Knowledge of Place

I

There is a floating thing in the wind that keeps us. An underwater stillness. And just when you think you are surfacing— the camellias combust under the blue, open like extraterrestrial eyes looking through measured windows of street houses, for life that has left us alone in this first death. Lost days like sparrows teem in a confusion of distracting blossoms and bushes.

She is not at home, she says. She is not at home in this world. She is the fourth wall closing in today, tomorrow, and yesterday into herself. Some days, her grief is slow like molasses. God leaves the world to trees. Some thoughts get caught up in the thorn bush one random evening and cannot find it in themselves to go on under the one and only sky— Other days, she hides time, and I am nowhere and everywhere. I grow older quickly and realize I have never been to the room I was born in.

I am there today, with the lost birds. They tell me they are not lost. So, they cannot possibly be found.

Antelopes keep running through the forest in the rain.

She stays up late nights crying kin min, kin min. Our family songs turn into talismans locked away in a suitcase wrapped in layers of mildew and a dark wooly heaviness that she slowly cries away like a chant meant only for our ears. One by one, trees leave her forest. She dreams of a house with wind and rain. And I smoke into daybreak signaling to the lone swimmer of the sky.

Whose is the last cry that breaks the dawn?

The birds are silent.

In my 3 am dilation, my lonely hour, my agony hour, I analyze her sky, placing the hours in a row. She lies awake on her bed, her hair tied up like an hourglass of quicksilver.

I cannot imagine this— sunlit spaces, mayflies, and water lilies. This is the Summertime Broadcast of My Mind.

She, the maker of my horizons, the constructionist of my roads— my blank record and this night— she listens intently. This place isn’t what we think it is. I am not who I think I am. We can never be as sure as the ground is. In this osmosis of thing and spirit, lovers only exist where they are not. Burn this too in My Death Fashion, touching everything. Rabid eyes stare. When are you going to tell the truth?

So, I tell her about Queen Anne’s lace. Within,

the grass

springs

up—

an elusive space for wanting. We lie down like shadows. We change places under the sun. Truth fades in and out of sleepy towns, palimpsests, and alleys.

Mother

breaks

down

in blossoms , cryptic codes

and grows a bit like a new found daughter.

II

Riding through the columns of light and dark in a city barely awake, we could be a parenthesis, (an after-thought). You must make a home of this place. My father, clutching his suitcase tied with a piece of my mother’s saree, is right here. This place will not be yours until you do. I see houses made of porcelain falling one upon another, boxes on boxes, suitcases on suitcases, filled with a flurry of dry flowers. I think of my basement, the burrowed burrow. Of me and my brother. And of the mole trying to skip spring cleaning.

I didn’t know it at the time. I was too busy rocking and rolling, my head still in a cloud of smoke, my bones free floating in a stream of black ecstasy that falls every night from the tallest city lights in showers of young old downtown gold, blurred, molten. In my mind, I was still retracing my every move in concentric circles of pleasure, unable to foresee the valley my father was planning to name after me. Here, take it. A heart made-up in all the wrong places. Here’s the box. The emptier it is, the heavier it gets.

I go back home and change into time; I find home, it was you; and you, all your homes; are me.

Ta kakisimoyahk

There is a place inside. Make a home there. Worship, drown and emerge with the bloodline of afterlife, acknowledge that pain was all along what tied us.

Ta kakisimoyahk

There is a place inside me. A quiet dark place. You may start a fire here between the river and the mountain I may then conjure again, that insistent voice that rose as the ground shook and the gods took turns to bite off bits from our nest, leaving us open to the rain’s love and the sky, too big, as it fell through our eyes and became a black river and then a forest full of black birds, that we carried away with us, furtive like our fears.

The night came alone, as always.

She stood for a while, under the jacarandas.

III

I try to dig up the voices that make a place and water it and when the time is ripe, lift the land, spacing it off to the sky— an offering to be torn apart, again, shred into fine dust, falling back, full circle. No one knows we were here. Sun stretches the day to its limits. Like an eternal lemon candy. Boys in tanks snort ride the summer on skateboards. In offices, we acknowledge the land, declare it stolen, carry on with shame, one foot at a time. It’s the seasonal injustice. Everyone catches it, like the flu. The voices come back, this time quiet, forgiving, making our ears red. We shift in our seats, take a bus elsewhere, carrying ourselves along. The light gets heavier. A new breeze walks in, and seasons change like clockwork. Servicemen jaywalk across the street, impatient, unwilling, obtuse. I uncover my burger like it is some exotic flower. The sun beats down in orange bursts and pills. The walls of my eyes turn citrus yellow.

Once more we must change places under the sun. Make our own beds.

We know now where we stand.

The water does recede, with the answers.

Fireflies keep escaping into the night.