In the Lateness of the World Read online

  ALSO BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ

  POETRY

  Blue Hour

  The Angel of History

  The Country Between Us

  Gathering the Tribes

  PROSE

  What You Have Heard Is True

  EDITED BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ

  Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500–2001

  Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Forché

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  This page constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Forché, Carolyn, author.

  Title: In the lateness of the world / Carolyn Forché.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019037457 (print) | LCCN 2019037458 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560401 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525560418 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3556.O68 I5 2020 (print) | LCC PS3556.O68 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037457

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037458

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  for Harry and Sean

  and in memory of the others

  To those, finally, whose roads of ink and blood go through words and men.

  And, most of all, to you. To us. To you.

  EDMOND JABÈS

  CONTENTS

  Also by Carolyn Forché

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Museum of Stones

  The Boatman

  Water Crisis

  Report from an Island

  The Last Puppet

  The Lightkeeper

  The Crossing

  Exile

  Fisherman

  For Ilya at Tsarskoye Selo

  The Lost Suitcase

  Last Bridge

  Elegy for an Unknown Poet

  Letter to a City Under Siege

  Travel Papers

  The Refuge of Art

  A Room

  The Ghost of Heaven

  Ashes to Guazapa

  Hue: From a Notebook

  Morning on the Island

  A Bridge

  The End of Something

  Early Life

  Tapestry

  Visitation

  In Time of War

  Lost Poem

  Charmolypi

  Souffrance

  Sanctuary

  Uninhabited

  Clouds

  Passage

  Light of Sleep

  Theologos

  Mourning

  Transport

  Early Confession

  Toward the End

  What Comes

  Dedications and Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  MUSEUM OF STONES

  These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,

  collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,

  battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir—

  stones, loosened by tanks in the streets,

  from a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,

  schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,

  pebble from Baudelaire’s oui,

  stone of the mind within us

  carried from one silence to another,

  stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,

  agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards,

  chalk, marl, mudstone from temples and tombs,

  stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,

  stone from the tunnel lined with bones,

  lava of a city’s entombment, stones

  chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,

  paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,

  stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,

  those that had flown through windows, weighted petitions,

  feldspar, rose quartz, blue schist, gneiss, and chert,

  fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe

  of a Buddha mortared at Bamian,

  stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,

  from a chimney where storks cried like human children,

  stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,

  altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, load and hail,

  bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,

  stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,

  concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,

  all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk

  with hope that this assemblage of rubble, taken together, would become

  a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred

  like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

  THE BOATMAN

  We were thirty-one souls, he said, in the gray-sick of sea

  in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.

  By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight,

  all were soaked to the bone, living and dead.

  We could still float, we said, from war to war.

  What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone?

  City called “mother of the poor” surrounded by fields

  of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers,

  with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah.

  If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone.

  There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters

  from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under

  the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you.

  But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night

  we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting face-

  down in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us.

  After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain

  of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where?

  We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans

  again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised

  to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive

  with no safe place. Leave, yes, we’ll obey the leaflets, but go where?

  To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?

  To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, w
here?

  You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.

  I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.

  I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

  WATER CRISIS

  They have cut off the water in the sinking metropolis.

  Do not wash clothes! Bathe only with small buckets!

  Meanwhile, cisterns on the roofs of the rich send it

  singing through the pipes of the better houses.

  There is the sound of applause, it is the clap of wings

  just before doves enter the darkness of the dovecote.

  Then a quiet comes. The sirens die down. Security gates

  slam shut. It is like night. We are waiting to breathe again.

  The gamecocks are forced to fight with knives taped to their feet.

  This is illegal. So is everything else and there is never enough.

  The logs are fed little by little into the mouths of the clay ovens.

  Many songbirds have been roasted by the heavens.

  Motor scooters flock through the streets, a murmuration.

  Crossing like starlings the skies. It is a matter of thirst.

  They transport the cocks in baskets covered by plastic bags—

  their entire lives tethered to the ground, trapped in wicker.

  Until they are angry enough. Roof to roof in the conclaves,

  cistern to cold cistern. They have seen to it.

  The rich will have what they want. Is this a relief?

  The last cloud is empty. The first death reason enough.

  REPORT FROM AN ISLAND

  Sea washes the sands in a frill of salt and a yes sound.

  We lie beneath palms, under the star constellations

  of the global south: a cross, a sword pointing upward.

  Through frangipani trees, a light wind. Bats foraging.

  Foreigners smoke the bats out by burning coconuts,

  calling this the bat problem. Or they set out poisonous fruit.

  The gecko hides under a banana leaf. So far nothing is said.

  A gecko mistaken for a bird that sings in the night.

  It is no bird. A healer blows smoke into the wound.

  Sees through flesh to a bone once broken.

  In the sea, they say, there is an island made of bottles and other trash.

  Plastic bags become clouds and the air a place for opportunistic birds.

