Poetry Month Continues
This week, QView features poetry by faculty members Uche Nduka (English), Geoffrey Nutter (Classics), and Sokunthary Svay (English)
Peeling Oranges
This is not a call
to worship
the pain I wear
on my sleeve.
I can brick up
the canyon or
change the course
of the wind.
Peeling oranges
while bows ripen
on strings.
As if a reunion
is rising and falling
inside mists.
And homelife coasts
in trees that blare.
—Uche Nduka
For Malcolm X
Incorrigible
and amply fed by red.
The pastoral melancholy
touching bone.
You cracked something open.
What's yours and mine.
A skein of ruptures.
Brutality and tenderness.
The myth of that
which is
called ease.
One damn shot after another.
He fired on the clock.
This dive of an osprey.
Opal of our era.
Agate of any era.
—Uche Nduka
Let Us Look at One of Those Teardrops
In a typical post-war American town in 1957,
in a ranch-style house on Aluminum or Oak Street
on the wood-paneled wall of a bedroom, above
the bedside table where a cigarette smolders
in a crystal ashtray embossed with the logo
of Zim’s in orange lettering, there hangs
a painting of a girl with huge round eyes.
She is a child of perhaps twelve.
Her hair is straw-yellow, like corn to stuff
a corn-husk doll. Judging by her dress
she has spent the night in an ash-heap.
She is holding a terrified-looking cat.
She is standing in front of a blank wall
of a building streaked with earthtones.
And a single teardrop flows from each
enormous eye, each teardrop big and glinting.
Let us look at one of those teardrops.
One day sailing, one executive,
on the deck of his small boat one summer,
drinking his bottle of beer on open sea,
was caught in a glittering mist blown in from the sea.
It was some kind of magical mist from the sea
that makes fathers vanish forever. It might
have made him shrink like Gulliver
to the size and texture of a spice,
or a pink or emerald grain of sand, or turned
him into a fish, or simply made him vanish.
And so this executive was overcome by that mist
and lost and gone forever…goodbye…goodbye….
On shore a boy and girl were eating lunch
out of an erstwhile violin case: papaya
and oysters, agave and sea kelp for salt and sweetener.
They have eloped together having only just met;
and now, among the waving grass and the sisterly
things that also follow no logic, preceded
here in expectancy by sunlight on the ice-plant,
they break their long fast: “How many cats
grew up in your home town? Who paid
to feed them? Was the city green as a tree stump
or blue as an atom summer nights?” “Was Mélisande’s
convolvulus scattered in sunbeams?” “How tall
is God?” The girl lived
in a phosphorescent dome with cement bay windows,
strips of greenish paint curling in the salt air.
Tall eucalyptus trees brushed the sky.
The boy was abashed, having until late been killing time
from age to age, cloud-sculptor, glimmer
of starlight rising with the rays of somerset,
one among people by the lakes of the sea
and living on a ball of wire
where the glassy vertical ships are set on end
along the sky for lightning catching towers.
The sky behind them is brownish, gray,
then gray-violet, shading to lavender, blue-gray,
pearl-gray shading to deep purple, blue gray.
Now let us say goodbye to them. Goodbye…goodbye….
And our true penitent tears turn to solid pearl….
—Geoffrey Nutter
I am the Apsara’s daughter
For Soriya
I wander in her forest
hearing ankle bells jingle with each step,
the universe at her feet and hands.
I want to touch her.
She flies in my house in paintings
with petals of orange blossom raining from the ceiling.
With her bas-relief tattooed on my skin
I worry I’ve offended the deity.
In my dreams I cry out to her,
នាងខ្ញុំ
កូនស្រី
របស់ព្រះអង្គ ។
I am still learning
as I copy myself in her image.
To she who abides in the sea of milk—
I try to churn my own from motherhood.
I hope it worthy an offering for this nymph of clouds and sky.
—Sokunthary Svay
