The Part That’s Left for You
By Hari Alluri
i
You won’t find what you’re seeking here,
a beginning in which salt emerges as the bridge
between the Sky and Sea. I’m sorry you can’t have
an origin that holds you. The serpent in the ocean
who chases seven moons into eclipse,
the one whom gods and demons grip
to churn, to churn—nectar, poison into being:
your blood can’t simply connect these stories
so the deity of loss becomes origin to salt.
ii
(Somehow this will still begin with salt.) The earth will not
belong to how you hold the earth. The bird in the story
may never alight where your homies visioned, combining
three birds you are from. This illegitimate salvage
brings no augur to save you at the crossroads, no.
You’re wrong again. You’re faltering. The signs
are all around: sun, moon, stars, and land,
a failed attempt to overthrow—and more to give. This
is only partial, another displaced version. Like you, it’s incomplete.
iii
And, in every moment: whole. You’re from
mistakes, my dearest—the failure of Gods to love the world
They made. Not only, but still: a world begun in war,
which is to say, in mourning (before this story separated them
Sky and Sea would touch). Here is the land, who led the rise
and fell. Here, the stars, the moon and sun: their raised-up
light, what the Gods had to settle for. After the Sea
convinced the Sky to try: Their own brightest failure—
it’s up to you, my loves—to restore the dead to life.
Notes:
Prompted by a conversation with Keana Aguila Labra and Maria Bolaños, in relation to a collaboration with visual art by Julay.
Prompted by a conversation with Keana Aguila Labra and Maria Bolaños, in relation to a collaboration with visual art by Julay.
Source:
Poetry
(January/February 2024)