  One and a half million plastic pounds make their way there every hour.

  The pellets are eggs to the seabirds, and the bags, jellyfish to the turtle.

  So it is with diapers, shampoo, razors and snack wrappers, soda rings

  and six-pack holders. Even the sacks to carry it all home flow to the sea.

  Wind has lofted the water into a distant city, according to news reports:

  most of that city submerged now, with fish in the streets.

  It is no bird. The man hasn’t sold any of his carved dolphins.

  Geckos don’t sing. The vendor of sarongs hasn’t sold a single one.

  Prau, the boats are called throughout this archipelago.

  Spider-looking. Soft-motored. Waiting at dawn.

  Geckos can’t blink, so they lick their own eyes to keep them wet. Their bite

  is gentle, they eat mealworms and crickets. This is why no crickets sing.

  No one talks about it, but people look to the sea

  toward where the plane went down. There is time to imagine:

  one hundred eighty-nine souls buckled to their seats on the seafloor,

  the wind too much for the plane, the gecko now at the door.

  After the earthquake, people moved into the family tombs.

  Many graves now have light and running water.

  Others live at the dumps in trash cities, where there is work sorting

  plastic, metal, glass, tantalum from cell phones and precious earths.

  This work is slow. A low hum of ordinary life drills into the mind

  like the sound of insects devouring a roof. There is no hope for it.

  There is only the sea and its yes, lights in the city of the dead,

  and a plastic island that must from space appear to be a palace.

  THE LAST PUPPET

  Moonlight taps on the puppet maker’s hut, the tip of a brush

  touching hide, light falling into water from an egret’s wings

  like tears on glass. Stones dusted with ash. Taps as if someone were there,

  attempting to wake us up. A bell ringing in a tomb of cloud.

  This debris is the puppet maker’s house, taken by a sudden wind.

  A storm like the future, filled with pigs, trees, cars, and something

  no one should wish to see. Fires on the seafloor. Burnt weather.

  The once-soft air embalmed in salt. As if God said it.

  They kill the snake, drain its blood into a glass of liquor

  along with its still-beating heart. Not everyone does this.

  You drink it, and later you chew and chew the strong muscle of snake.

  In another place, the blood of fruit bats is given without the heart.

  No one knows the difference this makes.

  Souls have their own world. The corpse its bone cage.

  Nothing but fire everywhere the fire finds air.

  There are no hides left, this is the last puppet.

  The puppet maker lifts it to the light and has it speak

  a language it will never speak again, its shadow finding the shadow

  on the wall of no one else. Then he puts a last song in its mouth.

  Souls have their own world. They are the descendants of clouds.

  Take this puppet to America. Hold it to the light.

  THE LIGHTKEEPER

  A night without ships. Foghorns calling into walled cloud, and you

  still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,

  darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.

  Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool

  you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:

  the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,

  there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow wick lamps,

  whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,

  the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.

  You say to me, Stay awake, be like the lens maker who died with his

  lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be

  their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.

  In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,

  seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out

  for a long time. Also, when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,

  and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.

  That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing

  to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread

  from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.

  THE CROSSING

  No matter how light it was or wet the fields, and whether or not the horses

  from the stable down the road had broken their fence and were grazing

  near our windows as horses in a dream, Anna would be gone, out

  pounding the earth with her pronged hoe. S
he never woke me, although I slept

  beside her, like sleeping near a hill wrapped in house-silk. Her teeth floated

  in water on the nightstand where she kept her spectacles, this woman who

  crossed, as a girl of my age, in the hold of a ship for weeks, lowering

  her bucket of night soil by rope, then, from the sea-rinsed bucket, pouring

  seawater over herself on the lower deck where bathing was permitted.

  The salt stiffened her hair and burned her eyes, but she was clean.

  It isn’t what they tell you, pisklę—calling me the name of a little bird that sings

  too much. If there were no cattle, horses, or sheep to be sold, they would take

  people whose passage had been paid and whose forfeit put up. Our papers

  were in order, and we had the passage and forfeit to board. They gave us

  drinking water, but shut off all water at night. Two weeks of the rocking

  boat and stink of buckets, all of us asleep on planks. Such rise and fall, such

  pitch of the ship! But some nights on deck, holding the rails for all her life,

  she said she ploughed the sea as she once had the fields, and into the furrows

  of light went the seeds and the black-winged waters fell upon them.

  EXILE

  The city of your childhood rises between steppe and sea, wheat and light,

  white with the dust of cockleshells, stargazers, and bones of pipefish,

  city of limestone soft enough to cut with a hatchet, where the sea

  unfurls and acacias brought by Greeks on their ships

  turn white in summer. So yes, you remember, this is the city you lost,

  city of smugglers and violinists, chess players and monkeys,

  an opera house, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir

  where two things were esteemed: literature and ships, poetry and the sea.

  If you return now, it will not be as a being visible to others, and when

  you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if

  someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why.