The Body Keeps Its Own Scripture

A poem

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was watched,

and the watchers were afraid of it—

which is how we knew

it was holy.

My mother taught me

to speak certain truths

only with the water running,

her voice beneath the sound of it

like a second river,

secret, necessary,

the kind that feeds the root

and never reaches the sea.

I thought this was how all women spoke.

I thought the water was part of the sentence.

I thought silence was a kind of punctuation

every language shared.

I was a child.

I did not know

that elsewhere,

the sentence simply

ended.

There is a tenderness in deprivation

that no one tells of—

the way the starved hand

reaches for bread

as though it were a sacrament,

the way the throat withholds a word

so long

it becomes a reliquary,

the thing inside it

more precious for the keeping.

We were precious things

kept in keeping.

We were psalms

written in margins

of a book

the empire claimed

to have never read.

Abroad, I watched a man simply stand—

hands in pockets,

no apology offered by the spine,

no permission being begged

by the angle of the shoulders—

and I wept,

quietly, later, alone,

for every body back home

that had learned to make itself

into something that does not threaten,

that had turned the raw material of personhood

into an act of careful diplomacy,

that had made of standing

a negotiation.

The body keeps its own scripture.

The body does not forget

what it was taught to ask for.

And I want to hold the bread

that does not arrive—

the flour counted at the crossing

like it is ammunition,

because to them

it is,

because the fed body is a rebellion,

because the full stomach

is a radical act,

because the child who ate this morning

will ask,

by evening,

why.

I read the books

the way the desert

receives rain—

with the whole of myself,

with a thirst

I had not known was thirst

until the first drop fell.

Books that were not permitted home—

not for what they said

but for what they assumed,

which was the one assumption

they could never forgive:

that the reader

had been born with the right

to know.

To know is to name.

To name is to claim.

To claim is to become

a question

the occupation cannot answer.

I met a scholar in a cold city

that did not know her name,

a city of grey light and cathedral bones,

where she wrote her thesis

at a kitchen table

in the hour before dawn

when the world

does not yet ask anything of the soul.

I asked her if it felt like prayer,

the writing, the distance, the doing of it here.

She said:

it feels like praying in a language

God may not speak in this latitude—

but I pray regardless,

because the alternative

is to let them have

even my silence.

And the artists—

oh, the artists

who do not make beauty

for the approval of the beautiful—

who make it the way the body makes breath,

never for glory,

nor the ledger,

who make it because the lungs

will have it so.

One showed me a drawing—

her grandmother’s fig tree,

a courtyard,

a door that no longer stands

rendered in such patient and exacting grief

that I could smell the afternoon through it,

could hear the particular hour

of a childhood

that the bulldozer could not fully reach.

I asked: how do you remember it with such fidelity?

She said:

“I resurrect it.”

Every line is a testimony.

I am the last witness,

and I will not

be an unreliable one.

They took it all

but all cannot be named in a petition:

the unhurried hour,

the book open on the table in plain sight,

the sentence spoken at full volume

in one’s own mother tongue,

the standing with hands in pockets,

the water that runs

simply because one is thirsty,

the childhood that does not know

it is being watched.

These are the liturgy of the ordinary—

that made of our ordinary

a crime,

and of our existence

a proposition

they have been trying to defeat

for longer than most nations

have had names.

And yet.

And yet.

Here is the wound that blooms—

I came to this cold, indifferent elsewhere

and I found Home

in every room that would receive me:

in the stranger who spoke its name

like an entire country could live in a breath,

in the shelf where our forbidden books

stood between other books

in absolute and ignorant freedom,

in the kitchen where someone said

teach me—

and held the word

like a covenant,

in the painting hung in a corridor

between a coat rack and a calendar,

asking only to be beheld,

not applauded,

not acquired—

only seen,

which is the oldest human asking,

which is the asking

beneath all other asking.

I found it.

I found us,

scattered and luminous

as relics after a fire—

and it was not enough.

It was not enough.

It was the reflection

and not the river,

the letter

and not the hand that wrote it,

the name spoken in a foreign mouth

with all the tenderness in the world

and none of the weight—

none of the specific, irreplaceable weight

of being from the ground

and standing on it.

There is a grief for which no elegist has written—

the grief of the person

who finds their country

faithfully reproduced

in every place

except the place.

