English, 2014, vol. 63 no. 240, pp.
79–84
doi:10.1093/english/eft058
Poem
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Univocity
‘Word over all, beautiful as the sky!’
Walt Whitman
1. Provincetown by the Sea
As August fades I pedal hard.
At Angel Food I pick up Portuguese fig cake,
Almonds cut and buried in speckled dark,
Pinpricks of sweetness bound in Saran Wrap.
In the High Middle Ages
Theologians mused how angels pranced
On the head of a pin,
How the spirit could spin cocoons of flesh,
Whether a body could be in two places at once.
Almost always
I am in two places at once,
Sometimes in three.
Free me weep me Motherwell by the sea,
Night waves succor you.
You knelt on the floor by the canvas, thrust hard:
I made the painted spray
With such physical force
That the strong rag paper split.
# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
80 POEM
2. Threnody
How her wrists hurt when she piano played,
An English doctor, new in town pricked her hard
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Drops of gold made her bones boil,
Tongue flower with blisters –
Dead in a day, one month short of fifty.
She died before I was born.
Moonlight, darkening storm.
Dove sta memoria
I never knew my mother’s mother.
In her diaries the recipe for mutton curry
Five cloves of garlic, a fistful of green chillis
Sits athwart Gandhi’s injunction to spin –
I have laid out my khadi, washed and ironed it.
Tomorrow when I wear it, the sky will be blue.
I never knew her. Nothing known –
The curse and blessing
Torn rag I pack around the wound,
Curbing the flow that could kill.
3. Torn Branches
Grandfather lies in wait for me.
My voice is young and burnt
My voice is a bramble berry squashed on stone.
I curl in a hole next to the bamboo grove
Where paddy rats and cobras rove.
Rove – Where did I learn that verb?
From my Scottish tutor –
She rapped my knuckles hard.
POEM 81
A swan in a bag, worth two in the sky,
She taught me such things.
Now fetch me sweetmeats, swirl henna on my palms.
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Who stokes kerosene and sugarcane,
Cords of broken rope?
Dark sisters in the sky, their wings are torn.
They have stumps for wrists.
They are singing Hosannas to our Lord.
4. Ars Poetica
By the crook of my knees
I hang in the mango tree.
The leaves are puffed with water.
I slip a finger under my skirt,
I touch the bark of the tree with wetness.
I write on knobbly bark.
A red ant crawls on my skin.
I turn my face to the sky.
The blue is splattered with white. I write the sky.
White drifts, it parts, sifts my hair,
The blue is cut with reddish flecks.
From a great distance, they are calling me.
They cannot catch me, I am in the green tree
They keep calling my name.
When I hear their voices
My finger threatens to catch fire.
82 POEM
5. Lines with Red Ants
Some things have holes in them
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Leaves on the mango tree when sparks fly through
I have a hole in between my legs
I pick red ants off the tree, I let them crawl over me
Fire blossoms where they bit,
I like it when the red ants bite.
6. Bathtub Blues
At the brink of eleven a child I scarcely know
Crouched in a bathtub
Silver scissors in hand,
Skin trembling under metal.
The first materiality is all we have.
Duns Scotus knew this.
The child wants to meet him in the dark,
She tries to read philosophy.
Over and over she whispers words she learnt
‘The mind has mountains, cliffs of sheer fall.’
Who was he? His loin cloth was made of glass.
Now strips of chiffon wrap around bone.
He forced me to see things that beggar speech.
Doctor Subtilis, please save me.
7. This is not a Dream
Someone is stooped at the edge of a pit
The pit is covered with dry sticks and leaves
In the park the air is very heavy
In the park the air is laden with blue
POEM 83
Blue the tails of the blue jays.
The snare of love – impossible to crawl through.
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8. Black Sand at the Edge of the Sea
Some things comfort me –
Soon I will be given to earth, folded in a death squat
Together with pig marrow, swan’s down, thread leaved sundew,
Pitchblende sucking bones in.
Where is grandfather now?
My friend Amanda says
Think of old Walt
Bent over his dead enemy,
Touching lips to encoffined flesh
So where do they live
The twin sisters Night and Death?
Can they wash the ground clean?
Meena Alexander
Univocity – A Note on the Poem
I think of this as a strung out piece of music composed on zither and harp and
tanpura and a drum made of goat skin. It has also the noise of a bicycle shifting
gears, me pedaling up Commercial Street in Provincetown, catching glimpses
of the sea.
Discovering again Duns Scotus, notion of univocity was important. First
the poem was called simply ‘Autobiography’. I changed the title because I
have another, very short poem by that name in my book Birthplace with Buried
Stones (2013).
Scattered pieces of my life are crystallized here – grandmother’s death
before Indian independence, well before I was born; painful memories from
childhood; later reading Hopkins over and over when I was a child, living in a
desert city; a recent summer in Provincetown where I saw Robert
Motherwell’s series – oil on paper – ‘Beside the Sea’.
84 POEM
I started the poem that summer, went on working, tore it apart, thought it
was done, realized it wasn’t. On 7 March 2013, in a café in Upper Manhattan,
sitting watching the snow, I wrote the section ‘This is Not a Dream’. And
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then when the next morning when I slipped it as the penultimate piece, in
effect the poem was done.
Meena Alexander
