Abecedarian For The Sacred Roux
Allons. Grazing bald cypress bark with open palms,
bayou bends and whirring airboats full of swamp:
Cajun mornings sprinkled with mallard sunshine beaks,
Dimanche dirt prayers—andouille pews carved from fallen
elms and glass stained with sacred roux, debris and silt
filter through our pores, letting us suck in sediments.
Gumbo burnt deltas remind us of Ganges ancestry, a
habitation where me and bhai dip our pining fingers
into the throats of our late relatives: their watery eyes
journey along the river, telling us stories about their
Kolkatan genealogy. Mythological—like rougarou tongues,
lore of folk and tale, turtle shell conchs chiming games of
mère may I: dozing gators along the banks snore and bell.
Nous—nous, we walk to Gariahat in search of onions and
okra to build castles in the kitchen with Ma and Baba. Back:
papillon pecans cocooned and covered—moon stringed moss.
Qu'est-ce que c'est? C’est tout. Amra—me and older bhai
ride a pirogue and paddle toward a star singing our names:
siffler—ragas and talas, hypnotized from mosquito hums.
Tabla beats drum our ears from centuries ago—Dagi’s
urn, a cremation to remember a kiss on the forehead:
vas, meandering amid accordion notes, floating up and up,
we fill our chests with past monsoons and marigolds, and
xylophones ring and dance from dawn’s distance where les
yeaux of twilight melodies envelope like fog and mist and
zydeco clefs hover in our stomachs—a fifolet on the horizon.
Shome Dasgupta is the author of The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), and most recently, the novels The Muu-Antiques (Malarkey Books) and Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West), a prose collection, Histories Of Memories (Belle Point Press), a short story collection, Atchafalaya Darling, and a poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, New Orleans Review, Jabberwock Review, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.
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