Vol 1 No 1 2007
Rumours for an Immigrant
1. Fifth Avenue Plaza
Water slips down a concrete wall.
In the plaza, she touches a metal table, a chair, a notebook.
Noon already. Each thing swallows its own shadow
murmuring, I cannot flee you.
She loosens her hair, becomes a woman in a silk sari
on a high balcony, the trellis cut in bone.
Rumours clip the air, spread their wings
and swarm through the plaza.
Suddenly she feels hot.
Draws her hair back, a comb glistens in her hand.
She pulls out a pocket mirror puckers her lips.
She tries to make small scale order
(two black eyes, dark skin, two nostrils,
that sort of thing) out of bristling confusion.
2. Central Park
From mouth to shining mouth news darts.
In fields by the river indigo burns.
Gandhi enters Central Park, smoke in his palms.
He raises a charka, a dove coos, fluttering out of his dhoti.
Behind him, pots and pans lashed to bicycle rickshaws,
come the people.
There is no homeland anymore
all nations are abolished, a young man cries.
In the lake rumours flicker, make luminous habitation.
Allen Ginsberg leaps from the reeds
holding hands with a young man from Conakry,
dead already, turned into a star,
shot 41 times by police as he stood in his own doorway.
Gently loiter, he sings.
On his charka Gandhi strums a tune:
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.
3. Notebook
She has heard the rumour no one will have a homeland.
She opens up her notebook.
She wants to flee her past.
She thinks she can live on the white page.
Wo ist Heimat?
She murmurs this in a tongue she does not understand.
Wen Beitak? Naad evida?
Sitting very straight she writes in her best hand:
I have floated on the river Spree.
Seen Brecht’s Theatre from the outside in.
Tucked my body into two suitcases,
with a hole cut between,
hung in a museum at Checkpoint Charlie.
Tired suddenly she stops writing, rubs her wrist.
4. Bodies and Souls
Three months ago she met a man with a hurt wrist.
He used to live not far from Mohenjadaro.
In her notebook she speaks to him:
I come from where Marco Polo turned.
As for Mohenjadaro, it is covered in dirt.
The invisible cities burn in me.
Here come under my ribs.
She claps her hand to her lips
lest the wind turn this into a rumour
that reaches Gandhi’s ears.
She whispers the immigrant’s name
adds, in her mother tongue Ende priyen!
She feels all her days and nights are etched
on his lonely skin
in script so exquisite and spare
no one has deciphered it.
In time she will be to him as the air he breathes
so he forgets her utterly
yet his mouth will be tucked to her ear,
marking a wild rose, her raw lips to his wrist.
Meena Alexander