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      January 13, 2017Delirium, Malibu 2016Meena Alexander

      I have gone sleeveless before you, armless too
      (Your eyes the color of choke cherries)
       
      Broken bodies, frolicking in grass
      Under the white alder, yes, that is what I saw.
       
      I left my cousin on the ground and wandered off.
      The suicides started to melt away,
       
      Before that they were thick in my head and in my heart.
      Of course suicides is the wrong word
       
      Each of them wanted to live
      Even the one who had started to cut herself.
       
      I do not know why I said what I did
      Perhaps so as not to make them seem so helpless.
       
      By the promenade, a white truck ran them over.
      I shut my ears, I cannot bear my aunt:
       
      So why in God’s name leave her behind,
      Your cousin the little one just seven years old
       
      Who hurt her ankle and could not run?
      I bit my tongue:
       
      Why dress a child in Broderie Anglaise
      Begging to be stained?
       
      Our world is a mess of sulphur and cordite,
      Jaws without teeth gnaw butterflies.
       
      Soul, a furnace where dross is burnt away.
      But that’s an outmoded way of thinking
       
      Why not a theater for a command performance
      Precise disordering of vowels,
       
      The beginning of delirium
      What the gods long for
       
      In this altered atmosphere
      (Headless the muse in Malibu)
       
      Poetry, a whipper-snapper thing
      On a high horse, galloping.
       

      Malibu, July 19 – New York City, August 10, 2016

      from #54 - Winter 2016

      Meena Alexander

      “There’s no monetary reward for poetry, but the reward, I think, is a kind of grace, a clarification of the everyday. Because that’s what poetry is really bound to, the stuff of our lives. It comes out of this muck and dreck and ruin that we’re in. I’m thinking that particularly now there’s such a difficult summer with all the shootings and the killings. I do think that as a poet one has to bear witness, but it’s also bearing witness to a leaf falling from a tree. I think you have to take what comes to you and write it.”

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