Arrow

Sumita Chakraborty

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781948579674
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Contemplative poems write a contentious love letter to a flawed world.

"In poems that focus on gender and race-based violence, environmental destruction, and grief, Chakraborty investigates the unknown, unexpected, and unexplained." —Publishers Weekly

"About a quarter of the way through Sumita Chakraborty's Arrow, the reader encounters an impossible poem called 'Dear, beloved.' It's impossible because who could write it? It's as large, in its way, as any epic, but as compressed as any lyric, and as beautiful as any lyric, but as foundational as any epic, but it seems to come after all things, though it seems, also, diurnal. And it's impossible also because it's a highlight, not the highlight, of Arrow, a debut as assured as any first or last book, as compelling as any, as well-made." —Shane A. McCrae
"I stand in awe of Sumita Chakraborty's visionary collection, by turns epic and compressed in scope, weighty in its tapestry-like materiality and sleekly dynamic as an arrow. The mythic and literary, here, are invigorated by seeming autobiography, which in turn gains collective energy and heft from the poems' timeless tropes and themes. Seamless and diverse in form, cosmic in subject and image, one feels in the presence of an oracular intelligence and an abiding lyric imagination." —Diane Seuss
"This powerful and endlessly mysterious collection of poems is a book of fables, of spells, of revised narratives, and of realigned songs, brightly lifted above our bodies by music that is as unpredictable as it is marvelous. The lyricism is everywhere apparent as Sumita Chakraborty addresses us, our bodies and their stories, our planet, and our sense of time itself. How does she do it? Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry, W. H. Auden wrote about Yeats, and as the hurt enters Chakraborty's language, we see that in speech violated, sounds and meanings—and even the oldest of human mysteries, like 'the etymology of love'—are redefined. All one can do is repeat: this is an endlessly compelling book. Bravo." —Ilya Kaminsky

DEAR, BELOVED

Child. We are done for

in the most remarkable ways.

—BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY, “Dead Doe”

It would be winter, with a thin snow. An aged sunbeam

would fall on me, then on a nearby summit, until a mass

of ice would appear like a crown of master diamonds

in shades of gold and pink. The base of the mountains

would be still in darkness. The snow would melt,

making the mountain uglier. The ice would undertake

a journey toward dying. My iliacus, from which orchids bloom,

would learn to take an infant’s shape, some premature creature

weaned too soon. My femoral nerve, from which lichen grows

in many shades, would learn to take breaths of its own

and would issue a moan so labored it could have issued

from two women carrying a full-length wooden casket, with dirt

made from a girl inside. The dirt would have been buried

with all of the girl’s celestial possessions. Bearing the casket

would demand more muscles than earthbound horses have.

The girl would have been twenty-four. This was my visio.

Sometimes I think of it as prophecy. Other times, history.

For years it was akin to some specific land, with a vessel

that would come for me, able to cross land, sea, the spaces

of the universe, able to burrow deep into the ground.

Anything could summon it—a breaking in cloud cover,

wind chimes catching salt outside my mother’s window,

a corner of a painting. And I learned how to call it, too.

This is the only skill of which I have ever been proud.

When my sister died, from the head of my visio came offspring

in the thousands, armed to the teeth, each its own vessel.

My first, their mother, lived on. For itself and its hoard

it found a permanent home in a cave at the bottom of a lake.

And it waited until I was standing on a mountain to sing to me:

You will call this mountain home until I tell you to move again.

There will always be more of it underground than you

will ever see with your eye. And so it turned out to be true.

And so when I stood on the mountain that became my home,

I beheld a dirt sea, and I saw our moon, which has two faces.

I learned that one face of our moon is dappled with maria,

and that the sunbeams here are newborns that lie

on each other, purpling into the fog and outstretched pines.

Earth spins masses of air until it looks like one of the many

irises studding our galaxy. From space, parts of the Atlantic

look like leather, wrinkled and dark, and others look

like iridescent fishes in an Old Master’s painting of the sky.

I live in the valley of a crater here, where steam rises like ghosts

in the summer heat. This mountain is made of igneous stone.

Every day I issue a warning to lovers: Darlings, I have

in my possession a dead girl deer. Her head is draped

over my right shoulder. I hold her with one arm

encircling her torso. You wake each morning with flowers

shrouding your body, like a corpse; I put them there.

To me, you died when my legs curved around your head.

One of the deer’s eyes has blackened, and her tongue is thick.

She belonged to my sister. O my sister, you were twenty-four.

Listen close. Even to this part. Especially this.

I want you to hear what I say to lovers, because I want to sing

to you, who died a virgin, a few treatises on love and sex—

how flesh and ecstasy are born, what they make,

how they live out their days. As a bodied girl

you feared me, and I met your fear with guttural disdain.

I imagine you wondered what it would take for me to hear

a mortal, human voice: whenever you spoke, a vessel came

for me, chattering like some frail and hissing bird,

pigeon-chested, thin-veined feet. Sister, I don’t listen to lovers,

either, who I call by the same names that were yours:

dear, beloved. But spirits are not like their progenitors.

Their touches can range from velvet to bristle.

Lover, each time I kiss you I name after you

a sickly feeling in my own body, as if each ailing

is a previously undiscovered moon orbiting a planet

that can only sustain the strangest of life-forms.

Sister, I know neither goodness nor mercy shall follow me

all the days of my life, as surely as I know the beasts

I inherit or create, of all unions familial or otherwise,

are speechless and brute, and bound to die soon.

Yes, there is much to love about the body.

Too, there is much to hate. I cast off care for pleasure,

and for labor, teaching my body over time that these things

can’t coexist. I fear it has started to believe me.

My body has never sought wholeness the way yours did, sister.

It was always still the dull twilight of early morning with us.

You were twenty-four, and when you died, I stopped fearing

arson. When I picture us as girls, we are at the base

of the mountain from my visio, divining the summit

as we diminish into spots of light. We are without parentage.

On my mountaintop in midafternoons flocks of wheeling

birds gather around the crescent moon. When the moon

worms its way through the clouds, it fixes its eyes on me

and sings a song that says we live our lives chained to earth,

and that when we die the flesh falls off our bones

so our bones can turn into the driest of riverbed dirt.

Sister, when you died, your bones cast an enchantment.

We made a powder of them, and I named the powder ash,

because ash is a word with neither origin nor afterlife,

and its definition is the look a doe gets when she’s been away

from her herd too long. When a person goes missing

and we don’t know her name, we grant her the surname Doe.

With this christening we name all missing persons

part of the family of ash, which ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Marigolds
• Most of the Children Who Lived in This House Are Dead. As a Child I Lived Here. Therefore I Am Dead.
• Quiver
• O Spirit
• O Spirit
• O Spirit
• Night Questions
• Dear, beloved
• O Spirit
• O Spirit
• O Spirit
• Basic Questions
• Essay on the Order of Time
• Essay on Devotion
• Essay on Thunder
• Essay on Joy
• Windows
• Arrow
• Arrow
• O
• Notes