Someone Is the Water
Austin Araujo
I am alone but for this vein
splitting the earth open
and we are silent, the stream and I

far away from our mouths. The stream
folds over itself, my hand
speculating under the surface.

The stippled faces of orioles
sail by slowly, their dark wings working
hard as tired men pulling oars

in a landscape painting, their lantern
chests dotting a modest pattern
across the sky, over this brook

a mile from your house—from you
who are alone but for your sons
and your sons' refusal to recognize

you cloaked under a sadness,
the color of whose cloth is muted
as these late-afternoon birds.

The stream sluices crawdads
and stones, carefully takes its bend
like a tongue spackled with canker sores.

I still expect it to speak. I've come
to listen to this slow
unfurling, hoping I'll fall

asleep as it turns like a lullaby
a child promises he will strain
to hear, to memorize. I make sense

of smudged pastoral visions.
Gone, the birds long gone.
Palms, I cup water with bent palms.
from the book AT THE PARK ON THE EDGE OF THE COUNTRY / Mad Creek Books
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I wrote "Someone is the Water" across several September mornings in 2020. I'd been idly reading TJ Clark's book, "The Sight of Death," which probably sourced the poem's insistence on the materials of painting to describe the landscape of rural Arkansas. The self-conscious language of art-making was potent for me as I tried to approach and describe a memory of my adolescent difficulty with a parent's emotional and physical difficulties. 
 
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via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Color cover image of Ranjit Hoskote's translation of Mir Taqi Mir, The Homeland's and Ocean
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"Mir’s voice speaks with clarity and urgency, with anguish and a timely critical resonance to our historical moment. His themes are our themes, his loss is our loss, his bewilderment is our bewilderment—the destroyed city, the devastated countryside, the scattering of friends, the exactions of exile. All these are features of our lives today, in a world marred by genocidal wars and forced migrations, invasions and insurrections, tanks and bulldozers, bombed cities and slaughtered populations."
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