Saudade, shifting through hickory
He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair."--Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
I
In that moment,
when the grandmother placed a letter on a sewing table, adrift
white wove, weathered and veined with a palimpsest ring of tea stain and coin rust.
Her words tucked into her inheritance like a child under linen.
And there, below,
an eel appearing underneath the edge of the wobbly table,-- branches-- trunks of the ebony aged and exhausted
black as ink, Diospyros crassiflora, caving in from the weight of her life and hearttime--
the fish in its plastic coffin of red, the strange quotidian
her bucket, a trove of responsibility, watering
for the tile and green floors, moisture and time and Calcium chloride,
or for the clothes soaking as peeled skin
for, as this evening, our market supper curled like a clef and awaiting her clever.
All that in a time pail.
Her letter was about to an leave her, as would her breath,
embarking through choice, and sealing with her thinning brown lips,
for as she quite the tongue and licking
and reached down to pick up the meal,
she forgot the paper cantilevered on the edge and
embraced
the fish as her own:
body to breath, guttural language to syllabic hope,
and held the slipperiness against her body and the eel softened
and my grandmother closed her eyes
and wept.
They both knew:
the time had come,
when land and nation and certainty needed a move
and there is no alternative or choice
the soul of things moving, going in flight,
through this life or that.
II
Years later, the letter found and the red bucket remembered
the life it thrived, contained, and the loss
the buckling of cleaning, the barking of food exchange in stalls,
the racing through lanes and alleys and sections of the city
our feet pebbles, our desire winsome and insatiate
toward her field, the lessons and the lesions
bled by pen and knives and stone.
III
To shift through hickory and honey-comb'd light,
To shift through hickory and honey-comb'd light,
unseating our wobbly head ,
to regain of a recumbent, flickering heart,
the ellipsis of all beginnings and endings, bridging half-mast:
élan vital
eel or fibre or fabric or family, home
caught waning along the tiled rooms and broken skies,
Komorebi:
where one readies unprepared, to
depart and dematerialized and beckoning.
Ghost, water, rhymes, our tethering
slacking and the language and arithmetic, lived
spreading wide and contrail'd,
all these sparkles and everything we tend and love, unbuckling
vamoose.
