Blood, soil.
Residential neighborhood.
Madison, Alabama.
I slouch to the writing, sideways.
Crab limbs cling to the torso in tumult, where my elbows bowl in,
my knees keel to my feet, scraping off the carpet,
frothing this writing body to the desk.
My reluctance is quicksand.
This lyric led.
I can't know how each fist knots, each knuckle locks.
I can't know.
His legs refuse.
Gravity legs coil on pavement.
His torso goes limp.
Keens quiet away from the dash cam.
His head, its dread stillness.
મેં કહયું No English.
Indian.
Walking.
મેં કહયું My handkerchief fell.
I was brought down on the grass.
The law says to every action, there is always
an opposite and equal reaction.
That's Newton.
Therefore, a handkerchief falls.
Therefore, the shoulder blades blanch.
Therefore, they offer his body to the sky.
Therefore, heave it weightless.
Therefore, wrap it to the frame, because he is no matter.
He is flinch, thin as linen, light en plein air.
But there is more of him--
more where the skull folds, more where the chest plows over,
more where one body pushes into another,
pushes a therefore into asphalt, plows
the life of blood and soil.
Therefore, they hold it here, a land dry as swatches of bone.
Here, drowned, sound of flesh on the ground.
Hold it here.
Land of more, land of more, land of more.
Hey, buddy, Where do you live?
Where are you going?
Hey, buddy.
Where are you going?
Where do you live?
A yard is a measure.
A curb, its end.
This is how a landscape renders a portrait, as Long
and as wide as hemmed-in history of linen.
Was it white?
Like the ones my father threw in the wash, soggy
from the day at the plant.
Or checkered?
Like the cotton ones he picked for Sunday mass.
Or Embroidered?
Like The one in custody at the museum,
a silk square with Krishna flanked
by gopis, holding lilies--
blood-tipped, bone-white and buttered,
its edges worn from worry or waiting.
Or was it a measure of cotton slung around necks
by thugs to make a noose from a slung
loop of a rumal, a coin anointed for Kali,
lashed to one end and a life dwindling at the other--
to wrangle the traveler, then strangle that stranger?
You want to stand up?
No?
You OK?
No.
Can you stand up?
No.
You understand English?
No.
The law says, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other
are always equal and directed to contrary parts.
But his body was one of two that couldn't speak of its place.
Therefore, they swept leg under leg.
Therefore, made him look close at the land,
made him taste the verge between walk and veer.
The law says, if you press a stone with your finger,
the finger is also pressed by the stone.
Therefore, with these fingers, I will
not a garland of buds plucked from the camphor weed,
flailing on the curb, where cuffed
by the soft folds of his neck.
His spine snapped and swelled, and therefore, we
will wear its scratchy robe for another century of stony sleep,
until our thunder feels more like survival.
The title for that poem, Blood and Soil,
is an English translation of the German phrase, Blut-und-Boden--
which was, by the way, chanted during the Charlottesville
riots--
conducted and carried out by white supremacists
not many years ago.
And I want you to think about the evocation of soil,
and land, and the purity of blood
now in our current discourse.
And keep in mind blood and soil and how it's being used as well.