Lachryphagus
For a Tear is an intellectual thing.
x
In the Amazon, a moth lives off birds’ tears by harpooning salt with his
barbed tongue.
x
At school, they called me Weepie: I couldn’t take sledges or switches.
x
I never saw Apa cry, except once.
x
Ama’s eyes are always filled. Her love, buckwheat bread and salt.
x
With each tear, her face forgets itself.
x
When Parvati told Shiva she wanted a child, he gave her a scrap of cloth:
Go make yourself a doll. She withdrew to a cave. When her tear fell to the ground,
out of the clay rose Ganesha.
x
I watched the crow tear Apa away from himself like bread and could not cry.
x
Basal, reflex, psychic.
x
To inherit the throat is to inherit the elegy.
x
A man cried at everything. You took him a gift, he cried: My people
remembered me. You didn’t, he cried: My people forgot me. You called him
by name, he cried: You remind me of my dead mother. He cried plump
gooseberries. Once he cried because he ran out of tears.
x
Don’t we all subsist on someone else’s tears?
x
When Apa’s shrine leapt up in flames, I was inconsolable. But what vision
could emerge from such belated lacrimal molt?
x
O Performative lipid.
x
O Public antibodies.
x
The one time I saw him cry was the day after he had lost his voice.
x
In Rose-Lynn’s photographs, “The breath between laughing and lace”
is a dry riverbed. “Tears after goodbye” are x and x.
x
Look, Apa, what you’ve turned me into: a scavenger of grief.
x
A tear of the crow fell on a valley and a lake was formed. The jackal
dreamt he was drowning in the lake and the only way out was to drink it
empty. When he swallowed the last drop, a city rose. The crow threatened
the city with the curse to deprive it of water if her tear was not returned,
but the jackal had already been slaughtered and buried beneath the city.
x
It’s a terrible place, the land without tears.
The first line, "For a Tear is an intellectual thing" is from "The Grey Monk" by William Blake.
