IN POSSIBLE DEPARTURES

1.

The migrants who came to the new world were conquerors of themselves. They thought they had mastered what they had left behind.

After Father died, I searched for the key to what was forbidden. I sought it in the wind between land and ocean. Was the wind a messenger from me to me? What parcels of letters did it bring to me, what messages did it refuse to convey, what nocturnal spaces did it jar open? I asked too many questions, and the question of all questions, which was a limb growing down from the sky and sprouting a new body in time: a ruined body, a body burdened, seeking its origins. I wanted to know the hand that shaped me.

Thresholds are like lips unwilling to move.

Father was about to cross over again … he always turned off the thermostat before he left. I took the bellows—gigantic lungs—and fanned the flames until the wind whirled into my head. The house breathed in winter, fire blazed up to the stars. The Big Dipper was the only constellation I knew. It was blue. Everything somehow became metaphorical in the furnace of my mind. It was not magic. I sought numinosity in the night. Blackness in the night without stars. Father used to point out the Big Dipper to me after revealing the names of trees: juniper, willow, maple, as well as the unnamable tree—the tree that wept, for it was without a name.

2.

The languages that had been lost. The history that had been stolen. Double lives that clamoured in between living rooms. Thresholds are lips unwilling to speak. We reach toward the mimetic moon. Writing on the walls. Scribbling over the old letters, scrolls of wallpaper rolled up and ready to be devoured before they are d

iscovered. Every day I sit at this table erasing and crumpling a stack of soggy paper. One can only imagine such a word that turns into a sponge. I pretend to touch my body. Am I absolved when I think the language signifies anything other than what was left and what we move toward as a result? When one looks back, the eyes falter with the feet and language slips incessantly into undiscovered rooms that pound on the head.

3.

The pharmaceutical companies paid for New Orleans,
the ballroom dancing was accompanied by Chardonnay.

There is another ruined house, syllables torn, shriveled fig
trees, half syllables, grunts and barks. Over the wall,
the moon-bone land of promise.

There is another ruined house
where leaves rustle …
the moving abyss
of canine utterance.

4.

A trace of me that was always boarding and unboarding a plane.

 I was eighteen the last time Father flew to Pakistan.

When Father left, Mother placed newspaper underneath the logs we had stolen from the neighbour’s heap—newsprint crumbling into ashes. Mother came into my room the night before Father left for the last time. Father had been tossing and turning—whiplashed by bed sheets.

She told me he was having nightmares again—nightmares of crossing over, I assumed, although one can never fathom the body esoteric, only make faint guesses at what the signs intimate. We felt, in waking: silence like a weight on the house, a house that may as well have been roofless when Father left.

5.

Fish me a vengeful language. A language of debris. Broken scattered images, fetch them. To piece, a room that is closed, open. Or something soft, the wind of lost leaves. Through a corridor. There is no old woman in the attic who mends the valved heart on a spinning wheel. There is no attic in this house. Humble hearth. Something soft. Threadbare. Something that unravels. There are the dreaming floor boards. The dead words. There are the backward and sidelong glanced utterances. There is the inching toward. There are the untouchable burn marks. There is a cauldron of seeds. Our glittering shame. Unspoken—speaking. I opened the door to the room with etch marks clawed into the wallpaper. The text was threadbare, the walls in shambles. Whatever was left of the will was unwilling.

I felt responsible for the gulf between my mother and father. This guilt developed a space between waking and sleep. Perhaps it was because I was a middle child, or perhaps poets are created from threshold worlds—from languages left behind, their sanguine music lingering on the palate.

6.

That night I dreamed of saving Father. He was drowning in a lake. I kept awakening to  what sounded like a raccoon, tumbling the trashcan of shadows. At night, when the stars were like heavy lids laden with supernal light, I searched through Father’s double-breasted blazer pockets. I found a stack of rupees, which I hid under my bed. I wouldn’t spend them, but keep them there along with a few cockle shells from Karachi until Father discovered it so that he knew I had looked for it. It was odd logic—but not illogical as Mother supposed. Not the work of an ingenious criminal mind. The work of the bellows: the work of the wind’s tyranny and magic.

The myths of childhood unravel in front of me into a golden globe I hold in my hand and enter at will. I can travel to the celestial worlds, to netherworlds, to hell. The walls engulf. The walls grasp their own tirades. Between the walls, the ants build, rebuild. To leave a chair inside the room, so that last leaf can enter fr

om the tree that is sprouting voices. I begin to weave this body into the song of  ancestors. Those who were left behind. Those silent ones who rob my dreams and colon-

ize my eyes. There is no leaving. There is here. The walls invade the body. I have pierced through to the other side, where the wind belches with bullfrogs on a road in Lahore. In an airport, or in a room. Does “I” matter if I am waiting again? Something other than an image will at last emerge from this room in the middle of nowhere. Tell us. Into yes and no. On this road that is no road. On our winding dispersal. Leaving. Waiting. Leaving. One ends up wandering. Waiting. Wandering. Trapped in leaving. Stationed here. In possible departures.

