Rumors for an immigrant: a poem in four parts.

   1. Fifth Avenue Plaza

   Water slips down a concrete wall.
   In the plaza, she touches a metal table, a chair, a notebook.

   Noon already. Each thing swallows its own shadow
   murmuring, I cannot flee you.

   She loosens her hair, becomes a woman in a silk sari
   on a high balcony, the trellis cut in bone.

   Rumors clip the air, spread their wings
   and swarm through the plaza.

   Suddenly she feels hot.
   Draws her hair back, a comb glistens in her hand.

   She pulls out a pocket mirror puckers her lips.
   She tries to make small scale order

   (two black eyes, dark skin, two nostrils,
   that sort of thing) out of bristling confusion.

   2. Central Park

   From mouth to shining mouth news darts.
   In fields by the river indigo burns.

   Gandhi enters Central Park, smoke in his palms.
   He raises a charka, a dove coos, fluttering out of his dhoti.

   Behind him, pots and pans lashed to bicycle rickshaws,
   come the people.

   There is no homeland anymore
   all nations are abolished, a young man cries.

   In the lake rumors flicker, make luminous habitation.
   Allen Ginsberg leaps from the reeds

   holding hands with a young man from Conakry,
   dead already, turned into a star,

   shot 41 times by police as he stood in his own doorway.
   Gently loiter, he sings.

   On his charka Gandhi strums a tune:
   I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

   3. Notebook

   She has heard the rumor no one will have a homeland.
   She opens up her notebook.

   She wants to flee her past.
   She thinks she can live on the white page.

   Wo ist Heimat?
   She murmurs this in a tongue she does not understand.

   Wen Beitak? Naad evida?
   Sitting very straight she writes in her best hand:

   I have floated on the river Spree.
   Seen Brecht's Theatre from the outside in.

   Tucked my body into two suitcases,
   with a hole cut between,

   hung in a museum at Checkpoint Charlie.
   Tired suddenly she stops writing, rubs her wrist.

   4. Bodies and Souls

   Three months ago she met a man with a hurt wrist.
   He used to live not far from Mohenjadaro.

   In her notebook she speaks to him:
   I come from where Marco Polo turned.

   As for Mohenjadaro, it is covered in dirt.
   The invisible cities burn in me.

   Here, come under my ribs.
   She claps her hand to her lips

   lest the wind turn this into a rumor
   that reaches Gandhi's ears.

   She whispers the immigrant's name
   adds, in her mother tongue, Ende proven!

   She feels all her days and nights are etched
   on his lonely skin

   in script so exquisite and spare
   no one has deciphered it.

   In time she will be to him as the air he breathes
   so he forgets her utterly

   yet his mouth will be tucked to her ear,
   marking a wild rose, her raw lips to his wrist.

Note

"Rumors for an Immigrant" was commissioned for Arc' en Reve, Mutations, Projects on, the City in conjunction with an exhibit of the designs of Rein Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter (Bordeaux and Fribourg, Fall 2000).

Meena Alexander

Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY