A Memory Of Its Ceasing
Philip Glass
Helplessness And Helpfulness

A Memory Of Its Ceasing

I grew up in an old shamble house now overbuilt, decorative for several decades,
but now with a slight gangly tarnish of neglect.

It’s still full of Hindu and Christian idols and celebrities:
Swami Ramakrishna, Sai Baba, and Jesus Christ.

The idols still sit with and without purpose, as officers, relics,
and spiritual registers.

I find I am now freely espousing but also finding these marks
of idolatry in poetry.

And so, this is about coming back to a normalized moment with a steep,
and yet numbered center: one that does not grouse at bitter states,
not in the hot room of hibernated troubles.

This is the one about when consciousness becomes exciting,
or about developing a feeling of benevolence towards a meager process.

This is about loving what is ordinary and its sentient onement,
           about loving a slow drain that drowns the enormity
with oneself and the localized system of numbering my thumbs.

This is about finding all the freighted blankets and figuring out
that the itchy pain returns in syntactical tatters.

It’s about earning a kind of uninhibited hurting
and finding that it is not an unfathomable creed without a lesson.

It is about the “I” that does the choosing of memories for a truer vision—
in seeing what might be down the vituperative road
and freeing this vision from its shame.

What kind of people are down the road for me?

Who sees me in kindness? Who do I see back in kindness?

I have tried to leave some coldness in the carrels behind,
in search for a new library desk.

This is about human consciousness, personality, and the abstract scripture I might
try to induce.

But there is loss.

I am losing my mother who taught me that Hinduism has ethics in love
and friendship, even when she has been coarse about all of it.

I, too, have been coarse: and thus lost meaningless friends and I must grasp that
only I am weighted down in bouts of sadness…

but to free it from pages, from falsities, how spacious.

This is about coming back to oneself.

No Ram Dass. No Be Here Now.

No Om of sitting in place.

This is about size and succumbing.

Philip Glass

Snow dropping pellets
into the synthesizer.

I have curtains flattering
the window’s flat tones.

I am in quiet reciprocity.

We used to hide out together
in friendship, and I felt so
enamored by your grace until I learned
that it was not a real gesture.

I was never your enemy until
I learned that I was yours
and that your perceptions
drew people away from you.
I believed in a certain fairness
and respect. It’s not subjective,
but like Philip Glass I will learn
all there is about repetition
in art and life, how to see
crystallization in the syllables
of falling sounds.

Helplessness And Helpfulness

I have never felt myself to be a succulent,
nor any plant-creature self-contained.
I have a startled helpless way
in which I anoint others to be helpful
so I can be helpful.  I am told I’m
feral but feel uncomfortable inhabiting it
because so many racist attacks against me
have been about my feral ways
hence I try to be a succulent.

Prageeta Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence 
(Wave Books, 2019), Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013), Infamous Landscapes 
(Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), which won
the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). She is
the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing,
Literary Studies and Art. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award,
she has taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.