Is history deaf there, across the oceans?
Agha Shahid Ali

I

On the shore, you hear nothing above the water’s
old insistence, but the slow clatter of pellets
teased out one by one from the child’s face.
When you look back at the bruised world: a dim
car scaling the lit highway through the canyon,
& a window where a hand draws a gray curtain.
In the shallows, the brown pelican resumes its last
hunt of the day, one big wing cresting the blue maw
of a wave. The swirling lift, the awkward plunge,
the squirming hunger it brings up in its tangled beak.
The quiet after: floating above the undertow, possessed
in the feed, as a frenzied gull lands beside it, cleaning
the leftover off its long yellow beak. How they both drift
on the ebb of this moment, sharing this warm flesh
mauled open into blessing, staring at the ocean stately
as the tall faces of ships. Once, you saw a mute girl
say grace over dinner in a language so heavy with hands,
her face closed up in a busy silence, you knew then,
the sole function of prayer was to beg the god of one-
self to be saved. So in the salt of grief, we’re not
forsaken, numbed by what exits our body in horror
we’re not driven to claw our faces in the dark.

II

The sundown flaring over the pacific, & one
long fold of a wave hovering back to shore.
The evening air a cross between lantana camaras
& eucalyptus, both airy signposts of childhood,
like an old croon of a ghazal in praise of alcohol
remembered only in a regressing sadness now.
You hear the river back home has changed course,
flooding through the living rooms of your town,
an angry murk roiling with a singular desire to bring
to surface every lost map of your grandfather’s revolution.
In the valley, they haven’t finished blinding the children
with the 12-gauge, & somewhere else they’re erasing
borders as bombsites turn green over hurried graves.
In the half light, walking up to your apartment,
the evening fog looming over the ridges, you encounter
a family of deer come down from the barren hill
to nibble on dates & blue-eyed grass. At night,
you hear the coyotes howl & pray for the fawn,
the only startled passenger of the unit, no more than
a few weeks old, flicking its clean ears, as it wobbled
by the bottlebrush, not used to the stench of the animal
hunger that stops its mother still on her tracks.

 

NB: This poem first appeared in Vinyl in January 2017.