are still vast and impenetrable. Those rooms are simply the sounds of opening and closing doors. What kind of dim-witted God both erects and removes obstacles? He wants simply to know that somehow, somewhere, he exists. To know this is to be saved from the madness of waiting, vacillating from the thought of impending release to not knowing when the conquest will end. He shapes his severed foot into an iamb, an anapest, a trochee, a spondee, but none of this appeases his djinn. He attempts to reattach his severed foot, but his djinn grows wings and, in angelic zeal, severs it off again and then blows a trumpet.

104

In place of his foot, the djinn installs a scroll where the next story is written. This scroll averts his eyes from the desert in front of him where each step is wiped out in a gust of wind, where each grain of sand is crystalline and memory is refracted into multitudinous shapes. One is black and the other is white. One is male and the other is female. Red and green. Wasp and bumblebee. On the scroll the djinn started a story: The curtain yawns out of the window. A light breeze plays on the buttons of your polo shirt and revels on your umbilicus. A call of prayer begins, truncated by another call for prayer. Parrots screech out of a mango tree, scatter in the sky, and the engine of an auto rickshaw can be heard even in this secluded room in the Punjab Club. All I can do is imagine how you arrived here. You want to rattle the curtains shut and fall back into a dream where a Houri finger grapples your toes at the edge of the Arabian Sea, your toes tingling and your palate dabbed with wine. You shut the window and flow back into the seductive current of sleep. The Houri has vanished and you wipe your eyes and call me. Where are you from again? Canada. Where are you from before? Before, before, your body means nothing to me. You lie to me and tell me that your Pakistani relatives are deceased as you gently stroke my nipples. I apply the final touches of makeup to my face in an attempt to conceal the sagging skin under my eyes. I glance out of the window and make the driver in the Range Rover wait. Young men whistle, their voices winding through the alleys. A child walking with his father points to a crumbling balcony, curtains fluttering out an open window. The vehicle comes to a halt beside a vendor selling yasmine and I open my window and buy a garland and pluck two flowers off of each end, braid my long, wet hair and tie it with the garland. The driver’s eyes brush over my body and for a moment I am pleased. Two crows turn in the reddish-grey sky around the minarets in the walled city. The sun, subdued behind smog and the domes of the Badshahi mosque, offers momentary visual reprieve from the crumbling rooftops, refuse heaps and roaming street dogs. I see

105

myself again as a young girl walking in a sandstone courtyard with blistered feet. I should rob you, but I would rather know where you are from, and perhaps you’ll call me Ada, or whisper some other trifle in my ear. You have cleverly attached your cash and documentation to a money belt that you lie on top of. Your driver waits for me outside the door. What do you want from me now? If you don’t allow me to rob you of your wallet, allow me to rob your mind. I flip through a New Yorker, an Atlantic Monthly, your jet-lagged world. What memory does this face stir in you that you would keep my phone number for two years? I look in the mirror and see you curled in the bed. When you first came to me, I saw you awkwardly tripping over a bamboo kite frame in front of my terrace, the most intact terrace in the walled city. The day before, all the rooftops were packed, the hotels full, and wrists of dark men moved in swift incisions through the air. The string, coated with powdered glass, sliced through their neighbour’s kite, or their neighbour’s neck. Why did they go for the kite you tripped over? The man who sliced him knew he was not a pure-blooded Musulman. When I see those kites peeled against the sky, I return to the day I arrived in Lahore and spent days in the sandstone-backed courtyard of the Lahore Fort. As soon as those memories arrive, the punctuation is removed and words float again, or they are cut. Zia’s men have banned the festival this year and raided Heera Mandi. The sky was raining down tea. My organ is glass to be filled with your bitterness, but you forget and drink from the cup your servant brings. The monsoons will come soon. You cannot take away the sky where our words float. Go and walk through the walled city with your European wife. I will return to the old city and train one chela in the art of poetry. I train my daughter in Heera Mandi to read and write Urdu ghazals from the Divan of Hafiz, or to read Meera in Hindi. Your world blared in our ears and wound through our senses. Our

