Excerpt from An Otherwise by Solmaz Sharif

Excerpt from An Otherwise

 

Downwind from a British Petroleum refinery, my mother is removing the books she was ordered to remove from the school library. Russians, mostly. Gorky’s “Mother” among them. The Shah is coming to tour the school. It is winter.

 

In the cold, the schoolgirls line up along the front of the main building and wait for his motorcade. Knee-highs and pleated skirts. Shivering in the refined air.

 

Wave, girls, the teacher says.

 

My mother, waving.

 

##

 

Put another way:

The must of the glued

spines and silverfish, metal

shelves, my mother

 

reaching on tiptoe

to take down Gorky,

for example,

 

filling her arms

with stacks of books.

The Dickens could stay.

You understand.

 

And the air is important to note

for what it is doing

to the pink

 

lungs, bronchioles—

a life of inflammation.

Wave, girls, the teacher says

to the shivering

 

and ironed line of them.

And wave she did.

And if he cared

 

to see

into the minds of teen-aged girls,

this King

would’ve seen then

 

the rifles pointed at him.

 

##

 

When I was a small child,

I think, about five or six, I must’ve

heard something, some cassette turning

 

to dust in the car’s player,

notes stretched, song

that quieted, in the front seat,

 

my parents, some tape spooled back

with a ballpoint pen and worn

to mica in the car’s player as the turn signal

 

clicked its quiet, and the keys

clicked with the wide and final turn—

song which was, I’m sure,

 

an ancient poem sung and filled

with cypresses, their upright

windscreen for what must be grown.

 

##

 

Downwind, I walked the wide hallways

of a great endowment.

 

It didn’t matter if I did or didn’t.

It changed only myself, the doing.

 

It fed down to one knuckle

then the next, this compromise.

 

It fed down to one frequency

and another, leaving me only a scrambled sound.

 

It would burn your fingertips

to walk the length of the hall

 

dragging them along the grass-papered walls

where they punished you

 

for not

wanting enough. For not wanting

 

to be nonbelligerent

by naming the terms

 

for belligerence.

The shellacked

 

shelves, the softly shaking

pens in their pen case.

 

What was given there

could be taken, and

 

quietly, you were reminded of this.

You were reminded all

 

was property of the West.

The mess of a raven’s nest

 

built behind a donor’s great bust

then gone.

 

The mess of bird shit on the steps

then gone. All dismantled and scrubbed

 

sensibility. And this was it.

This nowhere.

 

My school of resentment commenced.

 

##

 

What awaits us on the other side

of alphabet,

scrawl

 

serrated, all slit,

all hole,

 

red with scream,

I do not know.

 

The knowing is the dullest part of all.

 

Someone posts a picture of the Poet’s tomb

and I want to say,

That’s my city—

 

but I am left with the lie of my.

I said what I said and stayed

saying

 

what I came to say

 

long after the people left.

A poet as a fixed position

 

most cannot stand to be in

for long.

 

Someone snaps a photo and moves on.

Someone provides a corpse for this great wall.

 

##

 

Maybe I shouldn’t have taken you there,

she said of our trip

to her childhood home.

For years, I wrote of the bumps

 

left by the tanks

churning over her roads

as braille messages from the martyrs,

 

which meant I missed

it entirely,

the only

it:

 

my mother’s face

turned out

the passenger window,

 

just looking.

 

##

Summer. Harvest done.

The last stone fruit

 

pitted, jarred,

spoiling the last white shirt—

 

Row of cypress,

sun-blistered

 

fences.

Solid and settled masonry.

 

The unseen town

and town just

 

beyond.

The echo

 

as if inside

a room of stone.

 

I felt each world

was one cypress-lined path

 

and each path had

one of us, bagless

 

and awake, walking

wind and footfalls.

 

I felt we were heading

to meet somewhere.

 

##

 

I tried to say it was dead, the song,

but then it came, my mother singing

of cypress—

 

I tried to leave the literal,

but it got lonely—

 

I tried to leave desire,

but it scratched at the door, tapped

its empty bowl against the floor—

 

I tried not to answer,

but the bulb shone—

 

##

 

I saw that the head bent over

a book I couldn’t see

beneath a single yellow lamp

 

through the evening window

 

of a childhood not mine

was my mother’s

mind alight

 

learning to oil a rifle.

 

##

 

It seemed the astrologer might back away

from the stench—

 

There are too many and it is hard

to tell what is for you

in the noise.

 

I didn’t ask if the prisoner

with the sharpened spoon handle

to the wrist

 

came, saying, Tell my mother—

or the mother

 

salting a meal she won’t taste herself.

At a gate, it seemed

 

the officers knew I was coming.

Their questions tailored.

 

At a gate, I was asked

the name of my father,

 

my father’s father,

beneath a shivering bulb,

 

and whether I write

plays.

 

At a gate, one man

selling gladiolas

 

wrapped in plastic

out of a black bucket.

 

One selling wreaths.

One selling water.

 

At a gate, the men gathered to discuss

building

 

a playground

over the unmarked graves.

 

At a gate, I watched one hand

outstretched, saying,

 

Come.

I thought it was loss—

 

language, its little

radius—

 

when it’s a beckoning,

a way.

 

At one gate, my mother waving.

 

##

 

Enough, I said.

I plotted.

In the mornings, I wrote.

 

In my sleep, I wrote

with fancier, more elaborate inks.

And in my writing I began to write of cypresses.

 

And of small and sharp stone.

And I, on this path, a wooden handle in my palm, and a blade at the end of it.

And beyond, their windscreen, the unseen.

 

I knew not the poem, only the weather.

I knew not the listening, only this landscape, its one clear channel.

 

The metal in my teeth caught its frequency.

The iron shavings of my blood pulled toward this otherwise.