Disorder

Vanesha Pravin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226235363
• eBook ISBN: 9780226235530
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Midsummer

Cambridge, MA, 2008
 
Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment.
A baby touches phlox. Many failures, many botched attempts,
 
A little success in unexpected forms. This is how the rest will go:
The gravel raked, bricks ashen, bees fattened–honey not for babes.
 
All at once, a rustling, whole trees in shudder, clouds pulled
Westward. You are neither here nor there, neither right nor
 
Wrong. The world is indifferent, tired of your insistence.
Garter snakes swallow frogs. The earthworms coil.
 
On your fingers, the residue of red pistils. What have you made?
What have you kept alive? Green, a secret, occult,
 
Grass veining the hands. Someone's baby toddling.
And the phlox white. For now. Midsummer.

A remarkable first book, Disorder tells the story, by turns poignant and outrageous, of a family's dislocation over four continents during the course of a hundred years. In short lyrics and longer narrative poems, Vanesha Pravin takes readers on a kaleidoscopic trek, from Bombay to Uganda, from England to Massachusetts and North Carolina, tracing the path of familial love, obsession, and the passage of time as filtered through the perceptions of family members and a host of supporting characters, including ubiquitous paparazzi, amorous vicars, and a dubious polygamist. We experience throughout a speaker forged by a deep awareness of intergenerational, multicontinental consciousness. At once global and personal, crossing ethnic, linguistic, and national boundaries in ways that few books of poetry do, Disorder bristles with quiet authority backed by a skeptical intelligence.

I

The Pharmacist’s House

Haverhill, MA 2008

I.

September again and a new

Old house, a rag in my hand,

Dusting my sandalwood elephant,

And the tusks fall into a gap

Between pine planks.

Down there, Carl found

Trading cards of boxers

From 1910—Stanley Ketchel

And Owen Moran, born like me

In Birmingham, and a scrap from

The New York Ledger I read in

Late afternoon sun. A pharmacist,

Michael Flynn, owned the house then.

Centiliter markings reaching 440

On bottles dug up in the garden.

II.

I’ll live here for a year.

The winter will be

Long, the snow heavy.

And oftentimes,

Nothing to say, no one

Speaking, I’ll doodle

Flynn’s medicinal bottles

On credit card statements.

III.

Mumbai and the man

Held the tusks

To my eyes, showed

How to slide them

Into the elephant,

Wrapped them

With care in a

Scrap of newspaper.

IV.

The New York Ledger,

Saturday August 19,

1871: But it may be said

Literature is to catch

And copy the features

Of actual life. We say Yes

. . . with reservation.

First Wife

for my great grandfather Harilal

Areca nut crushed with tobacco,

clove and cardamom,

lime and fennel seeds

wrapped in a betel leaf,

Kunku folds the paan

and brings it to Harilal,

the railroad conductor.

She sits with him, the sun

a pink eye

low over dry fields.

Kunku gazes at it.

Boys on rooftops

are flying kites,

Harilal chewing

slowly, spits.

His teeth, his gums,

the ground

stained with the bright

red of paan.

Happy red, color of

love, of prosperity,

union of betel and areca nut.

Kunku cannot conceive.

It is spring, Harilal is forty.

Midsummer

Cambridge, MA 2008

Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment.

A baby touches phlox. Many failures, many botched attempts,

A little success in unexpected forms. This is how the rest will go:

The gravel raked, bricks ashen, bees fattened—honey not for babes.

All at once, a rustling, whole trees in shudder, clouds pulled

Westward. You are neither here nor there, neither right nor

Wrong. The world is indifferent, tired of your insistence.

Garter snakes swallow frogs. The earthworms coil.

On your fingers, the residue of red pistils. What have you made?

What have you kept alive? Green, a secret, occult,

Grass veining the hands. Someone’s baby toddling.

And the phlox white. For now. Midsummer.

Second Wife

for my great grandmother Jiba

The first wife, Kunku, travels

north, closer to the desert

in search of a bride.

There: God and rain,

rice and peace—Jiba, a girl

of 16, a farmer’s child

whose father cannot

afford her. Steadfast,

inured to the unexpected,

she had seen monsoons

bend wheat, and water buffalo

die in the rasp of drought.

Kunku makes an offer, the women

return south to become sisters,

slip into a home and share, grinding

red chilies to sell roadside.

They beat wet sheets on rocks,

turn them white, knead wheat flour

with oil, with water. The grain

entwined, bread puffed

over the open flame.

Agapanthus Is the Word

Central Valley, CA 2009

It is June. The field

Bleached, monochromatic.

The stubby palms

Fanged, erect.

Lavender buds

You’ve failed to identify...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• I
• II
• III
• Appendix: Family Tree