Stone 75:
from Mosaic
What if my appearance and disappearance
chime in the wind as one song, if all these marks
I make sound the place of my extinction—a beauty
I figure and refigure that no one will ever recognize
except as that nameless perfume whose petals
lie crushed under their feet? What if I hold myself
with blind tenderness like a stone in my hand
and this is both consolation and proof
that to experience singularity is also to grieve
the privacy of solitary gestures?
What if no matter how many times we meet
as rain on a windowpane or cling to each other
like sweet pollen, we survive to find refuge
in the future’s incomplete grammar? What if
being absorbed into mist or clouds or dust
is not, as we wish, anything like love,
compassion, and forgiveness? What if a world
where there is no otherwise, where there is neither
reason nor cause for sadness and joy, is the only one
in which we feel the contingency of our freedom?
Stone 365:
from Mosaic
Cycling around the neighborhood. Watering rose bushes,
then coiling the hose. Staring at a downy woodpecker
feed on Japanese beetles from the stump of a Rose of Sharon tree.
Small stones collected at a beach years ago by even smaller fingers
now forming an irregular circle around an ant hill. Just
one thing after another. Sparrows nearby bathing in dirt
to ward off mites. The single pictured hour fracturing
into the many sequences, and the many sequences succeeding
the many consolations of order. It’s a process.
Seeing little bits of day all over again, bridged and shuffled
in the hands of night. Pieces of day, pieces of night falling in and out
of pieces of wakefulness, of sleep, and something
rocking in the spaces merging sleep with waking
that curls like a wave lifting up its foamy forehead to speak
sleep’s thought. Here we go round the mulberry bush,
the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Day nursed
on the informal music of night. Thoughts, thoughts
threading a net of worry, and the net catching nothing
but a sense of being dropped. Then you wake up the next morning
and do it all over again. The silver streak of water
entering coffee-colored soil, the silver streak of a bicycle wheel
spinning across asphalt, the silver streak of moonlight flashing
through a sleepless window. The many routine sequences without center
becoming through repetition an act of ritual observance.
Rolling over in the dark chilled with sweat. I could
do this nothing all day so long as that nothing is with you.
Cold, sweet water drunk from a hose. Fluttering wings.
Playing jacks with small stones. Dirt under the nails. Pieces, pieces.
Then, while coiling the hose, something irising
into focus and writing itself into a mental note entitled
important. Just take a deep breath and relax. Remember
no man is an island; every man is a piece. It’s the kind of closeness
you dream of getting lost inside but can’t get used to, the sky wrapping you
in its speculative cool between the adjacent furies of sun and moon.
Lost like the light that moves its trembling fingers over the world
and knows without having to name. So tell me about your day.
Hearing acorns fall on the roof. Finding a blank scrap of paper intended
for no one in particular on the floor. Following, following
the continuous involution of the rose (hose in hand) and possessed
neither by thought nor feeling but perspective arriving
at the pinked center of. It’s only when you finish a story
and look back that every scrap of dialogue and detail
acquires meaning. I can’t go on like this. That’s what you think.
We were gathering nuts in May and I thought what if what if
someone comes to fetch you away. Sitting up in the dark alone
and drinking a glass of water. Tapping the window
to wave goodbye on a cold and frosty morning. Warming up
what’s left of leftovers. What does it all add up to in the end
anyway? Sayings and phrases like a slim book that exists
only to fill a gap on the shelf and keep all other books in place.
Promise me, promise me when I’m fetched away
it will be like a crease on any ordinary shirt, pressed smooth
and ready again for work and play? The smell of sea sand
on fingertips, the smell of rotting wood, the smell of mown grass.
I could go on and on like this. Pieces cemented into pieces,
held together by joy, anger, lust, grief, boredom.
Supritha Rajan is associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her poetry has been awarded Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and featured on such websites as Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in such journals as The Threepenny Review, The Cortland Review, Narrative, Bennington Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions (online), New England Review, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, Washington Square Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, and elsewhere.