Could we be sisters? asked the tree

her scraggly crown abuzz in thought,

If spinning on my seedwings, I'd

not landed in this little pot,

but grown amidst your tangled roots

and known what things they say

and learnt the lilts of choral chems

and shared the songs, the dance, the day.

Would now it be presumptuous

(if only I could stand)

to pull myself from this thin mulch

and try to root in righter land?

"She does not know our languages,

what could she take, what could she give?

Her cankered boughs won't bear the sun.

We do not think that she will live."

They're right, I think, to rule it out,

abide what cannot be unmade.

But I would wane the sweetest season

nodding in your shade.

for an Old Woman

The first meagre minutes of the day

can’t tempt me from bed, but something from my fever years drives me

out and I am 

in a low, peculiar vantage point,

the screen window above me

catches nettling light I squint through, looking

for the sick heat of other days

for a way out not through this gouged place

for roots not split shells, old names

or chastisement for a fool returning —

my gaze has drifted.

again I look slantwise up. from nowhere

an impossibly opal sunrise

circles the world in pearl ember,

look! I close my eyes and miss you

I haven’t written from this place for years, barely read.

that part of me doesn’t want to eat,

knows like old cats and toothless elephants

know, that sustenance is not the answer,

know to look

elsewhere, but not anywhere I can find

the wind

ruffles the sky,

            listen

are you listening with me?

as water runs softly over my face, falls in tiny thuds

to the wind

tousling

the shifting sides and secret nooks

of that bright unlikely expanse…

a white tarp, of course, stretched over the neighbours’ roof

eyes pushing forty have grown no wiser

and lead me no better than before,

but what did they see for that moment?

somewhere beyond a membranous surface

I took for the sky

I shouldn't have been surprised, but was unprepared for the cruelty of the Toronto Sun's libel against Asmaa Hussein, whose husband was killed this Friday at a peaceful protest in Alexandria. Insinuations that her one-time employment at one school within a global institute through whose doors a handful of notorious men drifted, in disparate times and places, could be grounds for condemnation or a withdrawal of sympathy, can only appeal to a degenerate mass. They are a reminder that doubt can be spread dumbly, perversely, for the sake of insulating prejudice as much as for spurring inquiry that would reveal it.

I knew Asmaa in undergrad, not well at all, but well enough to be dumbstruck with horror at what has happened to her young family over the past five days. I took a poetry class with her in second year, and while I was an editor at the Varsity she was working in an office directly above mine, editing the Muslim Voice. We attended one or two events with the same party, knew one another through mutual friends, and understood each other a sight better than strangers would. The hideous crimes inflicted on her late husband, her, and their 9-month-old baby, which have been followed by inhumane insults in Egypt and here in her home, I have watched her bear with unimaginable grace, courage and articulateness that have left me shaken by her faith and understanding of what it is to be human.

To those insufficiently concerned with such things, know that you make yourselves apparent when you fling stones at people in her position who happen to fit profiles you've chosen to hate. Her friends, I am sure, are needed as few people ever are. The rest, including those at the Sun prone to feeling deserved guilt, I would suggest should back off. And imagine themselves in her situation, rather than grasping at reasons not to.

From this valley they say you are going

My grandmother died on Saturday. I heard this Monday when I went home to meet mom on her return from a trip to Anchorage to be with the family. It was good--and unusual--that almost the whole immediate family lived there, especially considering how much they all moved around and have no roots in the area other than those they quickly fabricated. When they have no history, my maternal family will quickly stubborn one into existence.

This powerful bullheadedness is, as you might detect, a bit of a family emblem. Mom said that grandma died as she wanted to. She wanted only her immediate family there, none of her grandchildren, both to prevent us from having the memory of her dying and to draw in the most familiar people in her life while she waited. Mom also said she eventually wasn't even afraid. Though she still had bad stretches where she couldn't breathe and panicked, she was telling everyone that it was natural, what was happening to her.

So grandma had the death she wanted. She was the only person who still called me "Ani" (pronounce it "Onny"), a nickname my mom called me by when I was very young. Grandma always called me that--more the older I got, I swear. I don't remember the exact last time I said goodbye to her, and I'm glad for that. If I did, it would stand falsely as a summary of our connection. I'm left with a long and gappy memory of her. She was as stern and unbending a figure as I have ever known--more so, much more, than any other family member I can think of. But she wouldn't say anything against a view of yours she did not share. I know she was very kind and intelligent, perceptive and different, and worried. I miss my grandmother, and the question of when I, personally, lost her troubles me.

Her ability to find her good death leaves as strong an impression on me as the fatalistic sprit underlying all her wise deciding. She chose what was dearest and steadiest in her life to die beside, which is the first thought to almost bring tears to my eyes since the news began to hit. But she didn't choose to save her life when she could have. I'm unsatisfied we'll ever explain that habit well--is it unrequited curiosity that pulls you to die, fear and rationalization, disenchantment, disappointment, loneliness, weakness, shame, a complicated enjoyment of the object of your guilt, a simple act of mental avoidance? I don't know whether she reached any conclusion or was covered by an iron shield during the worst of it. I know my grandfather, who was exhausted, awoke magically ten minutes before she died, and she became calm when he came in to be with her.

If we have such control over the things we know about, if we can sweep away, more or less, the obstacles we'd hate to encounter even in the face of death, then why does it seem so right for everyone to do everything too late?


Love,

André

I'm not dead yet

This year will be hard. I'm not going to have any of my own time, and I'll have to be very clever to have enough time for the stuff I've committed to do. I think next year I'll go hollow out a boulder and live in hermitage, enjoying only the simple burdens and absences of a contemplative life, like crickets chirping, hunger, the inability to have odd bumps diagnosed or cuts properly treated, and the sense that those facelike imaginary patterns in foliage are actual people.