A Voice on an Answering Machine
I can’t erase her voice. If I opened the door to the cage & tossed the magpie into the air, a part of me would fly away, leaving only the memory of a plucked string trembling into the night. The voice unwinds breath, soldered wires, chance, loss, & digitalized impulse. She’s telling me how light pushed darkness till her father stood at the bedroom door dressed in a white tunic. Sometimes we all wish we could put words back into our mouths.
I have a plant of hers that has died many times, only to be revived with less water & more light, always reminding me of the voice caught inside the little black machine. She lives between the Vale of Kashmir & nirvana, beneath a bipolar sky. The voice speaks of an atlas & a mask, a map of Punjab, an ugly scar from college days on her abdomen, the unsaid credo, but I still can’t make the voice say, Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been dead for a long time.
—Yusef Komunyakaa
Isn’t this poem powerful? Isn’t it haunting? I meant to post Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why” because I assigned it for the Composition II class I’m teaching (“Writing about Literature”), but I ran across this poem in The Best American Poetry 2011 and couldn’t ignore it. Some poems, some words, you just can’t leave alone because they speak to all that you’ve lost in your life and all that you’ll never be able to erase.
My favorite two sentences (lines? what is the vernacular?) of this prose poem are the end of the two paragraphs (stanzas?): “Sometimes we all wish we could put words back into our mouths” and “…but I still can’t make the voice say, Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been dead for a long time.” And I love that though these are lines relevant to this particular poem and this particular speaker, these are feelings that we all have. In really good writing, the specific is still universal.
My first experience with Yusef Komunyakaa was hearing him read his poems at AWP in Washington, D.C. last year. He’s articulate and, if I remember correctly, soft-spoken. I didn’t know anything of his poetry then and I’m only starting to read more of it now, but I am blown away by all that I’ve read. If you haven’t read much of his work, check him out at the Poetry Foundation and listen to him read one of his most famous poems, “Facing It.”
-R
