Satya Dash

Biosphere

                —after Gabrielle Bates’s “In the Dream in Which I Am a Widow”

Hands of the puppeteer. Wringing blood. Stick figures playing

soccer in the front page cartoon. Deep admiration for satire. Fear

for the artist. Shame for my inaction. Shame for the mirror that feeds

hypocrisy. Into the mother of mirror. Glitter of the noonish

lake. God plunging dagger. Into soft leather of the sofa’s sexless

fantasy. It takes me those four residual weeks that stretch the year’s quota

to 52, to realize— getting out of my own way requires not the love

of a loved one, but a loved one. Your couscous spine. The fiber of nerve

endings. Hungry passage of a sentimental smile. Bathing in private brine.

Our house was a blur studded with hard candy. Our brief love at many

points had the intensity of a torchbeam, piercing the caramel nightlife

of everything in the forest that oozed. A feature of divergence. I took

a chance to glance, my shins and chest bare with tiny hairs. I failed you

at uninterrupted prayer. When the perimeter sank, I rushed over

to the few square inches of glistening earth I identified

as the center. I waited. Smiling with unbuttoned collar. Leash

for some storm to grab me by. My blue tongue. Sucking in

heaps of irascible air. Watching over me, a miniature sun in its lustrous

bath. Too still to fall. Too bright to watch. And through

the window, a glimpse of you teaching a few kids the eight parts

of speech. Your fingers doodling on the whiteboard. My envying

the erasable marker-pen you held and the kids’ jubilant discernment

of conjunction from interjection. Then a memory of lust. Leads

to lust. The soil of night. Closing over us. Yet the hounds

of surveillance. Unbearable like the season’s heat. The water

of time. Soaking calluses below slender fingers. The pyre keeps

burning. Like a dream on fire. Fuelled by the might of bolting

hooves. It didn’t matter if I was procreated by intent or chance.

What mattered was the opportunity to burn together. Ashes

to be scattered. On a patch of revered field the mongoose wrestled

the deadly cobra on. We had a little arrears time left to ourselves.

You moved on from grammar to a O. Henry story. The kids

read it aloud. I heard gasps of disbelief at the ending. I love

that story. Browsing the internet one last time, I managed

to read an article on the special structure of mongoose nerve cells

that makes them immune to venom. I carried this information

to my grave alongside a vial of your summer

scent. Slicks of carbon as we fizzled out in the backyard. Nutrients

for starving stars. Sheets wrinkled with silver protein. Our jasmine

altars. Honoring oxygen. Candy gleaming. Candy melting.

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STATEMENT OF HOMAGE

Gabrielle Bates’s poetry transports me to a world where the truth of complexity resides in clarity, the infiniteness of attention and startling detail simultaneously haunting and delighting, an effect I was attempting to recreate in my homage to her breathtaking poem—“In the Dream in Which I Am a Widow.” After reading the poem, I was inspired to weave a world of detail not for the sake of detail but to bring strange compositions of language, personal memory, and image together to feed off each other and create meaning. The goal: memorable feeling, perhaps? All love is doomed and eternal, and most passions eruptive and tender. To inhabit such contradictions means that the binary will eventually dissolve into a spectrum—it’s what the poem tells me: “an honest steeple, one that points not straight / but upward and curving. As faith goes. / Back to earth.” While writing, I realized I wanted the absurd story of my love-death-transience poem to do just that—go back to earth.

Gabrielle Bates

Gabrielle Bates is a writer and visual artist originally from Birmingham, Alabama. Her debut collection of poems, Judas Goat, is forthcoming from Tin House in 2023. Formerly the managing editor of the Seattle Review and a contributing editor for Poetry Northwest, Gabrielle currently serves as the Social Media Manager of Open Books: A Poem Emporium, a contributing editor for Bull City Press, and a University of Washington teaching fellow. She also volunteers as a poetry mentor through the Adroit teen mentorship program and teaches occasionally as a spotlight author through Seattle's Writers in the Schools (WITS). With Luther Hughes and Dujie Tahat, she co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, where poets talk over drinks.

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Diagnosis

                                                   —after Caroline Bird

While walking with your father on the shore, you found

a piece of parable under a pebble. Vexed at this discovery,

he vanished. He had more pressing issues to attend to. When

you scratched the sand with your finger, you wrote pain

in cursive as you thought about the long rubber blades

of a car’s windscreen wipers, the tiny squeak of supplication

they made in their arcing sweep of moisture. At the mall

when you swiped your credit card, the machine beeped hard

like it was hurling at you a code of profane signals. The card

belonged to your father. The useless agony belonged to you.

In the rectangle of a window, two hands reached out for

each other from opposite sides. After touching once, then

twice, they parted ways. One of the hands you identified as your

mother’s from a broken nail. A rectangle pressed or stretched

appropriately can become a square. The same treatment to your

face imparted new meaning to your self portrait. The colors came

alive on the canvas. Tufts of hair fell on your feet. Your head was

crowned with a hat containing a bell inside. It rang on the day

of your birth. Frisking you as you entered the arena, the security

officer smirked, saying— enjoyyy. The percussive vertigo confirmed

this wasn’t some dizzying dream; the sporadic laughter confirmed

brief spikes of joy. Every affirmation pushing a coin down your

throat to your lungs, which you exchanged to buy mint flavored

breath. What the chewing gum gifted you was a chiseled jawline.

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Statement of Homage

While reading Caroline Bird’s The Air Year, I found myself, on every page, gasping with awe and admiration, occasionally chuckling so hard I could hear my own laugh. I was enchanted by the slippage in the poems, the narrator gliding through worlds with a child-like hunger and insatiability, making the book an in-flight record of a soul scribbling lines on the sky that turn into magnificent myths. And what about these myths? Well, they live on. And the networks of connections in these myths, the stunning interplay of event and emotion have lived in my mind ever since I read the book. In my homage, I wanted to create my own myth, by connecting certain painful moments from memory in the belief that somehow zigzagging them together on a string could create some circuitry of hope and gratitude. I love the life-is-a-fractal view in Caroline Bird’s poems as patterns vanish to give way to patterns—highlighting unexpected multiplication as way to sustain language, love, and wonder. Rather than using just image, in allowing the strangeness of events, actions, feelings, epochs churn together to drive the poem forward, Bird makes sure pleasure is no longer compressed in certain moments but dissipated through and through the heady experience of the entire poem. I can almost imagine the poem beseeching the poet while it is being written: take me somewhere, anywhere, but please do blow my mind. And the poet does so with invention, guile, and wit. The thrill I received from reading The Air Year is at the heart of why I come to poetry and writing in the first place— to discover. Sometimes gently, sometimes wildly.

Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird was born in 1986 and grew up in Leeds before moving to London in 2001. Caroline has had six collections of poetry published by Carcanet. Her fourth collection, The Hat-Stand Union, was described by Simon Armitage as “spring-loaded, funny, sad and deadly.” Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition (published July 2017) was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, was published in February 2020 and was book of the month in The Telegraph, book of the year in The Guardian, shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and winner of the Forward Prize.

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