106

eyes will hunt your sleep and turn your nights to chaos. You turn over and ask me tenderly to massage your back with the rose oil I have stored in a tight ball of cloth. My eyes become gazelles that dance on the night of your body. I know every knotted muscle, the smooth map of your skin. In the silence, our bones breathe in unison. You are saying you dug beside a banyan tree when you were a child. You are saying there is a chest within a chest within a chest within a chest. One chest for each season. Rain is always subtracting soil and I won’t ask you what you left behind before, before, before. Say “before” three times and your body will become a plow. The tea was too black in 1947. When India was cleaved, I was clove. I darned my father’s socks even as they burst into flame. Our mud and corrugated-aluminum-roofed hut was engulfed in heat. I walked with my father’s feet even as they left me. I darned my father’s socks with a bobble and needle. I darned in the new country and even as you sleep, as the world sleeps. I know your name. Listen, my name is Lakshmi, short for Amina. When the border collapses on the other side of silence, I mend again. I write your story and leave a copy in each drawer like a Bible in every motel drawer in America. A foreigner not familiar with custom will feel watched by God. The past is the will to remember walls. Sade-e-Sarhad. The border calls. You are sleeping and the world is sleeping. I speak to these walls, to this puppeteer Jinnah. Did I tell you that I love in Hindi and in Urdu? Listen. After my mouth was sealed, I was a trap, snapped in my own fingers. I wrote a letter to the silence that pierced the silence and I was a needle and I was darned.

He can’t pierce through the other side. Her voice does not exist in time. He must invent bodies where there is an incongruence between voice and time. (What is the voice underneath the voice? The time underneath the time? The tongue underneath the fist?)

107

He feels his body sinking into torpor. He wants to scream out the windows, but his throat is knotted. The seed unravels, the roots are tangled in brine.

4. Says the quail with a rose petal in his bill: Eyes without sequence, numbers without time. tongue without light. What substance is this? Call collapsed on answer. The Rose is wind whispered in his ear. A garden growing on the tongue without entrance. . . . severance of call from answer. . . . and from the parch, the Nightingale announces: . . . and from the weave, the Nightingale escapes. Nightingales are more content trapped in the hieroglyphics of a petal than guided across a fulgurous valley.

5. He desired to see his father’s old village and he had instructions from him to locate something buried in the living room in the house. Perhaps it was the key to where he is now, imprisoned in his senses. When everything came to a standstill, he remembered that this was why he had returned to India. He felt a responsibility to dig up whatever was left, to preserve or destroy it. There were no specific

108

instructions in the will. He awoke, blithe like a winged blue fish out of water. If he had stayed, hovering in the harrowing light, the silver cord would have snapped. Presumably he would be dead — or the fish would be dead and that could be a good thing. When you die in a dream (or the image of you dies in a dream), do you wake up or keep dreaming? Metaphysics can be tiring. How do we know that when we prostrate, we are not bowing down to a different God? High frequency sounds give shape to the body. Frequencies of absence. As he sits in my room, gluing plastic tusks on a line of Ganesh statues, he wonders who he is at night without eyes — with only a tight ball of yarn trailing behind him like moonlight. Narratives emerge from his abdomen, the voices striking up one against the other, as if each is flint that will create a flame to replace a distant memory. No burning here. Distinct bodies emerge as memories coalesce. Left-winged academics and one-eyed conservatives in coital embrace, each vying for the other’s attention. He reassures himself by saying there will always be slight variations on the same theme, the same character. When in doubt, create a new God. There will always be the Rat-God. He begins scribbling down the myth of the Rat-God, with a ballpoint pen this time, as his hand works more quickly manually. Rats know the deepest pores in the heart and dart from those holes, showing us places that are darker than, say, a hummingbird — lovely to observe, but inefficient when it comes to burrowing.

109

When in doubt, turn to nocturnal creatures, or those creatures that crawl out of their own body. The hermit crab protects its abdomen by inserting it into a gastropod shell. While walking, the crab carries this home around. As it grows, it lets go of the old hermitage, searches for a more spacious shell to accommodate its growing body. Gaston Bachelard announced, “We carry our lairs with us.” As our layers are shed, we search for larger spaces to occupy our most expansive thoughts. Our bodies are more resilient than the marine gastropod mollusks that the hermit crab grasps with its abdomen. Language is persistent in its standardized form. When the grammatical structures of the brain begin their process of deterioration and decalcification, selective body parts begin to emerge from the precarious hearth. Yet the rest of the body insists in its own silent language of recoil and withdrawal, binding itself to the inner corridors of our ancestral homes. There are no other vacant shells in the desert of flux. Thus the signs unclasp from the home of their meaning. Solitude. Lean into the tongue of unknowing. The vast unformulated sky of dreaming; there are still unfathomed chambers in the heart that are perpetually undergoing mitosis in dreams. On a scrap of wallpaper from the Toronto house, he once wrote: erosion. Our inmost language rests here in anticipation of a violence that will purify it of its meaning. A language of release, a language that

110

will not crawl in search of another home, but expose itself to the silence of night. The stories he sought to speak are spoken for him in this desert of unravelling meaning.

