Two Poems
Z Turns
1933 Siliguri—Calcutta—Darjeeling—Gaya—Ghoom—Bellingham 2023
Demarcations of the day in lines laid down and the trains that dance along them:
Darjeeling Mail, morning and evening, and North Bengal Express across the noons,
horn song and whistle bent like a string pulled off the fret, bent, as the ma note in raga malkouns,
I want to hear a winter raga. It is winter, Baba, a pail of coal and kindling smokes at your door.
The toy train runs right past your house, gauged narrow as tram track, steam engine offering
a blossom of smoke like the one that rises from the pail. Goes north every morning, into the past,
toward your birth place. This screened porch is your present: your father the pleader
holding chamber hours, his muhuri interpreting and framing the grievances
of the mokkel, the clients who come to the door. The toy train passes
and when you look up again you are four hundred miles away and one decade away,
in the old colonial city with its massive printing presses and promenades,
its pink and amber buildings. You are going into the cinema. Celluloid news reel: Eisenhower.
Dignitaries at Blair House. And the wonder of snowfall in Syracuse. Baba, today you also remember
Gaya, the heat of the sun on your head, how the priest told you to climb seven flights
of mountain steps, the water of the Falgu darkening your hem, the river that in ancient times
ran milk. And you did what you believed you had to do. But you actually haven’t gone anywhere,
you are a boy again, the toy train slides past you. Past your father in his chair, the compounding apothecary
down the street with dram of this and ounce of that, mortar and pestle, concocting
tincture and suspension. He razor-slits a thin strip of paper, dips his little brush
into a jar of glue and pastes it on the bottle to show the doses, as levels. The toy train continues
down Hill Cart Road, past your one-room school. Past the postman walking door
to door with his fistful of postcards and tissue-thin envelopes. Nearly a century
later, here, across the world, you recall the Blair House newsreel, you recall how the glass doors
of the USIS at 46.26 Chowringhee automatically opened, how cool the inside was,
how cold the drinking water. The posters on the wall changed with the season.
Shall you and I change seasons too? Let’s call it summer. Cue raga bhupali, its rise (aroha)
and descent (avaroha) symmetric, an evening raga, another evening at the cinema:
beautiful Sharmila with her cat’s eye swoosh, and the book in its creamy wrapper
she pretends to be reading, her powder blue sari and glass bracelets. Sapno ki rani,
queen of dreams, in the movie she is on the toy train to Darjeeling,
where the tea comes from—as I say, in saying where my father comes from—as I say, meaning
where I come from. Sharmilaji’s bracelets are the green of first flush muscatel
champagne tea leaves. The plantations fall along the trestle and tunnels and ascending aroha
of the toy train track from New Jalpaiguri toward the highest railway station on earth, Ghoom,
which means sleep in our mother tongue, means holiday, or journey in Nepali,
and really sleep holiday and journey all point to the same possibility, don’t they, that we might
live for a time in another world? Baba, you don’t mention Sharmila-ji in Aradhana,
not the song not the train scene, but you tell me about a movie that you’ve never seen,
because it was perhaps never released, Ghoom Paharer Deśe . . . the deś of ghoom pahar . . .
the Country of the Mountains of Sleep. You remember the actor in it, and his three brothers,
and how proudly your headmaster used to speak of the four boys, their father your father’s right hand,
the very muhuri we left on the screened porch, eleven stanzas plus one lifetime ago. The descent
from Ghoom to Darjeeling is unnavigably steep. The train must describe a circle
at Batasia Loop, where the air is sweet, and air’s a synonym for song, and batasia
means breeze. The train turns and turns until it crosses the place where it came from.
Baba, it is not lost on me that it cannot move forward without first going back
over where it came from. I hear music: Raga bhupali, still introducing itself in the alap,
the getting to know. The apothecary turns the brown glass bottle in his hand, reading
the medicine through slits on the pasted strip. I score lines of my own across white paper,
cut in apertures, windows. You recited the rites in Gaya, beside the river that once ran milk.
You did as you were told to do. The funny thing about the toy train
is how it can only climb the steep grade of the Eastern Himalaya by sliding back-
wards, the way it came, then reverse to move forward, a z turn. Someone crouches
on the front buffer, above the swell of cylinder, pouring sand or salt for traction or to melt
ice on the rail. It is winter again, Baba. How sallow the sky through the chicken wire screen
of the front porch, demarcated into a thousand parts, outlined like tile.
When the train comes back tonight from the mountains into the flatlands,
down Hill Cart Road, it will be capped with snow and you will feel a kind of wonder,
that bright layer a letter, a white paper from a different world. We move forward and backward
because we must. The priest told you to throw your offering off the mountain top
and then descend, down the stone steps like a raga, without looking back, like a raga,
your steps prescribed, like a raga’s, and despite that, no, because of that, I believe
there was music in them. Perhaps it was me you threw off that cliff. I mean – maybe.
Who knows? Perhaps it was me you turned your back on because that was the only way
I could come—come back?—to you, out of a high garden lush with steam and mist and cloud
and smoke to sea-level, arrive at this deś, its indifferent ocean, its wispy rivers that never ran milk,
but where nevertheless rhododendrons bloomed red silk outside our windows on Everglade Road.
I know there will come a day when the only way—the only way—I will be able to move forward
is to first move back, into the past, to meet you in Batasia Loop where the air was so sweet,
and then cross over myself, from that day to its iron-tied tomorrow, pouring salt
like an offering as I go, that the path into the future might yield, the journey between ghoom
and deś a descending scale, symmetric or asymmetric, resolving, in the end, in the tonic home.
Ruth Work
Ruth: Compassion for the sorrow of others.
from the Proto-Indo-European root krue: to strike, to push
Why do we do as we do? As our parents did, ritual’s rutted routes worn.
But what is means? What is end? What are the rite and the rule worth?
To be good. As a cutting strikes, natal stem craning toward light.
To do right, walk clear of the faults of the rude world.
But what is good ? Roll the scope: oo → o, sweet merge to monocular.
Turn inward → Focus. Good → God (but not the same root word).
And who decides? Diagnoses fracture, or adhesion, names ill ill.
Prescribes prevention. Or remedy . . . Tincture of rue-wort.
Does God speak by text and or in sign, or, the Signified, by both?
We parse conscience. And commentary. Push into the ruth work.