Ever since I was young, I’ve seen how dreaming shaped the waking body. (The ocean’s innumerable fingers grapple with and lend shape to the shore. As I matured, I desired to be trained by someone who could trace the finger back to the crest of dreaming and unlock the body’s history. I wanted to know the hand that shaped me. Thresholds are like lips unwilling to prove …)

7.

When I reach the border, they will push me over to the other side. With a wink of an eye, I will be freed from this ancestral torment.

The ability to descend into a place awakened when I talked to Father the last time. His eyes were like tornados.

Often I found myself trapped there, falling downwards towards the house’s centre of gravity, if there is a centre of gravity to a place. Whether this was my imagination or not, I cannot ascertain. I often found myself buried between rooms, as though the room could not contain a body. Buried between conversations.

Objects detached themselves from my mental grasp, melted into the semblance of memory. Their meanings formed from memory, now shadows of memory.

Gravitating to the epicentre of a place, I was dropping into a dark hole. Room—the body appendage. Dropped from the memory of a foreign architect. As I descended, I began to turn a deaf ear toward the sounds in those rooms and their dead conversations. Then they awoke us.

What is this unitary other, amalgam of the house of theoretical abstraction? Bedrock where the self reconstitutes itself. What you fetishize is not one lost voice, but, for lack of a better word, an archaeology of lost voices. Here absence belongs to the unlettered body, is not the domain of your primitive methodologies. The sense that fails in failing guides. Against a colossal groan at the heart of nothing. Once I dreamed that “the other” could be constituted in an open space until the earth opened up and we were nowhere to be seen. Now the text is inhabited by valved mouths bursting the seams of history.

Before the Nightmare roamed the house with its atrophied legs, Father recited Iqbal’s poetry by the fire. Then he would leave for months without a word. A few weeks later we would receive a letter: “I will be back.” These simple four words were like inscriptions in the heart. They were like the knobs of a door into the blackness of a night without stars.

MAPPING THE FURNACE ROOM

   When he was a child he had a passion for mapping and demapping
the house. De stratifying, stratifying. Imagining maps
in his cobbled mind. He walked around the block with a question
that had been bottled in the furnace of the house.    
A question like “who am I, here,” and upon arrival at the same
point on the block. Inflammatory question forged in the furnace
of the house when he filled a glass pitcher with distilled water
and clambered over a mountain of photo albums to arrive at the distiller.

   At one point in my little brother’s dreams, I went back to Thunder Bay.
I was terrified at arriving at the absent place, the buried gable.  This would add
another scale to an already bat-like existence - where stumbling
was the same as walking through the heat of another place. If one kept oneself open
this long, the heat would either sear them, or the cold would make the bones release
stories. Either way there would be stories.

   The furnace room was where we kept distilled water, picture albums,
newspaper clipping of father topping his class in Pakistan,
but never getting a job because he wasn’t white enough in Pakistan.
He was no gentleman, bric-à-brac and Tommy Mugs, antique maps.
The floor was cold and uninviting and there were skis and imaginary
mountains as soon as he walked in—objects could yearn in absence
possessed by an independent life. When doors closed those doors
could be an opening in another room: a hinge unhinge another place.

   Dogs could still run in dreams when their paws twitched;
the furnace could die and when it did there would be a fight
and in the argument a landscape vast as an atom—a disappearance
into maps—or there could be the tropics. And we could love white.
And we could act our parts and slightly change our names, but those lost letters
now are living in another room unhinged, where there is no furnace
and the heat could kill you.

2.

  We could, in secret, hate our past.
We never arrived, having never left. And always
we would leave a door open to a past, to a bullock cart,
a servant, congenial conversations in the living room.
The grammar is still there, but the words
would be for our children to figure. We never taught them a mater tongue.
We never tongued them. We weaned them in white.

  Already space is auditory, clacking hinges, a furnace humming
in the morning, bamboo frames (somewhere else). Already
space is a mackerel slipping from fingers back into sugar cane clattering, hexing
the way that a sentence could move if it remembered. A word dismembered
is a new member of the family.

  Plates underneath the earth could quake or cleave and forge another signature
over and over again. We shift from India to Pakistan to Canada. There are scattered
clothes of a dead brother whose name we must archive at some point.
There are sounds that twist and wind, arriving nowhere.

  Father says something like: I should have one more wrinkle, but I desired immortality, before that I had intentions to send money home.
So I told my son he was useless.
In 1947 I was a child.
In 1947, I gave a speech for the formation of a new country.
In 1947 I will never grow old.
……….I killed a Hindu.
……….I may have thrown a knife in the Indus. The Indus eats away the shore,
an autoimmune disease. I release dead bodies from my mouth
killed on a train to Jalandhar to Amritsar. There was confusion—now I am—

   Someone tried to get on a train to Pakistan and he was shot dead with his left leg left dangling from the platform. These are por
traits now draped in white linen and the snow covers my tracks. I am a detour to another room. I could unwalk and unwalking
could mean mapping backwards.

  Let the heat melt and I’ll find my feet.