Three Poems by Alycia Pirmohamed
Meditation on Calton Hill
After ‘Mirage’ by Pratyusha
I spend time identifying the trees. The silver birch in Alberta and Edinburgh are not the same / my body in Alberta and Edinburgh is not the same. A landscape alters a body, alters an “I,” alters her imagination. Here, I face the direction of the sea. Elsewhere, my neck may have turned upward to follow a mountain. Elsewhere still, the reeds of a jungle—
Walking up the hill, I leave footprints alongside the footprints of strangers. We share this experience, find commonality and cross the borders of time by way of root, seed, and dirt. Perhaps for the duration of one step, I am on a path in Kananaskis again.
And I remember a body – bodies – also alter a landscape: through consumption, impression, silence. I see the land’s imminent
bareness.
I’m oriented toward sprawling green, toward water, toward the horizon line craning its neck through a cloudy morning. A veil of fog can be so alluring – its ghostliness covering us all until we’re shapeless, faceless, nameless, bodiless. But is fog a defence mechanism? It thickens as pollution thickens. Does the earth manifest these ground-clouds in order to protect herself, eradicate us; our shapes, our faces, our names, our bodies?
I unravel symbiosis – possibilities of healing, of human and water intertwined, of love.
I wonder if we’ll ever live up to this new name.
Self-Addressed
Into the tall dusk,
into the tamarack wood,
into a city which at this hour
could be the shape
of any migrating bird.
This is me, driving straight
into my own life,
past the river frozen over
slick, the chokecherry’s saw
toothed edges—
into the roughage
of memories that surface slow
and tired, memories like
the stars enacting
what is already gone.
I am grasping at
the things easiest to love:
Anas acuta, Pinus resinosa,
Anthaxia inornata, the language
of the prairies,
syntax that I have held
like a dog with birch in her
mouth, a landscape that runs
through a body,
is a body—
into the boiling ginger,
into the neck of a loved one
folded like a leveret,
folded like a letter closing with
I wish you were here,
I wish you were here—
Darkness, deletion
How all of it settled so precisely in its place /
A moment split into half headlight, half thrush /
Every memory changed just slightly /
To want to go back /
Look beyond the moon, the face of her mother /
Beyond the face of her mother, a wild darkness /
“Oyster black.” What else to call it? /
Film of night water and sediment /
In the seam of one shadow, a skirt of birds /
Her mother’s eye is a fishing net /
She talks with the dead, water on all sides /
To never go back /
A long, midnight car ride along the Pacific coast /
Water as slippery as an eye /
This moment drifts like a blinking full moon /
