interspersing of a poem of Emily Dickinson's entitled "With Flowers" and Shahid's own personal lines that talk of bridging the gap between Amherst and Kashmir, xxx denotes distinctions between Dickinson's poetry and his own related poetry
Reading Dorian Gray in Kashmir . . . for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens . . . of textile and embroidered work . . . the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency, are known in the East . . . --The Picture 2; Dorian Gray Dorian Gray wore those gauzes from Dacca known as woven air, running water, evening dew, that transparent cotton a dead art now, dead for over a hundred years. No one can imagine, my grandmother says, what it was to wear, just to touch, tha...
iii ABSTRACT A snow child from Kashmir, the vale surrounded by the Himalayas, the persona thinks of the snowmen, his ancestors, whose burden is heavy on his shoulders. He wants to enter Spring. But will springtime mean not only their death, their melting, but also his own? . In the streets of Delhi, washed by the monsoons, he explores myth, history, and language. Kali turns to snow in his dreams, and he wants to touch Durga. The gods become mortal, stabbed at their altars. The persona recogni...
HOUSES for Jon Anderson The man who buries his house in the sand and digs it up again, each evening, learns to put it together quickly and just as quickly to take it apart. My parents sleep like children in the dark. I am too far to hear them breathe but I remember their house is safe and I can sleep, the night's hair black and thick in my hands. My parents sleep in the dark. When the moon rises, the night's hair turns white in my arms. I am thirteen thousand miles from home. I comb...
three short notes to self, the copied ending of A Tale of Two Cities, and another entry under the title CRACKDOWN where soldiers enter homes filled with women, proceed to destroy and steal things, all separated by xxx
The Dacca Gauzes . . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite . Dacca gauzes. ' — Oscar Wilde/ The Picture of Dorian Gray Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one now knows," my grandmother says, “what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a rin...
