Raga of the Reports
(for my father)
When it snapped, the thread of time, that chime—
god’s veena string—a line of melody I called life,
it ended. The moon creaked off its hinge, wind blew in
the little coffins of my ears,
my mouth opened, I found a field—
pathless, unpeopled, fireflies: off-on, off-off.
*
In dreams it’s your hands I see—peeling pith from an orange, midair telling a story, stirring sugar into tea, gesturing the makhta, lifting a splinter from my good-girl feet.
It’s your voice—the only one to say my name the way god says it.
I say my name in rooms, chairs full, the air conditioned, lights livid as if for surgery. I sound like I’m importing myself.
When I open my mouth, I see the quince is in its glory. When I open my
mouth I hope to find
that line of sound—my name, chime of you and me, of time,
a coral blossom. In the mind. In the mouth.
In the yard, a whole bush shaking with sparrows.
*
When the doctor couldn’t look at me. When she read out the report I’d already read—
the quince was glorious. I smelled the perfumed air. I felt the little mind. My mind
became a coffin, then a field. Do you have questions, asked the doctor in the moon?
I closed my eyes and listened to you call my name. My god. In the chime that used to be my life.
*
God said, let there be light. God said, let the flowers and the little coffins bloom. God said, time and fathers—all there is. You must open your mouth
and speak the world. You must import yourself to the field called life.
I repeat my name. My date of birth.
I went to bed a person. Woke up a patient that first time,
your hand on my forehead declaring
I had cold-body-fever, rubbing Ram Tel, god’s oil, over my scraped palms.
I went to bed a person and woke up sweating on a train.
Never eat the dessert, you used to say. The fields
of rice streaked by. I dozed and woke to find a charpai
full of turbaned men playing cards outside the window. I wondered. I woke again. Would you be at the station? At my bedside with a book?
Your hands. I see them—
I went to bed and a song went by
and now another man putting his hand on mine saying my name the wrong way, saying
Dexamethasone, Isatuximab, Lenalidomide, I’m saying
soon there will be lilacs. The quince has passed. I cut the last prickly branches. I wait for the lilac to choke me with perfume.
*
Once you brought me to a holy man. He told me not to put my nose too close to his roses. I could inhale small bugs. But you said every tiny thing makes a song. The holy know
the syllables. The songs of all the little living things. Thick silky roses hung over dry pavers in the mid-June heat. Gulab. Gulabi. The monsoon
hadn’t come, yet there was this pink lushness. I think of it now
pressing my face to my own not-yet lilacs. Who knows what’s inside
when you open your mouth. Your mind. When you will wake up
a dry field of study.
What kind of syllables are the doctor’s? Divine
enough to fill the little coffins? Lush
enough for all the little living things?
*
When god spoke in her ear, filled her night with fireflies. When she was
pronounced out of herself and into the field of care—
A dream of roses. A dream of hands on her forehead. Her god-name spinning her into the world.
*
Saraswati plays the veena. The whole world vibrates with sound. Oh, the sound of your name in the mouth of the ones who love you. Oh, the little melody
of love. Of fear. Of fever. Of flowers about to bloom. Listen, listen—
strings of the veena
calling
*
It’s too hot when the lilacs finally bloom. Smell so intense it feels
like sound.
*
In waiting rooms, I give my name, my date of birth. In moon rooms,
on lunar dates. In scanners, the lights blink on and off. I listen to the hum—
*
The goddess plays the veena. Flowers bloom and bloom.
Fingers picking out the melody. Fingers laying down the drone.
The holy wrote: the human throat
is a sareer veena—moan and hum
of the universe inside you. The rhyme of time. Open your mouth
to find the lilac after the quince, the song-flower of your mind.
*
On the day I first put the chemicals in my veins—
On the first day I use a medicine that will ruin my body to save my life,
learning to tune myself to that string of syllables
19 children are shot in a school.
This poem should stop. All the blood should stop in every vein.
What’s the use?
The broken veena string, the smashed chime—
all the gods and goddesses
should be stricken from the page.
We open our mouths—
horror error sorrow terror—
We open and close our mouths—
The syllable sobs
of life keep pouring into the light—
Name. Date of Birth.
The child blinking into the field. The field
filled with little coffins.
How will we bear the song?
How can any other story go on?
We open our mouths
and lay the flowers on the graves.
Off-on-off-off. Even today—
Stop, I say. Stop.
The notes have changed. The raga continues to play,
the nurse repeats the syllables of my life. A new music—
report after report. Name after name
nothing stops
How can a song contain it?
How can a vein?
It should not.
I open my mouth
and here’s the nurse with the needle
saying my name.
Here’s a father with an inconsolable bouquet.
Here’s a god-tune in my ear. Saying,
listen, listen—
you were always just a little variation
of one little refrain
listen, listen—
the monsoon after the white-hot June.
Kirun Kapur is a poet, editor, teacher and translator. She is the author of three books of poetry, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015) which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award; Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series; and the chapbook All the Rivers in Paradise (UChicago Arts, 2022). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares , AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner and many other journals. She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program.