6. He is seated on his father’s lap: “Father, tell me the story.” The petals from the helical flower fall. His father remains silent and starts singing the names of unnamable trees. His father sings in an unknown dialect and the child devours the lushness of his tongue. This vision evaporates into the djinn, and memory recedes into the doorways through which he is to walk out again. His father walks in the desert. The sands gather into the shape of a well. The image solidifies. He sees women leaping headfirst into dry wells, and British colonels, angels and presidents covering over the wells. The faucet drips and the djinn casts cold acid glares at him, throws sand in his eyes. The fingers waver in setting the next tusk onto the next elephant. Ibn Arabi states: “He who claims that God is his Creator while not being perplexed, this is the evidence of his ignorance.” The threshold usually reeks of prophecy, as though prophets left old refuse on the floor before they crossed over. The djinns accumulate at the threshold in throngs and form their boulevards from the stench we follow with our idolatrous senses. Yet the prophets never really crossed over in our minds because

111

we designated them as prophets, as those who had a privileged identity worthy of leading us from land to ocean to land. We attached the nobility of the prophets to their bodies and thus never crossed over from the land of water. He walks to the washroom adjoining my room. He kneels and lets out a spurious gust of wind. He finally lets his muscles relax and sits there laughing. He looks in the small mirror at his grizzled beard. He looks in my eyes and they don’t seem to be his eyes. He puts his eyes on a leash and walks them around the room. Then he puts his tongue on a leash and does another round. He repeats with each body part. Then he looks at the mirror and sees only the smudges from his fingers. Blake once said: “excess of joy weeps.” Is presence being aware? If so, where is awareness? Is awareness before thought, after thought or within thought? Who, precisely, is aware? Yes, no, yes, no, the sky cracks with thunder. It is the first rain of the season. The alley below flows with sewage and the sewage draws nearer to him. (If he knew, he wouldn’t be at a doorway with a parcel of reeking wind behind and ahead of him.) He tears the pages from the mouth of the Remington, covering his tongue with darkness. He squeezes his fingers through the metal bars and watches the shreds fall like fake snow down into the larger prison below.

112

CHAPTER ONE

This is the account of a blindfolded man. There is no reason to go by my birth name. To be aware of one’s birth name is unending torment. To feel the body locked like this closed room in the brain fermenting. There are methods of escape which I learned prior to my capture. Just as there is a methodology for free association, lying on the archetypal sofa of an analyst and spewing out image after image; there is also a methodology for flight throbbing at the back of the dry throat of a raccoon. O raccoon seeing clear night visions, clearing away night’s pretension. The raccoon burrows to core of black matter, to detritus, worms, through a garbage heap in search of scraps of a map. There is a table where I write this account by hand. I run my hand down to the front of the chair. In this room I am free to take my blindfold off, but instead I choose to feel where the edges of this page end and the desk begins. If my writing leaves the margins onto the table, they will discover my wandering words when the sky caves in. There is no use for veering off the page into the brain’s lacunae. They will find those scraps and devour them. The words don’t point any where, the words don’t tell any thing. I am in love with something like an incompetent vagabond scattering bread against the chains of wind. I wish I could tell you this, but my telling would point in every direction. This is the story of a map I am seeking. An entrance into the body. A threshold to you. At times my stories are shapeless, at times they are tightly bound by time and space. There is no saying who is who or what is what. At times, I am “I” but this “I” can be summoned like the accident of birth. This “I” is a ghost of what it once was before the day when I awoke and they called me by the name Arif Khan. Even if I am haunted by this “Arif Khan,” he must be exhumed, ghost that he is. When he is exhumed, the methodology of flight begins. My kidnappers blindfolded me so I can reach you and touch you awake. Let me tell you the story I once thought I was writing . . . now it is black and ready to burned.

