Prodigal
The Tornado
The tornado has not yet blown through the window,
scattering spoons, shattering the pitcher,
has not yet thrown the room sideways
through the back-door.
I am left, abandoned at the table
agreeing then to be reborn.
What if I fled, not into the safe underground,
but outside towards the fields?
If I hadn’t prayed for wind would the ocean of air
ever have dropped down toward me and come?
I lost and then found myself four times,
then five times, then six, so perhaps the house will be safe.
Out of the corner of my eye the car suspended
eight feet above the ground, the rain streaming so briefly upwards.
All I want is to love forever, for the door to open,
the family to return, for the meal to be served,
but as the cups and knives rise in a garland
around my head, the weeping house agrees to fall down.
My Cold Childhood
Far away in the north country, my father the planet-maker
Marks up Styrofoam globes with the surface features of Saturn and Mars
Fastening these to spin eternal from the ceiling of my room
Orbiting the bright light often since by 5:30 it’s pitch dark
In the northern lights I switched genders
To play a girl in all our games
Other Indians across the lake dressed in feathers for the crowds
And I the loneliest astronomer wanted only to leave the earth
Swim heavenly into the dark a desperate sky-sailor
Lonely among the whites, a boy and a girl, a wingless wonder
Fox Week
Two foxes linger in the yard for a week.
Only twice in my life when I prayed did I ask to be answered.
The first time, on an overcast night the full moon shone brilliantly through.
The second time, seventeen wild turkeys suddenly appeared, picking their way through the snow, circling the house.
This time I am a fox in the yard who needs no answer.
I remember nothing of how I was wounded so I must be at home.
Toll Bridge
Is the universe the river or the bridge
Is the house in pieces
Am I cables or a road bed
Buckling in the storm
Is the storm itself god
That year unbuckled from everything
I asked what am I doing against god
Nothing
But nonetheless
And though I don’t know what in
I am drowning
Father Figure
One summer he built the deck with his own hands
Writing the math for the angles directly onto the wood
There was a time I drove home across the state
Looking at my hands on the wheel wondering
Would he be alive when I arrived
That abandoned emptiness I have never lived down
Hunger
Bruised by silence I walk up the staircase alley
Beneath which the river still pulls stone from stone
With my rain headache I can in the grey sky’s edge hear
Each step condense into sound
My father shouting my name into sleep’s angry silence
My mother calling her hunger in to dine
The Afternoon
After scraping the last of the avocado from the skin
He left it, spoon and seed
My father is not Abraham commanded by God
To relinquish his son. He is only my father
Having lost him in those minutes
I cannot now return
In the dark of his youth
He was given a new name
In the pause between us
I find no answer
Swing Set
Mind set more than matters oh play me wind
Prune the weeping cherry before spring splinters through
Weep for me later when the stone seeps inside
Reversal of river to air by swing set open the season
Open the seam then body stirred by wind
Or is the body a spoon
Muscling wildly up to taste the cold white blue
Visit Home
All the tree branches shatter one after the other in the knife-cold storm
I am tired but still trying to decipher the dangerous diagram of
How a family loves
I wake early to do chores: polish the windows, sweep the granite floor
A secret is afoot. Sticky threads connect every object here
Everywhere you look something is unsaid
My mother absent-mindedly plucks out a spider nesting in my hair
“we waited for you to come and help us fill the winter birdhouses”
in my chest there is a sun-dial oriented for spring
in the last part of the evening, the house is still settling
Switching Mythologies
Never warned, never warm as in the womb
Never wore the comfortable clothing of “I belong”
What son wouldn’t lie down in the thicket
Just to feel his father’s breath warm and near
His father’s arms wrapping him as a gift to God
Later, lonely by the chain-link fence
He changes his mind, dreams himself Ganymede
Curly-locked wonder plucked from along all the straight cousins
And abducted fabulous into Heaven
Kazim Ali is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. His books include four volumes of poetry, The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, the mixed genre Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities and Sky Ward. He has published two novels Quinn’s Passage and The Disappearance of Seth, two collections of essays, Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence and Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice as well as translations of poetry by Sohrab Sepehri and a novel by Marguerite Duras. Recently he edited the essay collection Jean Valentine: This-World Company. In addition to being associate professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Oberlin College and founding editor of Nightboat Books he is a certified Jivamukti Yoga instructor.