Saddiq Dzukogi
XII.
Some days are like this:
I step out at first light, to the front porch,
to the basil and mint plants flowering in the confines
of a wooden urn. Like ardent armies,
the stillness of morning leaves breaches the air,
weaving through trees—I crave that silence.
I remember the day I went fishing.
I saw a man clutch his pearl and say,
young man, our heart is a harried housewife
juggling multiple household chores
but unable to keep pace with the promise
of a fruitful life. There is a hummingbird
on the lawn, its throat clogged with glass shards.
Like plants in our crude garden,
our garage,
I keep my secrets shrouded from attention,
the soft lights of fire beetles glowing in the eyes
of the world. I often wonder, inside the earth,
what myth, lies buried, waiting to sprout?
I want to plant where
my mother once toiled winnowing dirt
and husks from rice, to feed our hunger.
Somedays I walk out of the gate of night
with the acrid taste of nightmare hanging,
like bitterkola in the back of my throat.
Staying away from home is not an option
I came to lightly. The disquietness of memories
echo like a luminescent mist
across the woodland of my heart. A shadow chokes
on a shard of glass. I say to my wife the chaos of love
is often more painful than the chaos of war.
She turns and asked, what does that mean?
I reply, let’s ask your silence. The relentless deluge
of swearwords. In the ferocious storm, the rain
pounding against the windows,
it’s like keeping a fragile seedling alive. Since my pacemaker surgery,
I have heard “you’re too young” quite often.
It irritates the heart my cardiologist is trying to cure.
I wish I could say to them, you’re killing me.
I sort through the wreckage like a weaver
delicately threading a loom amidst the fury
of a thunderstorm. Let blessings come down
like a hail of arrows, each piercing through
my heart. On the television
a drowsy video is playing, it’s Mamman Shatta,
his talking drum searching through the tangled
knots of my family’s history, a faint memory
of my father returning from Cote devoir
with a white gallon of milk, or perhaps
it was something else that has since turned to ash.
Something like a fire is raging
in my heart. I am buoyed that there is beauty
to be found at the center of my suffering.
I heard, I think in a song,
that a garden and a grave both begin as empty
plots of land, what sets them apart is the seed
we put in the ground. Each time
I close my eyes, to sleep, I am greeted
by crows. I rather they leave me be,
like a house abandoned in the honed teeth
of decay. There are new and old scars
on my skin—a tree
with a lightning strike-mark.
I said to my wife,
my life is a broken mirror.
It’s not abundance you see but the distorted,
fragmented images of my joy and sadness.
XIII.
At the cardiologist’s, everyone in sight is almost
quadruple my age.
I am like a great-grandson that knows
the disease festering in the old.
Ageist? We are all peers in the way our bodies fall
apart before the bewildered eyes of loved ones
like beggars stunned by hunger,
the hope that we would not tire
and sit out the rest of the road. Below a rucksack
of our feeble breaths, I cursed what pulled me
out of the utopia of youth, what caused me
to fraternize—not in a bar, but at a heart clinic.
I ask, what am I doing here? No music
but coughing, labored breath and quite honestly,
the stench of our collective dying. And
we know it and smile over it. Through a sludge
of emotions, of days being grateful that we see
the light of another day that seems too long
to be possible. The flares of unbecoming.
I come back home. I feed the goldfishes
in my son’s 10-gallon aquarium.
Mouths open, they bunch around floating feeds.
It reminded me of the hospital hallways,
how we too are trapped in our various sicknesses,
how we slog to our own feeds, the hope to feel better,
and be better. Water is gargling from the mouth
of the filter. What can purify us so, I wonder
aloud. I refuse the song of hope, tethered to nothing
but more hope. When the kettle started whistling,
I know it is time for tea. When death starts whistling,
I know God is waiting. The humming of the aquarium
kneads a headache into me. I am reminded of everything
I labored to forget. The grief of the moment,
so the grief of the past, my favorite grief will continue
to speak. It is the only voice O! dead daughter
left in my ears. My hand is on the carpet. I like
to touch things when I think of her. In large parts,
I’ve been stripped. The refrigerator
after intermission, begins to hum on its little opera
stage that is the corner of the parlor. It is time
to sleep. I kiss my wife and fold my shadows
back into my body.
