Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras

By Tishani Doshi
So far from Worcester, Massachusetts. 
Elizabeth—you, here! At my dentist's
in Madras, sitting with pressed knees,
leafing through back copies of Femina. 
Teeth haven't changed much, except
now we have comfort sedation for root
canals, so there's little reason to cry,
which doesn't occlude the possibility 
for epiphany, just makes it harder for
empathy to pass between you and I.

The waiting room is cool and bright, 
full of brown sofas, bad art, bony
teenagers with braces. You really shouldn't 
be reading those magazines full of women
with their horrifying breasts, plumped up 
with silicone, poised like bouncy castles
on their chests. What can possibly be gleaned
from Bebo's diet and make-up tricks? Or Kat's
wardrobe must-haves. What kind of fucked-up
message is: You can be your own Barbie?

Has it always been like this? Women
succumbing to other women, wanting
to inhabit other voices, other tongues. 
Must we dream our dreams and have them too?
And you, Elizabeth—you might have fallen
in February 1918, through the pages of a Natoinal
Geographic, through Florida and Brazil, through
geographies of heaven and hell. Through Lota
and loneliness and a million stinging arguments. 
Yet here you are. Isn't this togetherness?

I speak to myself all the time, like a crazed
woman on the streets. Sometimes I sob
at train stations and wonder—will someone
console me? But eyes mostly glaze and flicker
like hummingbirds, quickly away.
And what can be said about darkness after all?
About men who board buses with iron rods?
What can be said about all the dragging and laying
of bodies to earth? Of landfills of lacerated breasts
and vaginal scree, of girls hanging from a mango tree?

What unity can there be between them
and you and me? What's real isn't what connects 
our meagre horizons, but how we're moving
constantly, a colony of lemmings. At the dentist's 
today, I took the bit between my teeth, and what 
the X-ray showed was a picture of the future. 
Stalactites growing from the soil of my gums—
tenuous, skeletal, telling me that one day I'll die;
that the dust of everyone I've ever known
will lie in graveyards or cremation grounds. 

It wouldn't matter then—all the flossing
and scraping of our tongues, all our universal cries
of suffering. None of it will make the dead sing
sweeter. But living, we must rush to see the sun
the other way around, we must feast on miracles
for breakfast. And even though the million
wild ascending shadows will not be back, 
Elizabeth, we must engrave the words on cages,
swim through the beast of this salty knowledge. 
Our art is worth this much at least. 

Copyright Credit: Tishani Doshi, "Meeting Elizabeth Bishop in Madras" from Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods. Copyright © 2017 by Tishani Doshi.  Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Girls Are Coming out of the Woods