113

I

the dawn still trapped in a cloud a chariot that lost its wheels arif is wrapped in a sheet as though in a tomb the tomb is made of memories that can’t be touch the tomb is made of memories that reel if they are touch cannot be ignited here there should be stories which attempt to capture a butterfly in those victorian nets the fan revolves above him memories that shouldnt be disturbed disturbing them is only a memory arif has known the memory of disturbing them a remembrance song petrified the body is stretched out across the bed legs in the shape of migrating birds if he once heard the cry of he is haunted by the cry now there is a desert outside he is searching for the father again it is only a dream a waking dream there is debris that makes it impossible to scatter the need to tell the story what is a need to tell he writes in the first entry a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step the television in the bus stated and we plugged our ears when the music propelled us backwards aching backs when he was five opened up a passage to the interior of his memory that precipitated he could fly what is possible between thoughts where sailboats towards an unknown destination float he just finished the final edits of a poetry book the book that failed as all books must inserted flaws that led to the next flow flows bloom in the chest a maze of passage ways leading to the vena cava no poems left in the world n said only diaries of affect underneath leaves of history give me a toddy he tells the saki in his sleep what happens after here the saki says too much speaking is a disease the tongue should rest a while before it begins to with the same stammering trademark too much writing is impaled on a stake beside those greater themes which besiege us one day there might be a book of moaning a moan book a book of moans

114

arif unwraps the cotton sheet wound around again and caught again body in the folds his mind robs itself of direction the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow directions are the wheels of a train track then kim becomes a man on account of the steel tracks which quell rebellions and connects him to mother earth knowledge is power the great gods say he removes the wooden teesbeh pressed against his neck the muezzin’s cry from a passport the last question which besieges the journey to no where where is the passport to get from nowhere to nowhere if there is only nowhere what is the question of crossing before he crosses into some other memory no new land someone once said an author he once saw at a vietnamese restaurant in toronto slurping noodles into the esophagus gagging author the rumble of the rickshaw naked glancing out of the dusty drapes he spots a staggering drunk man the big black fly caught in the folds grabs a fly swatter beats the curtain down until there is no sound left the first beggar blind with his outstretched hands allah ache of the dawn chapter seven generations flow through the blood the great gods insist translate that if you liberate yourself you liberate seven generations or if your business runs in the blood you will be blessed by those the one who prayed on your behalf cleansed your blood of toxins noxious if not chains no signs left and those butterflies will not emerge from their sheaths into the fumigated air the man stumbling up the stairs and the chowkidar with the towering white turban opens the door no new worlds only the old festering ones

115

P R E FA C E

Ancestors haunt us. If they don’t swallow us whole, they take us in piece by piece. Until we learn their languages. Until we break. Their brokenness. One day. Will make us whole. They don’t care for sacrificial offerings on shrines. They would rather hear hailing half notes, notes that resonate in shadow. And send off a cord to their homeless strangulation. Our ancestors breed in shadows. To know them we must be the shadow. Or walk in a place where shadows trip us. Remain nameless. They roam their forms on the leashes of our light-hewn words. They invade our mouths so we might give them lips in a foreign language. You can’t penetrate the hive, or the poison therein. A language that is not accustomed to them. Honoured in a tongue they cannot read. For now, these half notes. This language that makes our bodies strange. Weave words as one weaves the strings of a broken instrument along steel frets. The scrambled rib cage of lost music. Lost words reappear. Estranged memories unravel. On the threshold. The miracle of crystalline knowing. The marvellous bursts forth like flowering fists. A prism splits clear light. I learned to listen with ears and a broken tongue. The towers of this language. This body. Lost tongues converging. There are reeds that can be broken and remade into pipes that siphon voices from the undertow. Those lost bodies are in the body, those lost voices want only to sing. If they don’t swallow us whole, they take us in piece by piece. Until we learn their languages. Until we break. Their brokenness. One day. Will make us whole. Conversation with the blade of a knife. First: We are threshold upon threshold to an eternal torment. Second: You chained yourself to a door in a hallway of mirrors. Third: What waking delirium on the other side? Fourth: How do you mark the threshold to an eternal torment? Fifth: What body unburdened by its weight?

116

The weight of an anvil, or the gravedigger’s axe. What body disturbs your vision? What body breaks up vision into bits of bread that you use to trace your steps through the hallway of mirrors? The threshold blossoms like a rose with infinite stamens, crystal with innumerable facets. The arrow went clear through the hallway into unrefracted light. The body remained its witness. To cross over is the pledge, anthem to an unnamable country. To cross over is to find another blossoming threshold. Bewilderment. Dervishes are thresholds before they are named. “The conclusion,” the knife said, “is that as soon as you claim yourself, a doorway closes to the threshold of an eternal torment. How do we cross this place?”

