Meena

[Meena Alexander, February 17, 1951 – November 21, 2018]
for David, Adam & Svati

Name me a word
Great, simple, vast as the sky
A word that has, like the intimate hand
Of the woman I have loved forever,
Washed the dirty innards of history.
– Jibanananda Das, “Name me a word” | “Amake ekti kotha dao”

Your languid kohl-lined eyes resemble fish
 swimming deep in high Himalayan waters —

where your consort in the guise of Shiva
 holds you steadfast with love’s constancy.

You are a precious blue stone — a bindi, third-eye’s
 astral order, nakshatra’s preordained destiny.

Your name, invoking the cyanic skies —
 now just an azure epigraph in the heavens.

We hang on to delicate atmospheric embroidery
 in these unpredictable toxic times,

trying to resuscitate our own breath
 so we can live. In this quickly changing river 

whose bed is our birthplace with buried stones
 and stone roots, a house of a thousand doors

provides a safe haven, albeit temporarily.
 “Life is too short to drink bad wine” —

we had joked in Manhattan, and again during
 a boat ride in Macedonia’s Lake Ohrid.

Here the water’s pristine aquamarine, and blue
 gem’s namesake — absorbs the shock of arrival

refracting your verse — wrapped in raw silk.
 How precisely our fine fault lines fissures

recall the litany of words, phrases, book titles —
 your poems woven as a pashmina shawl,

a patchwork quilt commemorating the dead
 in colours so vivid that it almost blinds us

with its calibrated extreme saturation.
 Such is our lives, their complicated twists

informing, charting familial stories —
 your sepia-stained chapbooks slow-inking

a storm and its faithful companion
 night scene: the garden of many senses.

The river and bridge we must now cross
 is shaking, fraught with our limited days —

with lies and rumours some have falsely
 created to hide their own insecurities,

their hollow vacuousness, their invented angst
 shielding their untruths from people’s eyes.

Name me a word, my dear friend —
 these letterforms, now emblazoned in gold

on matte red laminate — an anthology,
 urgent beautiful words you gathered —

strung selflessly with quiet meticulous care.
 What would my “one” word be?

How does one reduce life to just one word
 or a hashtag? At the end of our lives — 

we start from where we began — the same
 cosmic sound of our mother’s womb,

the same elongated word-chant: “Om”!
 And in this birth-echo you’ll live forever,

your words and spirit, eternally alive —
 an epitaph in our illiterate hearts — R.I.P.