Anemoia
(n): nostalgia for a time you have never experienced
Once, my mother caught wild rabbit.
I licked its bones clean. It was sweet
and tender. I slept through the massacre,
nourished and full of innocence.
Once, I was innocence. That summer,
I learnt English and the ghazal
became all intention and realism,
its end an incision at my name.
Once, my name was incision
left by archangel on the tongue of history.
When my grandfather named me
he wished me a voice and wept for me.
Once, my grandfather wept
in Cordoba. He wept a hundred years
for the poet who wept in Cordoba
for the Andalusians and their eyes.
Once, our mothers had large eyes.
Dark vaults shut in prayer.
We were safe while we were
shape and light.
Once, light was shaped
like eternity and the sun was fact.
Only its reluctance was event—
the eclipse, an ideology.
Once, ideology eclipsed
the human condition—or became
the human condition—well, it rained
for a year and no one danced in it.
Once, it was not Majnoon who danced,
maddened with desire
but the world that maddened
with unlove.
Dear Daadu, I am in America Now
It is a season of bitter oranges. The first revolt
of starlings rises, a blade against the skin of sky.
We left the city to look at ruins and ghosts
of an old country house. The wind is human with memory.
I meet strangers on the bus.
I want to know them, to hold their animals, their grief and joy.
I want them and their animal joy to know. To hold our grief.
I meet strangers on the bus
in the country of wind. Human memory is an old house.
We look at ruins of a city left to ghosts.
A blade of sky. The skin of against. Starlings rise.
It is a season of revolt. The bitter firsts of oranges.
Unnationing
Here, our bodies
sovereign in the sun, heel
and earth marking and unmarking
each other in the soft insignia of garden.
Here, my uncle is in service of thirty-three
guava trees. He asks us to gather what the storm
has coaxed to the ground and whatever is reachable
to our outstretched fingers before they assume the postures
of aggression. Here, the lexicographers have eliminated birthright.
Here, we do not wear the incident of the body as occasion. I watch
my uncle leave offerings for parakeets and child-thieves whom he always
catches but never interrupts. Under the patient rotting of late afternoon light,
a communion of ants glints like carnelians on their pilgrimage to the blessed sugars.
I humble where the branches cathedral the heat. I pluck with care, think of Solomon
with each snap of peduncle. My limbs relent their received motions, their skin-packed codes
to govern, acquire new grammar. Each footstep is a conjugation of cede, each fruit is tender
from the bee-kisses and splits without blade into blushing hemispheres under my thumb.
We stuff our cheeks with mouthfuls of abundant homeland.
