On Home And Reading Ocean Vuong in New Delhi
a poem titled, 'Cathedral with no walls'
Autumn. The birds have perched away to another season like an unrecallable memory, sweet as a dissolved rusk in an adopting liquid. the freedom in the town where you sleep remains flightless.
I am in an apartment, the kind of one that is remembered only by the misty sunlight of the neighborhood, and the silent whispers of the gray oat alley. The breeze pauses here for a brief moment before whirling inside through the 4-storeyed window beside my desk. I run my fingers down to its polluted ebony wooden frames. Its texture reminds me of how everything we touch, turns into a breathing tombstone. Like an insignificant victim— into a living, which is to say, overbearing a place to enter into a pious household, but leave out only as a bad omen. leaving out only smoke, midnight arguments, and dubious attempts of a hostage escape. So when my room burns, I remember a verse my sister says, ‘A soul is not burdened than what it can bear.’ and open the door gently for the outspreading smoke and hear the grey bird chirp on my window, every moment as its first.
It’s been more than a week since I have been in New Delhi for my university, and more than anything I have been doing, I have been wandering places without having a destination. With Shahid’s poetry wrapped in my palms, I gaze at the silver lining of buildings stretching along the street, unending. I watch myself, from behind. limbs in a short swing, oscillating like a handheld fan. I see banks over McDonald’s over rail helpline centers, like a packed organic body, fuming out with humans with prescribed needs. And there in a market of such a huge metropolis, I could see boys. tugged t-shirts, younger than the coffee stain on my shirt. left by their fathers. kissed by the streetlight, compare their heights to the Times Now building.
I could not be the boy I thought I could be. And I have been living with him for a very long time. I have shared my bedsheets, those alarming sleepwalk of April, my puddle-drenched Puma socks, and its lava-fuming ulcers from frequent shift on the green sidewalk.
These slender shoulder blades, unbridle like a carcass. shivering with life.
How could I not see it with my own eyes and feel it carve his blue fingerprints on the weight of my palms? tearing my destiny, collapsing his own timeline. How do I tell my father, that I did not lift those circuit tools to repair a wiring, but to learn who I was? and that I learned to abandon the days-old hyacinths shedding out from my shirt pocket on the clothesline, faster than I could learn to understand how the brown clock worked, because tenderness in his words, was the fading sonata out of a piano that hummed only obituaries. Yet I did not create who I was, I touched the glistening blue light in me when the fire crackled the last bleak wooden ember. I danced when the lights turned out, and tasted honey when I pretended to starve. It’s like those moments when you purposefully turn the key to the wrong side of the unlock and know for certain where you are going. and that the other side is the only true direction to Jerusalem, and that if it’s still unfound, you are just a sinner who is told to be more than that.
I feel like the world has come down washing on my knees. And that I am in a Nissan, watching it tussle around my toes. And there is a sound, so much closer to her voice. Offering me to live another hour. Here is a room, you can spend your entire life in. And here is, a home you cannot hide away from. Because the word ‘home’ comes from a Germanic verb meaning ‘to hide’ which can only mean that we have spent all these centuries in hiding, and still survive. That home is also the place inside your bones and flesh where you have turned up too often with a purple bruise on your knees, weaving the air in your, “Let me live again, and I will bring a Milkweed flower pot on my way home”. For love has stirred too long in your house to not turn into a refusal, and you have tried too hard to be understood within the walls of your own house, that you won’t ever will be able to tell how you are without feeling to vomit a world where the secrets keep everyone together, like a slaughterhouse where the butcher could trace down the white spots on everyone’s flesh.
I know I could live Because I have been kneeling down to God for the sake of preservation since the winter striped light to the yellow leaves. Because Ocean Vuong wrote, “The bombed cathedral is now a cathedral of trees”, which means the wars have ended, yet could not unstitch me from my name. That the F-16 planes have smothered the spire, one kiss at a time and left. That the walls are missing, but so are the priests, and so is the history, and the autumn sins. That the rain has dressed the ruins like prison steaks, yet the cathedral exists. barged in exits, full of moss and trees. Philadelphus. Lilac. Acanthus. Honeysuckle. Ivy, and Heather.
So I promise this time to reach soon, to Cathedral of trees facedown. massive. the copper in my knees, carved with knife, a blood brighter than its sound. And I keep on its silver floor the Milkweed from my arms. The turn to home turns a home itself And I was just late to the dining room. crawl, headfirst. tint of red flesh, under a buried torch in your eyes. like a hungry dog. your skin, watercolor into a vanished verb overnight. now call it a hide. I keep you hidden in me. because I was a refuge and never a pilgrimage. The way your spilled juice deepens the shade of the shirt at every touch and still manages to conceal until you wrung it like your grandmother’s braids. The way a Russian misfires in a war, like smoke that was once fire. separated only by the daylight spark. "I thought, it'd be... more violent than this" your fingers like a pink brushstroke, run down the last rayon. the scent of the bed after your somersault spreads like moondust of a rusted twillight. the radio says something, they say how lovely would our house be you grip my arms so tightly. and keep the pot beside me, almost like a bullet that yearns a warm hug. even if it sees it in a barrel.
your writing is so beautiful and such a joy to read, thank you for posting
Your writing reminds me of a feeling that reflects a lot like finding something covered in dust and when you brush it off, you get a story. You get something of a long time ago and it speaks to you. Reading your pieces hold recognition of that detail for me.