#post2010

Excerpt from ‘Lingua Franca’

Dadi speaks to us in Hindi so that

we will learn, simple things like

come here­—yahaanaao

go there—wahaanjao

eat food—khaanakhao

bring that book—pustaklao

and we do

The Devnagari script

enclosed

with a straight roof

and a wall to support the sides

each alphabet leaning in

turning

phonetic tricks

uh-aa, e-ee, oo-ooo

ka, kha, ga, gha, na

our tongues performing

calisthenics

all of us partaking

in this linguistic

Olympics

going for the gold

‘Maud? Was I boring you so much that you’d rather stand outside in the dark?’ A woman calls to me from the warm light of a cluttered dining room. My breath curls towards her, wet and ghostly, but no words follow. The snow, sparse but bright on the ground, reflects the light on to her face, which is drawn tight in an attempt to see. I know, though, that she can’t see very well, even in the daylight. ‘Come inside,’ she says. ‘It’s freezing. I promise I won’t say another word about frogs and snails and majolica ware.’ ‘I wasn’t bored,’ I say, realizing too late that she’s joking. ‘I’ll be there in a minute. I’m just looking for something.’ In my hand is the thing I’ve already found, still clotted with mud. A small thing, easily missed. The broken lid of an old compact, its silver tarnished, its navy-blue enamel no longer glassy but scratched and dull. The mildewed mirror is like a window on a faded world, like a porthole looking out under the ocean. It makes me squirm with memories. ‘What have you lost?’ The woman steps, precarious and trembling, out on to the patio. ‘Can I help? I might not be able to see it, but I can probably manage to trip over it if it’s not too well hidden.’ I smile, but I don’t move from the grass. Snow has collected on the ridges of a shoeprint and it looks like a tiny dinosaur fossil freshly uncovered. I clutch at the compact lid in my hand, soil tightening my skin as it dries. I’ve missed this tiny thing for nearly seventy years. And now the earth, made sludgy and chewable with the melting snow, has spat out a relic. Spat it into my hand. But where from? That’s what I can’t discover. Where did it lie before it became the gristle in the earth’s meal? An ancient noise, like a fox bark, makes an attempt at the edges of my brain. ‘Elizabeth?’ I ask. ‘Did you ever grow marrows?’

I think of human psyches as landscapes, and to the question of whether she was happy or not, I think that others encountered her in a flower-spangled meadow that was highly cultivated, if not artificial, and I charted the authentic swamp of her unhappiness far away in another part of the landscape she herself did not care to know.

Something’s Coming but Never Does 

I follow locusts. I think they’re loyal, but it’s a story.

In morning’s bleached streets and nights

of tungsten glinting, their fretted steel legs

ticker the minutes. What do I know, except I need

a thing to walk behind. The lot tagged The Devil,

red spray paint, two concrete steps. This is where I go

when the heat comes, when no one alive can tell me

how to make the day move on. She lies there, the bitch,

in a bed convex from her weight. Though it’s dusk,

I see she is the color of dirt. Though fleas open

new roads through her hair, she is asleep. I hear thunder.

Some days it rumbles dry, no rain. I’m tired. The air here,

it’s like breathing gasoline. I lie down, too. A razor,

a latex glove turned inside out. I curl my body close

to hers, my lips, nose to her spine. I close my eyes.

I want the mites to leave without me, but they don’t.