Some Questions He Asked by Kazim Ali

"We turned the machines off at dusk and commended you to the earth"

Some Questions He Asked

by Kazim Ali

            "the soul got to choose. Nothing else
            got to but the soul
            got to choose.”
            -       Brenda Hillman
 
 
I could never make you mythical 
 
Not Demeter who mourned that her son might live half his life in hell after tasting the bliss of the juice bursting from the seeds in his palm
 
Nor Niobe who wept like a stone after losing her sons to beauty and ambition
 
Perhaps I ought to have imagined you as a nameless mother, that of Orpheus who sang such verses to the dead they opened the very gates of hell for him
 
But myth does not do in the nights where it’s you who has gone from this world, flown from your shape into whatever is next
 
We turned the machines off at dusk and commended you to the earth the very next morning
 
At the graveside it was I, the Orphic son, who climbed into the ground to shake your shoulders to remind you it was time to leave this shape of earth to earth, that these forms were your home no longer
 
The verses sung from above were not of my making or my tongue and none from my own mouth came that day or since
 
Did the Greeks know something essential? That even were the soul immortal without the shape that held it close it would wander inaccessible lands forever, that it was the body left behind that would dissolve and rejoin creation
 
That borderless I might lose you to god, the single bright spark of you racing to rejoin some divine Whole
 
It had been dusk, I held your hand, we knew some part of you was gone and yet you lived and breathed
 
All I had were not words but gestures of body: I held your hand, rested on your shoulder, kissed your face, was that you or not you that I turned on your side in the grave, making a pillow of a chunk of earth so you could rest facing that mosque you loved on the other side of planet 
 
Does the soul get to choose? Did Orpheus’s mother know he relinquished women and spent his days drunk with poetry and song?
 
And who was she really, maybe no muse at all, but an ordinary woman, a tomboy from Hyderabad who sang and climbed trees and stole her cousin’s bike to ride around the neighborhood, laughing the whole way?
 
And what angel or devi who slipped a coin under her son’s tongue, cursed him with the knowledge he might reach past the screen separating the lived-in world from the dead?
 
He knew what happened when he looked back—he lost love forever, he was torn limb from limb by a world enraged, that even dismembered his body floated down the river singing those same syllables that moved ghosts to breathe again
 
If it were a myth I could nearly imagine that ragged screen of grief fluttering, somehow hearing a scrap of a voice in the wind, a flutter of wing. Could it all be more than ancient lies? Could it be perhaps now having left the shape of earth behind you are singing to me still
 
But it is not a myth and we are not mythical. 
 
You are you, both enveloped by this earth and gone
 
And I am I, torn asunder and cast adrift, 
no words left in my mouth with which to bewitch the king of the dead

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Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Kazim Ali, in which he discusses genrequeering in literature, writing about death, and the relationship between prayer and poetry. About this, he says:

“I trust poetry more than prayer, at least the traditional way it is thought of and used. Prayer as communication, as description, as observation or ode—all, too, are the provinces of poetry. I always thought prayer was a form of panic—when we are pushed to the edge of what we can process, accept, or react as humans, prayer helps us to stay in the abyss. But couldn’t poetry be a better action in that moment…”