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      October 15, 2021Rotten GriefTishani Doshi

      This morning I misread Tantrism for Tourism and it’s been downhill
      ever since. Elephants are dying in the Okavango Delta and no one
      knows why. A man I love crumples into himself on a railway
      platform away from home. My sister calls to tell me about
      her aged cat, who keeps collapsing, then rising to roam
      the house in wobbly confusion. It is all falling, falling.
      A poet on the internet talks about a Jewish legend,
      where we are given tears in compensation for
      death. I would cry about the perfectness of it
      except I’m incapable. My ophthalmologist
      has made a diagnosis of dry eye so I
      must buy my tears in a pharmacy.
      I think of what this is doing to
      all the rotten grief inside me—
      unable to create salt bathing
      pools to fire up my wounds,
      this body powered by
      breath, dragging its
      legs through
      the vast
      summers
      that have
      lost their will to
      transform me. All
      the unknowing we
      must accept and fold
      like silk pocket-hankies
      pressed against our chests.
      The theory of spanda in
      Tantra advises you to live
      within the heart. I’m a tourist
      here, so bear with me, but imagine
      a universe vibrated into being. All things
      made and unmade by a host of small movements,
      my favourite being matsyodari —throb of fish when
      out of water. Just the word throb, you understand, hints
      at longing, but also distress, and suddenly, language opens.
      All the etymologies I used to think were useless in the arena
      of bereavement are echoing over the great plains of beige carpet,
      saying, We interrupt your weeping to tell you the world is real, rejoice!
      The elephants in the Okavango are keeling over like ships. No one
      can say why. A die-off sounds worryingly like a bake-off but
      without the final prize. At night I squeeze drops into my
      eyes, whispering the magic words, Replenish, ducts,
      replenish. If you play elephants the voices of their
      dead, they’ll go mad for days, searching for
      their beloveds. To fall is never an action
      in slow motion. The snap of elastic
      in your pants, going going gone.
      Belief caving in like a bridge.
      My heart, your heart, the
      elephants’—here’s a
      crazy thought—
      what if they’re
      dying of
      grief?

      from #73 – Fall 2021

      Tishani Doshi

      “There’s something marvelous about the conciseness and smallness of poems. I love that they are small and yet very big, and that you can spend time with one poem and it can expand so much in you. There’s something about the distillation of the form that is allowed to say things in a way that we can’t do with other arts. There’s something mysterious about it. Nobody is able to define exactly what a poem is; nobody’s able to say what makes a poem good or not—these are still questions that are out for debate, and, in a way, I think they’re meaningless. If a poem touches you or moves you, it has the possibility of transformation, and I’m really interested in that. Of course, novels can do that, and dance is capable of those transformative moments, but a poem for me also reaches back to a tradition of orality, the spoken word, of putting something into existence just by speaking it, by naming it. There’s something ancient in that. There’s something powerful about incantation. I’m less interested in breaking down a poem than in the sense of a poem just washing over you and changing you somehow.”

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