(thaw poem)

Some days you just can’t think of a title, no matter what you do. Margo Roby challenges her readers this week to write a poem about place that (in one option) keys off of another place description that moves you. I didn’t copy the exact location, but more the style/elements of the opening page of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which remains one of the top contenders for my favorite novel. If nothing else, just the dreamy richness of her description makes the book worth a read. The opening paragraphs, which I borrowed liberally from structurally, are:

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.

But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.“

(You can find the whole first chapter at the NYTimes page.)

Just from reading that, it’s tough to imagine a richer setting description in such a relatively short passage. Roy’s gift for simile and metaphor and personification is unparalleled. (And she’s inventive, talking about people “smiling out loud” and stuff.) The world, in her book, is indivorceable from memory (ties neatly into the last Reverie prompt!) and experience. So, rather than talk about South India where I haven’t been, I thought I’d do a two-month mini-impression of Chelsea. And given the erratic weather/temperatures lately, its feckless dithering is putting me in a mood for a bit of a grumpy poem.

(thaw poem)

February in Chelsea is
a month stripped bare of itself.
The nights are warmer than the days:
albino pigeons lift one thin wing at a time,
while the drizzle dawdles up and down
the crosstown streets. Flags stream
straight upward. Sidewalks
crack. Brown mice scurry from bin to bin,
scooping up memories of stale bread
until the mustardseed man comes,
lays down hieroglyphs of dust: then, only
flat memories of mice
bordered with indifferent frost.

People wipe their hands on frock coats
for fear of catching humanity.

But then March rolls off the Hudson
in great crooks of color, greens and yellows
staggering down the mortared canyons
of brick apartment blocks. Window boxes
overflow in protest while their owners
smoke pot off the balconies. Terriers frolic,
madly mounting each other
and tangling their leashes. Trash gathers,
forming mushroom piles on the grates,
before the cousinly storms
come for their visit, everyone biding time
while the squalls lick the asphalt clean,
then take their leave.