Torn Lace

A correspondence between
Shivanee Ramlochan and Andre Bagoo

Dear Andre,

I confess to you: I think often of fire, my friend.

Burning bodies has always been crucial to how I understand death.
The
first cremation I attended was my grandfather’s; he was transformed
into
ash and tiny fragments of bone on the banks of the Caroni River in
Trinidad,
according to Hindu rites. I remember the immense nature of that
heat,
how even out in the open it felt like a furnace. I remember the dome
of my
father’s head shorn clean, in accordance with the traditions. In truth,
fire has
never been very far from my traditions. Fire is what I believe and
hope will
herald my death, in the end.

Despite this, I’m afraid as hell. Some nights, I close my eyes and the
Northern Range of hills in flames comes to me, like the harbinger of
a dream
that might yet come to pass. It’s true that some forests can take care
of
themselves better than humans can dare to imagine. It’s true, too,
that
most forests might be better off without a human footprint. We did,
after
all, weaponize this fire. To warm our homes, to scorch our meat, to
slough
the life off our bodies when we’re ready to leave.

I admit to you that when I wake in the hot night, I reach for my
match-
stick and candle to try to stave off the burning heartache of the
world. It
may never work, but I offer you such an admission. All I can do is try
to
caution myself against the wrong kind of flame.

The World’s Oldest Woman Offers
Herself for Dissection

That canny empress ripped from her colony
Shielded the lucifered tallow with her madness,
Trailing torn lace and nitrous promise
Through Thornfield.

Staked through their mad hearts with sargassum seaweed,
All madwomen understand it’s better to consume the manse
With fire. It’s better, if you can, to light the
Lamps on your pathway to hell.

To protect myself from burning, I stuffed my old heart full
Of sphagnum moss. I lay down in the bog of the
Cretaceous country and begged for a loamy death. Let
Every soil cradle me when it’s time to go.

To keep the fire from the trees, I ate them.
Scissor me surgically, and you will find
Bromeliads from the Botanic Gardens
Functioning in place of my pink lungs.

Come closer. Lean in. The Guiana Shield wetland forest
Balances on my breastbone, Roraima’s Amazon
Reservoiring upward into my suprasternal
Notch. Cut me there and let loose the waterfall.

Remember, as I’m laid out on an amphitheatre
Table, what I’ve said about madwomen
Is that we mark the cycle of living and reforestation through fire.
Forgive, if you can, the smell of burning human flesh.

When the world was first beginning, there was a forest.
You can see that, can’t you, staring at my insides?
Peel back the flesh curtains, jigsaw this mountain
Range from that one, witness how deciduous and strange it was.

Dear one, delivered mad as I am into our green basin,
Sanctified, arboreal, calcified soft tissue,
Deribboned skin as sucker vines, unclassified by modern
Science – know I tried to keep growing things alive.

Even now, in the year of Our Fall 1001, when we are hotter
And more intemperate than any combustible hell.

Tropopause

such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, and then, again,
such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never
knew such a night
as this
a lowness
a poor, bare, forked animal
a small deer
a traitor
a storm at his bare head
such children
such a fellow
such sacrifices
such addiction as yours honours
such conditions
such unnatural degree
such a tongue
as yours
unconstant starts
such dispositions as ours
such a need to hide itself
such a monster
such a king

Secondary Circulation

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts

Cento for Richard Georges

skyward

What are poems but prayers?      birds always find their way
back home    but home is    nowhere – a memory; a never was Do
wings remember        the air       my beard grows wild I forget
goodbye          comes in the languages I cannot remember
coffee grounds wet like earth when I am gone don’t tell anyone I
am gone the clouds no longer look like drowned bodies        but I
can no longer trust my mother’s histories The sun sank like a hurled
stone             you will find your way Everywhere is song         the
hollow wail of galvanise roof tearing away from the rafters        still,
long after the storm had taken him They say he held the door        the
thing that breaks you is all there is

Andre,

When I was very young, younger still than my grandfather’s funeral, I
would
climb onto my uncle’s roof and gaze over the sleeping green plains
of Las
Lomas. In my thirty-four years of living, I’ve seen verdant hills
denude to
housing complexes, I’ve felt the throat of the rural part for rivers of
metal,
as constant and solid as long, liquid staves splicing the hinterland.
When I
read your poems, I taste the wind of that frayed childhood. My heart
beats
as quickly as the green span of an owl’s. If I go mad in our
Anthropocene,
dear one, then let it happen to wingbeats. Hold on to this if ever you
find
yourself in a place made unbearable as a furnace, a landscape where
the
temperature has become your enemy.

Fierily,
Shivanee

PS, a coda:

Cinquain of Safekeeping

When fear
Somersaults you
Wide as naked doves, cry
Into the air for safe passage
Spread wings.

Shivanee Ramlochan

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, critic and essayist.

Andre Bagoo

Andre Bagoo is a poet and writer, the author of four books of poems.