Many are working to scrape Chartres' high windows of their scalelike soot. It's hard to match, in this dimness, the pictures I've held in my mind with what they are pictures of. Hard to see under its glass case, this veil— some bone-colored, disintegrating sheerness.
Once, it saved this city. Once, with armored invaders closing in—someone uncased it—the real veil under which the Virgin gave hot birth— carried it to the high wall of the city to wave its milky shapeliness
until the army, understanding, turned around in terror of it. I love this story, the cool wind moving through this light cloth, warriors running from the slightest possibility of birth-scent— the veil like a glint of arctic ice that cools and holds back the rising water.
And I have sailed the seas to comehere, meaning I have flown over the rising sea to be closer to my idea of here. I look up
at the stained glass—its Madonna looks to me benevolent.
Inside the glass panels of her window she floats in the icy blue restored to her as light
falls burnt-orange through her feet.
Once an angry silver cross hung from my mother's neck. When she was dying she knew her limbs would go first so she kept asking me to check her
feet. I pressed my palms to her high arches. Yes, cold, I said, but didn't pull them into my lap, didn't hold them.
Her feet went cold under the sheet, then the rest of her.
Now I hold them in my mind like an amulet.
What is what to what. What am I doing in the dumb lovely feel of this light
as it falls through this Madonna as it falls through the sea's darkening blues
blues so dark now they can't reflect this light the ice was once armor to.
My father contracted Covid-19 a few days before he was eligible for his first vaccine shot, so at this moment I am reading the poem through the lens of his death. I am thinking, with the poem, about protective covers and access and time and survival.
"To say a poem in English sounds 'artificial' is to condemn it; the same remark about a pre-modern Persian poem could well elicit the response 'Of course it does; it’s a poem, isn’t it?' And so the fact that a particular metaphor or rhetorical trope has been used by many other poets, and is thought of as intrinsically 'poetic' rather than as colloquial, is not so much a barrier to its continued use as a validation of it."
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"Paol taught me how close writing and translating could be, and how both could pull from the deep well of changing landscapes and languages. Part of what drives this work is the way the original physical and cultural landscapes that inhabit our writing are always betraying their translations into poetry. We write the world down, but it doesn’t stay put"