117

NOTES

Faiz Ahmed Faiz quoted from “The Dawn of Freedom” (August 1947), published in The Annual of Urdu Literature, Vol. 11, 1996, trans. Agha Shahid, p. 86. Edmund Jabès quoted from From the Book to the Book: An Edmund Jabès Reader, trans. by Rosemary Waldrop. Page 1: Quote taken from a Wikipedia article entitled “Inductive reasoning.” Page 3: The Wagah border is the sole road border crossing between India and Pakistan. Quote from Andrew Joron’s Fathom. Page 12: Mohammad Iqbal was a poet, lawyer, philosopher and Islamic revivalist who inspired the creation of Pakistan. Page 15: The Khyber Pass links the Northern Frontier of Pakistan with Afghanistan. Page 17: Quote taken from a Wikipedia article entitled “Deductive reasoning.” Page 19: Quote from an article by Jim Blackshear, 2002, entitled “Echolocation: a useful tool for the Blind Human.” Page 27: “Al Batin” is one of the 99 names of God. Translates from Arabic to “he who is hidden, concealed.” [“Moulana” is an honorific Islamic title for a religious cleric and/or scholar.] Page 28: Epigraph from Nathalie Stephens’ Touch to Affliction. Page 30: “Angrez” — Hindi for a British person. Page 35: Quote taken from a Wikipedia article entitled “Electrical conduction.” Page 37: Epigraph from Ron Silliman’s “Sunset Debris.”

119

Page 51: Arunachala is a mountain in Tiruvannamalai sacred to Hindus and believed to be the form of Lord Siva. Page 57: Quote taken from a Wikipedia article entitled “Magic (illusion).” Page 74: Title taken from a line in Tim Lilburn’s poem “How to be Here?” Page 82: Excerpt from “Black Salt,” written by Édouard Glissant, p. 63, trans. Betsy Wing. Page 87: Italic lines taken from the following places (in the order they appear): http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/747/, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4354858.stm, http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowP DF&ArtikelNr=86090&ProduktNr=224276&Ausgabe=231138&filena me=86090.pdf. “Sid Khan” refers to Mohammad Siddique Khan, ringleader of the London 7/7 tube bombings. Page 91: “a sphere for your sorrow” drawn from P. B. Shelley’s line “The devotion of something afar/From the sphere of our sorrow” in “To-”. Page 105: Houri: “denoting humans or djinns who enter into paradise after being recreated anew in the hereafter,” Ibn Kathir, Tafsir ibn Kathir (Qur’anic Commentary). Page 106: Musulman: synonym for Muslim (from Turkish and Persian). Chela: roughly equivalent to “disciple.” Heera Mandi: Lahore’s red light district. Zia: General Zia-ul-Haq. Page 110: Gaston Bachelard, quoted from “The Poetics of Space.” Page 111: Ibn Arabi: prolific expounder of Sufi ideas, born in Murcia, Al-Andalus, in 1165.

120

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Johanna Reynolds. G. C. Waldrep and Frank Davey for being mentors. Michael Holmes and everyone at ECW Press. Stuart Ross for his close readings and editing. Stan Dragland for his editing and generosity. Nathalie Stephens for encouragement and friendship. Hédi Bouraoui, who offered advice on several pieces. Alana Wilcox for the grant. K. Reynolds for looking out. To people who dialogued with me and helped me think about poetry: C. Chen, P. Lu and B. Iijima. My family. Grateful acknowledgement to the editors of Open Letter, Contemporary Verse 2, Lichen: Arts and Letters Preview, dANDelion, Switchback, Eleventh Transmission, Chowrangi and Undercurrents for publishing early versions of these poems. To people who read and commented on several of these pieces: A. Mukherjee, C. Sandilands and P. Vermeersch. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

121

“When you are transplanted,” says Asher Ghaffar in this passionate, discontinuous narrative of national, racial and bodily dislocation, “you grow in all directions.” Burgeoning language, for instance: flights of wild metaphor, breathtaking bursts of non-sequitur. But the displaced body yearns for wholeness, for cessation of the relentless splitting of language and identity. This remarkable book is a searching meditation on the marginalized of our time. The angst of displacement rages across the page. Ghaffar’s reach — from Canada to India/ Pakistan (the heartache of partition), from the mundane to the mythic — is wonderfully broad. Of sorrows irreducible he has made a deeply affecting book, well described in his own words:

decomposing has no opposite,



is feeling expanded bereft of pattern lifted into language. A cosmic music



emerges from my bowels.

— Stan Dragland

Asher Ghaffar’s work has appeared in CV2, Open Letter, Lichen Arts and Letters Preview, and dANDelion. In the fall of 2008, he will begin a doctoral degree at York University in social and political thought.

ISBN-10: 1-55022-854-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-55022-854-0

$16.95

ECW Press ecwpress.com