Who can eat, here.

Who can speak, here.

Who can stand, here,

full-spined and unashamed,

and carry this freedom

the way one carries

something that was taken from another—

with gratitude

that is also guilt

that is also love

that is also fury

that is also the four of them at once,

at dinner,

every evening,

without resolution.

I am free

in the way a torn page is free—

separated from the book,

still bearing the words,

unable to be read

in the sequence

the author intended.

There is no return

that restores me

to what we were before the leaving.

There is no departure

that releases me

from what we left,

from the condition,

from the cartography

of being human

and from there,

and from the particular there

that the world has decided

to debate

while we are inside it,

while we are the ones

the debate is made of.

We are the people

who see our country most clearly

from the distance

that is undoing us.

And we see it—

we see it the way the dying

are said to see the whole of life,

with impossible clarity,

with the specific cruelty

of the thing arriving

at the exact moment

it can no longer be held—

and it does not come home with us

because we do not have the home

to take it to.

Only this.

This suspended memory.

This vigil.

This in-between that has become

a permanent address.

We stand outside the river

and we know every stone of it,

every cold current,

every place the light

breaks the water into something

almost unbearable to look at—

and we are not wet.

We have never,

since the leaving,

been wet.

The women carried it differently.

In the hands that kneaded bread

at four in the morning

because the children would wake

and the world would not pause

to be ashamed of itself,

and someone had to feed them

before it started again.

My mother’s hands.

Her mother’s hands.

And the women still there —

I was raised inside this someone.

I learned to read

by the light of it.

I did not know, then,

that it was a miracle —

I thought it was simply

what women were,

the way I thought

water was simply

what rivers did.

I know better now.

In the darkness

of being the one who holds.

There is also —

God help us —

a humor,

that only comes

from the unsurvivable survived:

the women back home

who make a joke

in the middle of the wreckage,

who laugh at something

sharp and true and wrong,

who will offer you tea

from the last of anything

and dare you with their eyes

to refuse.

I have never been able to refuse.

I was not raised to.

Here too —

the women who received me

before I’d earned receiving,

who looked at something in my bearing

and recognized it —

the quality

of a man

shaped by women

who were shaped by fire —

and simply said: sit.

I carry two worlds at once.

The one where I can sit

at a table that will hold me,

and the one where I know

what it costs the others

to remain standing.

Back home they are feeding children

on the arithmetic of what crosses the crossing —

and they are funny about it,

the dark gorgeous humor

of women who have decided

that if the world insists on being terrible

they will at least not stop being themselves —

who make of catastrophe

a dinner party,

who set a table in the rubble

and call it Saturday

and mean it,

and pull out the good dishes.

I was built by these women.

My sentences were built by them.

The way I reach for metaphor

when the plain word would wound too much —

that is my mother.

The way I stay

past the point of comfort

to make sure the room

knows it is not alone —

that is every woman

who held a household together

with the domestic equivalent

of bare hands and theology.

We share this, the women there and here —

the knowledge of what it takes

to make a table from what remains.

To light something

in a place that has been

deliberately darkened.

To call it home and mean it

and know simultaneously

it is not enough,

that nothing about this is enough,

and to do it anyway —

with style, even,

with the indestructible style

of those who were never given

the option of falling apart.

I am the son of that style.

I am the poem it wrote

when it thought

no one was watching.

The bread is on.

The tea.

The door is open.

I learned that from them.

The women here carry their grief in therapy.

The women there carry it in their posture —

and both are correct,

and neither is enough,

and they would love each other immediately.

The women here have words for what happened to them.

The women there just lived it

and made lunch.

The women here light candles for healing.

The women there are the candle —

lit, melting, still giving light,

slightly annoyed about it.

The women here journal.

The women there

are the journal —

every page filled,

nothing crossed out,

no privacy assumed.

The women here are learning to rest.

The women there forgot rest existed

sometime around 1948

and have been

suspiciously productive

ever since.

And this—

this is the thing

that heals

and will not be called healing—

this knowing

without having,

this seeing

without standing in the seen,

this love

enormous, precise, and homeless,

reaching,

always reaching,

for a shore

that is ours

that is there

that is real—

that will not,

that cannot,

receive us.

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