Groundwork

Rustum Kozain

           Las caras lindas
           De mi raza prieta
           Tienen de llanto
           De pena y dolor
           Son las verdades
           Que la vida reta
           pero que llevan
           Dentro mucho amor
                                 - Susana Baca

(The beautiful faces/ of my dark race/ are made of weeping/
pain and suffering/ They are the truth/ that life challenges/
but they carry/ within so much love)

She says: this is a way from loss;
not nostalgic, not maudlin
but like careful quatrains, the clear
windows onto loss, or these

moments like small, sun-struck rooms
in winter suddenly still
when a parent leaves.
Or in an instant empty

of a lover on their way to work.
And you sit there watching
the last eddy of dust settle
as if no one had been there;

and the earth no longer in motion
around that still point
of a father's firm embrace
or a mother's indulgence

which with grace stays the child
against the lost book or toy;
no longer does the earth spin only
around the still points

of her brown eyes, the lover
in whose gaze you learned
how close you can come to another
and their work at grief: her stories

of putting up corn
in the urine-coloured shame of poverty
after her mother's divorce;
the father, crazy for his children,

and who would die
as his lonely heart gave in,
hunting as cocaine raced
through his veins, vision dark

as if he peered at the sun
through brown bottles now
empty of his beer.
All her stories

by which she drew closer
by which her loss lessened
by which some ache like thorns
rose from the body

and crumbled at the surface
over the time of your love
in its peaceable, motionless night.
That ache by which you loved.

                 *

Here, in a sunlit room, above
a suburb of yellow brush,
she, she has no answer for loss,
this ceaseless memory of love.

Only, a gentle nod
and a loosening of brown arms.
You cannot conquer loss, she says,
maybe learn to live with it.

Grief, she says, and the work of grief.
That shard of a word.
And you turn from it to the window
onto this sorrowful suburb

and you think of the weight of things,
of the mason's sorrowful plumb
that tugs and tugs at existence,
pointing not at the earth's centre

but at loss. This reckoning
lead-straight but which skews
the earth's balance of grief.
And there it is again, that word

from which you shy
for grief cannot well
from an image of yourself
you hold: bowing through loam

to mutter prayers
and kiss the foreheads
of grandparents you never knew.
Grief cannot well from the loss

of someone you never knew;
there can be no grief
but fictions of loss
as, an hour from you,

your father you know
counts the years on his prayer rug
that he quarrels with his God
over a son lost to which djinn

or Shaitaan, lost to the trickery
of which books save the Koran.
He must know grief, your father,
who had no vision of your leaving

and who every Eid must now sob,
alone on his rug, or clasping
the shoulder of your brother,
your brother my brother, Abdul-Kader -

oil-stained, born mechanic
born to murderous speed
and praise-poet to the American V8 -
this is my decade-old ache for you,

still deepening by the day

this ache by which I love you.

                 *

Grief is the memory of love, she says.
No matter the ones who love you
are alive, it is loss, grief,
the work of it.

But you turn
from such democracy of grief, turn
and think of your mother,
convert to Islam,

who dreamt of the cross
two days before her brother
your uncle dies, him
rattling in a stained bed

in a decrepit, dirty hospital,
the luxury of a middle-race;
him with his body giving in,
heart then lungs, mind, limbs,

all gaunt. Unshaven death
already for months staring
from his sunken sockets
at all who gather weekly -

exhausted wife, impatient children -
but his vacant eyes warming
at you, at your mother,
as he foresees her grief,

foresees her foreseeing his death
as her dreamwork
prepares her for the loss:
their parents and him,

a trinity waving from a cross.

Your mother who knows grief,
who Sundays, breaking
from cooking, turned up
Rachmaninov, and over her cigarette

longed for another life,
a past of Sundays in a big house,
her father at the piano
in a sunblessed room;

organist in church, a school principal
with political mind
who in his own way fought
the cancers of this land,

made voice heard in debates
at the local Teacher's League.
It is for these she stares
through her skeins of cigarette smoke

at the ache of that loss
at her memory of some gentle love.
This hurt and ache,
this deepening of grief.

And maybe at this deepening
her love remembered grows,
until in its unbearable memory
grief starts anew.

Unending,
the work of grief you imagine
she, at sixty-two
still labours at:

father dead, brother dead
and her mother dead of cancer
when she was eleven.
They who loved her.

If grief is the memory of such love
it is the memory
of what once loved you
measured for its depth at the moment of its loss.

LitNet: 04 May 2006

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