Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

This That We Have

2021; Wiley; Volume: 109; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tyr.2021.0083

1467-9736

Canisia Lubrin,

Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity

This That We Have Canisia Lubrin (bio) call the year anything / call it twenty-twenty-somethingthe maps can tell us nothing everything somethingof this electric world where doors open the expanse of memory freeing itself into the diaphragm of oceans, soils we find bearable like life or maybe language a liquid thingwe lock our heads around & hearts what to do with theseflesh-chambered engines we widen widen like the sealikea morning no more invisible than a black shoeon a Black foot than two black hands lacedbefore a windowed, night-hued citybright clusterof fingernails enclosing the daywe come to these cracked spaces tuned— to the lifetimes of extinctions swimmingin our mouths white-noised asthe future—a figure of speech [End Page 144] we are past hidden our lives, ourselves hingedto winged things like shadows at midday ruined cities crowding at our feetto watch what is rehearsed the waywardness of crowds to meet again in the convoy on our way to anything blue and scorching just as to arrive un-fleshed we who sound the Atlantic's long ragecall the year anything; call it 1492every sunset, an emergencyin this worldcaptives bellying their sense of the dark as day splits opena dangerthough we bow to everyone who brings a drum [End Page 145] a fiddle for the frenzied ringing in our boneswe practice savingourselves from the quadrupling intoxicationsudden, inconsolable as anything the elephant'sstolen tusk the frozen plane below must crack like cymbalsin this knowledge but who can hearwhat we do not the fevered incantations of the dew way up herethe chorus tonight [we know by now]is the gurgling of seahorses& the starfish giving up their placentasto the wideness of the sea just as the barking dog a country awayenters its cracked femur into the log marked for savingthis world more intimate now to usis the flammable language of mapsthe silence we admire in the birth of thingsthe effusive doctrine of birds above us, such incandescence we movewith the desiccated graces and stones and roses the lines we inherit the error of floating houses [End Page 146] do we petition the summoners of our preventable catastrophes— whoever claims to cleanse the villagewithout picking sides is not believed until the tongue pulls us together in the middle of repetitions the shared sutures dissolving in our eye amid our flight, our voices splotch the distanceour resplendent songs blackening like a hurricane refusing a boat to wreckthe wounded map we dance uponwe danced it here to the plantations at the sea's beginning bend tell everyone the matteris not the self which we have always hadnor the cavesthat in their damp and dark, know themselvesbut the maps we'd move the world to make [End Page 147] like healers— & crickets, disorient the cartographer's loftinessdown to bush and flock to sunsets that hidethe lengths and breadthswe come back to; papered with no even sense of the invisibleeven empty as clay potswe want the repaired century nested, stained and carried in our headsthen loosed to the tall grasseswhere frenetic servants' visions are ledgers of our semblances a clearingthe timbre for our reunions look, call the year anything we should bringbring a place to point to when we arrive [End Page 148] Canisia Lubrin canisia lubrin is a writer, editor, and critic. Her books include Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, and Code Noir. Lubrin is the recipient of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Windham Campbell Prize, and other honors. Lubrin is an assistant professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada, where she completed her MFA in Creative Writing. Copyright © 2021 Yale University