Desire (A poem Cycle)
1. Sweet Dark
Seeing you I could not shut my eyes.
It would be true to say
I did not get one hour of sleep.
Through the window, thickets of snow,
A placket of plane trees,
Someone else’s tomb – whose I do not know.
The moon near full
Slips out of its petticoat,
Swims through window glass.
What’s between us— fierce , moist, rumpled
Like these bedclothes,
Shimmering in body heat.
2. Dream Time
In a waking dream
I press my palm to the slope of your face,
Touch you where hair sprouts—
Blunt mouth hair—
Regardless.
I have grown to love you
Against my will.
I say this as if the will counted
In this sort of thing.
3. Sun Sign
The horoscope is exact
It says you and I will step
Down into darkness
Together—
This was based
On matching sun signs.
The spotted hawk drops
From the moon.
No one sees it.
4. Tunnel
A woman in the subway
In a fawn colored skirt
Grips a bright cello between her knees.
Scarlet, not the cello itself
Rather, its case.
The tunnel is something else.
We cannot know the tunnel
Except as aftermath.
Sempiternal rack, love’s toil.
After the burning,
Strings of the cello reverberate.
So too your breath, a slight hiss, a quiver.
5. Damage
In my mind you stroke my shoulder bone
Through voile.
How can the body
Exist in the mind, like that –
You and I touching?
I used to dress
In voile petticoats
When I was a child, now a blouse
A summer’s usage, merely.
Our bodies are filled with bone.
Surely you know that?
You see it with accidents
Of all sorts – some deliberate, others not,
The wounded one
Lying on the sidewalk
In between parked cars,
Flowering trees with umber petals,
Bones terribly displayed.
6. Desire
The painted body covering
The naked body
Belongs to the self on stage—
This is written in the Natyashastra.
Let the painted hand
Carry a fan
Scented with sandalwood
And attar.
Let the bare hand
Carry a phantom fan.
When the lover approaches
The lacquered fan
Will cool
The fleshly body.
And the fan
In the naked hand
Will set a ghostly self
On fire.
This excerpt is an Almost Island exclusive.
Meena Alexander's books of poetry include Illiterate Heart which won the PEN Open Book Award, Raw Silk and the recently published Quickly Changing River. She is the author of the memoir Fault Lines. Her reflections on poetry, migration and memory Poetics of Dislocation is forthcoming in 2009 from the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series.
Currently she is working on a cycle of poems based on drawings made by children from Darfur, in the aftermath of violence. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.