The title 1000 Pieces of Time provides insight into the author’s concerns: time, mortality, and imagination.
Clock time goes forward. A person is born and dies in clock time. What to do faced with the inevitable? The poet confronts mortality with imagination. His speaker finds beauty, Botticelli’s Venus, on a travel poster in a window on a block of boarded up stores. Venus looks downcast, “as if she knew / how beauty could be stolen / how winter always crushes spring.” With imagination a child, Mary, teaches a rooster to walk backwards in “Walking Backwards.” Today she is immortalized in her stories, in a book titled The Complete Stories, by Flannery O’Conner. “The Sweater,” is set in the present. The detail of “a thread unraveling / on the sleeve of a shirt” evokes a poignant memory of the poet’s grandmother’s life.…
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As she sat
bent over,
in the least-smudged chair of my garden set,
my sister told of
a neighbour who styled his garden
—its stubborn hedges and out-of-average-reach trees—
with hair tweezers and nail clippers (for feet).
As she drank
her coffee,
cross clover continued to unroot the grass,
and drunk wasps circled ground-struck apricots,
while unimpeachable ivy
succeeded in suffocating the “permanent” plants
in the borders—green nooses left unseen.
As my eyes
grazed over
the playfully growing decay, I knew
she wasn’t talking about my nature
and though I already had my answer, I still asked
my sister—
‘You think the garden has something to say[?]’
– Josje Weusten…
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Jui’s paternal aunt, Bomma, had been a hoarder for as long as Jui could remember. The dull maroon single-door LG refrigerator would sag and droop under the weight of expired ketchup bottles, moldy slices of Amul cheese and steel tiffin boxes filled with the month’s leftovers. Bomma was not someone who threw or gave away anything. Boxes of sweets offered for Ma Kali’s puja would be relegated to the bottom shelf and swiftly forgotten as she was insanely diabetic. Their housemaid Asma’s special mutton biriyani would ferment for days on end after she had had one bite and found the meat too hard to chew. Stray mayonnaise and chilli sauce sachets would accumulate by the dozen on the rickety brackets of the fridge door. Every once in a while Asma would attempt to perform a cursory clean-up and be rewarded with choice words for her trouble.…
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The sun shines hard on the thick blades of crabgrass whose roots carve deep into the hard dog-pissed soil while the seven year cicadas play high, heavenly strings in search of a dying mate. In the speckled shade of a young cedar elm a small day old bird has fallen from its nest and is crying. The freshly mowed grass is crying too; one million blades cropped to the shoulder on one fifth of an acre and then a brown stained fence between another stiff fifth and they are all drowned out easily by the low fierce whir of dark green ac units cooling homes spaced as evenly apart. Every home with the same brown fence, every home with the same grey driveway, every home with the same blue sky, every home with the same small elm planted, and it will be twenty-five years and three new owners before children swing from the branches.…
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One Sunday morning in May, my mother telephoned and asked me to attend Mass with her. I was busy packing my books and deciding which ones to leave for my nephew Sam and his sisters, and I had fourteen papers on Theme in The Great Gatsby to read and mark by the end of the day. I didn’t want to go to church. But the Mass was being said in memory of Papa Vincent, my grandfather, dead these twenty years, and members of his family would be expected to bear the gifts—the little carafes of water and wine and the loot from the collections—to the altar during the Offertory Procession. My father, the sweetest soul I knew, was feeling under the weather, and my brother, a believer, was out of town.…
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Outside the wide front windows, rain is washing
the field of concrete with sheets of
water, the cars sitting like obedient puppies
as grime falls away from their coats
Outside the windows, laughing people scurry
under any overhang to keep dry and
pull back their children who strain to slap the soles
of their feet -and the soul of
their hearts- against the shining surface of
gathering puddles
Outside the windows, two men sit where they
found refuge for smokers under the
window overhang, a tin can as ashtray balanced
on the bench between them,
the profile of the elder showing him speak as
the younger reaches a hand to touch
the frail man’s shoulder.
Inside the windows, the air has turned the shade
found at the mouth of a cave, shadows
in far corners, growing darker deeper inside the
usually bright bar.…
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I only found out on my tenth birthday that I had to wait three more years to be a teenager. Up to the age of nine years, 365 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds (it was a leap year the year I turned ten) I thought teen just meant double digits. But apparently they set up a system where some of the double digit numbers had the suffix -teen in their names, and ten, eleven, and twelve were not them, and you had to have the suffix –teen in your age to be an actual teenager.
I can still hear my infuriating older brother George informing me of this at 12:01 a.m. on the very morning I turned ten. Maybe 12:05.…
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