USA

The Morning Baking

Grandma, come back, I forgot
How much lard for these rolls

Think you can put yourself in the ground
Like plain potatoes and grow in Ohio?
I am damn sick of getting fat like you

Think you can lie through your Slovak?
Tell filthy stories about the blood sausage?
Pish-pish nights at the virgin in Detroit?

I blame your raising me up for my Slav tongue
You beat me up out back, taught me to dance

I'll tell you I don't remember any kind of bread
Your wavy loaves of flesh
Stink through my sleep
The stars on your silk robes

But I'm glad I'll look when I'm old
Like a gypsy dusha hauling milk

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of the wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

The Garden Shukkei-en

By way of a vanished bridge we cross this river
As a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain.

She has always been afraid to come here.

It is the river she most
Remembers, the living
And the dead both crying for help

A world that allowed neither tears nor lamentation

The matsu trees brush her hair as she passes
Beneath them, as do the shining strands of barbed wire

Where this lake is, there was a lake,
Where these black pine grow, there grew black pine.

Where there is no teahouse I see a wooden teahouse
and the corpses of those who slept in it.

On the opposite bank of the Ota, a weeping willow
Etches its memory of their faces into the water

Where light touches the face, the character for heart is written.

She strokes a burnt trunk wrapped in straw:
I was weak and my skin hung from my fingertips like cloth

Do you think for a moment we were human beings to them?

She comes to the stone angel holding paper cranes
Not an angel, but a woman where she once had been

Who walks through the garden Shukkei-en
Calling the carp to the surface by clapping her hands

Do Americans think of us?

So she began as we squatted over the toilets
If you want, I'll tell you, but nothing I say will be enough

We tried to dress our burns with vegetable oil

Her hair is the white froth of rice rising up kettlesides, her mind also
In the post-war years she thought deeply about how to live

The common greeting dozo-hiroskhu is please take care of me
All hibakusha still alive were children then

A cemetery seen from the air is a child's city

I don't like this particular red flower because
It reminds me of a woman's brain crushed under a roof

Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore difficult to understand?

We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness
But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close

As our life resembles life, and this garden the garden
And in the silence surrounding what happened to us

It is the bell to awaken God that we've heard ringing.

Afterdeath

from the quarry of souls they come into being

supernal lights, concealed light, that which has no end



that which thought cannot attain

the going forth, the as yet cannot be heard



--as a flame is linked to its burning coal

to know not only what is, but the other of what is



Hive

into a light most unexpected the glass hives

executed labors whose writings in a darkness are lost



meanwhile they exhaust the city’s supplies

and live only in the midst however abundant



inaudible to them the murmur that comes to us

song of abundance psalms of grief



an entire absence of hesitation

whereby they break with the past as though with an enemy



it is not without prescience their summoning

as though nothing is happening will come back



to live as long as the world itself in those who come after



too vast to be seen too alien to be understood

prefers what is not yet visible to that which is



as a society organizes itself and rises so does a shrinkage enter

so crowded does the too prosperous city become



the era of revolutions may close and work become the barricade

suddenly abandoning generations to come

the abode of the future wrapped in a shroud

a door standing not now where once it stood



we are so made that nothing contents us

Prayer

Begin again among the poorest, moments off, in another time time and place.

Belongings gathered in the last hour to be taken, visible invisible:

Tin spoon, teacup, tremble of tray, carpet hanging from sorrow’s balcony.

Say goodbye to everything. With a wave of your hand, gesture to all you have known.

Begin with bread torn from bread, beans given to the hungriest, a carcass of flies.

Take the polished stillness from a locked church, prayer notes left between stones.

Answer them and in your net hoist voices from the troubled hours.

Sleep only when the least among them sleeps, and then only until the birds.

Make the flat-bed truck your time and place. Make the least daily wage your value.

Language will rise then like language from the mouth of a still river. No one’s mouth.

Bring night to your imagingings. Bring the darkest passage of your holy book.



All copyright by Carolyn Forché. For permission to reprint or otherwise circulate please address the publishers.

All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.

"Morning Baking" was published in "Gathering the Tribes" (Yale University Press).

"The Colonel" was published in "The Country Between Us" (Harper and Row)

"Garden Shukkei-en" was published in "Angel of History" (Harper Collins)

"Afterdeath", "Hive" and "Prayer" are from Forche's new collection, "Blue Hour" (Harper Collins, 2003)

© All Copyright, Carolyn Forché.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.