My city is not a city, no more than a bare town that’s slowly growing. It’s got a Bi-Mart and a Safeway and a McDonalds—people never go there, though, just Big Burger across the street. It’s been here longer, and it’s not a chain, and my people here don’t like change.
The folks who live here aren’t slow by any means, but we like slow. We like watching the world subtly change around us, and we like taking our time as we live our life. We remark on the sunset every night, saying things like can’t believe it’s still light out! for half the year and can’t believe it’s already dark out! for the other half, accordingly.
It’s a town surrounded by the countryside, and there’s the great big Coleman ranch that’s got cows and horses and other animals.…
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With twenty rupees in his pockets, there was only one way Pervez could go.
And it was starting to seem like a tough decision already.
It’s not that he didn’t have direction. He had the directions and the dictation right: he knew exactly where he had been told to go. He knew where he was supposed to go. Surely, he could go there. But the minarets of the mosque didn’t pull at his heartstrings as much as the magnetic mansions that housed other objects of interest did: a friend’s house in a different locality, a local parchoon shop that sold all sorts of colourful candy, a bazaar, a ground where boys would let you play cricket if you contributed only twenty rupees. Pervez had twenty rupees to spare, the wide world to see, and he couldn’t make a decision.…
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We carry the bride’s coffin on our backs, hastily constructed by our frail hands from what was once her litter. The starving season is a killer, even for brides brought from afar to marry kings and princes, dowries of gold and spices carried with them through the streets of hollow wasting faces. The bride’s hand maidens walk ahead of us, adorned in white, the color of weddings in their country, but to us, it has always been the color of mourning, the color of death, the color of the snow that comes to take our children. We step in tandem, careful not to drop the corpse, even as the air itself turns bitter and blue in the cold, and still yet we walk northward, to where tears freeze as you weep, and your heart stutters, for the air is fractal.…
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Via del Corso, 111 Centro Storico,
4 giugno 2005.
My apologies, wherever you are.
in that small square off Via del Corso,
I photographed your argument,
filled the lens with you
standing on your toes,
leaning into him.
your lips pucker, as if you’d kiss,
but I can feel those wounded words
and watch the hands mimic every utterance:
pinched fingers point in the air;
a flick of the chin; ma va’ là!
basta!
the words and every gesture
become a dance all your own.
more than once you take two steps back, turn
and then return
to continue with such passion, such intimacy,
the sun slips behind heaven’s white clouds
and a light grey veils the day.
while others continue on premeditated paths,
perform circadian chores
or simply go about their business,
I watch you walk away, disappear,
vanish in a crowd that’s unaware
of all the music in the air. …
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The time will come when Earth wobbles so fiercely that overcompensation is impossible. Notice its placement, its tilting, its hanging in there, just there, without a way to know it’s going to stay there securely for a few million years before the sun swells up beyond its present state and renders the Second Coming a moot point. Unless that will be the Second Coming, an inferno that makes Satan’s playground mere child’s play. A blistering nugget singed beyond recognition. Encompassing flames, heat, molten rock. All things melting into the air, the sky. Souls as blemish-free as a sleek new tablecloth – an afterthought along with everything else. No more thought will be left to hang our coats on when it gets too stuffy to move.…
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You gotta get a good rock. A big one. But not huge. Come down the hill to the end of our grass. There. An “X” marks the spot — we’ve got lotsa rocks around it. It’s not an “X” really, but mommy says the place is “precious,” so it’s kinda like treasure. So you grab one rock. It’s smooth, fits in your hand, and it’s not too heavy.
We need paint. Come up the hill to my house. Shh! Mommy’s being quiet in her chair. We can get some nail polish off the dresser in her room. It’s a kind of paint. Mommy won’t mind. She doesn’t see me when it’s her quiet time. Look, here’s a good red one beside the picture frame. The photo’s kinda old.…
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My daughter has a lot of demands when I want her to go to bed. She’s supposed to be in bed at eight, but I usually don’t fall asleep until after midnight. I give her enough attention during the day; you’d think she’d be tired enough to fall asleep when she should. But no.
I put her down at eight, but she asks me for a glass of water at eight-twenty. It has to be a clean glass, and it has to have the right amount of water. If I don’t do it right, she gets cranky.
At eight fifty-two, she’ll ask me to read her a story from the leather-bound tome on the stand in the corner. It has lots of stories, but she only wants to hear the same one.…
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