What is the Shape of your Body?

Sometimes in the spaces, there is fear. Choose one:

1. The body of a woman, how she moves through the day.
2. Inside her: lolling oblongs, a little runny.
3. As seen through the mosquito net.
4. The translucencies of Sigmar Polke.
5. I don’t know anything.

Artificial resin, lacquer on synthetic fabric. Substances that caused the
surface to change colour. Silver oxide, red lead, cobalt chloride. Lanterns.
Transparent polyester. Layered washes of lacquered colours and resins.
I don’t know where to begin. But I know my elbow, my back tooth: throbbing
I must.

1. How she moves
“I keep looking over my left shoulder, to see if he’s still there":
My name, my body. Such versions, I occupy. Live in, as surely as a dungwall
house, a house that does not turn, is not born twice: skulls, oranges.
A ladder leaning against a eucalyptus tree. A black hen with her red beak,
in a basket of straw in the tree next to the front door of the house. Where
I live. With a man whose one eyebrow
joins together. (Blown ash.) Plum
blossoms. Mango orchard. Rooster. Two eggs; bees. A very dark brown
horse. A clay oven. Honey. The sun. A cinnamon liqueur, he brings me. I
gulp then sleep, stunned by the sweetness of nouns. He has made altars of
peacock feathers, paise, tiny mirrors, a dried stem of jasmine that is taller
than I am. Then I’m awake. Wild salt of his chest and belly. A bed.

It may be that I have taken an irreversible action. (Woody smoke.) A goat
skin drying on the clothesline.

2. Her body
I risk lemons. I risk melted honey. I risk water. I risk an old wine bottle that
has the shape of a Dravidian goddess. Her abandoned torso. Her hips.
The massive sloping stubs of her transparent shoulders: I risk. The green
glass of this body walking, slowly, along the orchard path. Balancing the
lemonade on my head.

3. Her eyes
It is difficult today. The orchard. (Making something.) I see making a shape
there. Dragging a black tarp under the farthest mango tree, over the old
skins and nettles. I began to. But stopped.

4. Her surface
Red clay. A dry riverbed. I’m scared of the dogs. I’m scared of the cowmen.
No. I’m not from here. My hair loosely braided, oily, not kempt. My
body gets smokey. Gets holes in it; its layers of bright cotton. No. I was,
without a doubt, born in an English-speaking country. A country I could no
longer tolerate.

5. What she knows
Shame may be fatal. l am here now. How I got here: gravity. The long dark of
the border of Pakistan and India. Speed faster than colour. Not being a man,
I bleed like this. To arrive seasonal, in pain, not what he thought.

I am not beautiful. I couldn’t even look into the faces of the air hostesses.
Only the darkness around them. At a slant.

I write because I cannot paint.

Salt. Rose. The colour black between the stars, beneath tongues. The
darkness of our bedroom when we blow out the candles. The coals and
the ash in the ingiti at dusk. The sound of a man working with nails and a
hammer, as I write this. Later, after chai, we’ll have our bath. Salt crystals
from Goa. Rosewater from an Indian grocery shop in the East End of London.
It is difficult. He is always with me. These are the scraps.