Portrait of a Lady - Ranjit Hoskote

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Portrait of a Lady - Ranjit Hoskote

Objects are lessons; from bowls, hairpins, brooches,
you learn of forgotten lives. The stories say
my grandmother was a fever tree:
two birds sat on her branches, one pecking
at a grape, the other singing an aria.

What history's bookkeepers do not show
is the tremor down the spine she felt,
the tendril of blood that coiled in her nose
when the whistle of a train annouced
her husband's return from a tour of duty.

In the stories, she's an actor, a pilgrim;
shadow-boxing with a thunderstorm,
she slips through scrubbed floors
and ember beds. She leaves me

a loaf of shortbread in the oven,
a page of couplets in a script I cannot read
and wrapped in a peel of green appleskin,
a tea cup glazed with a Dutch windmill.
the last one of the set.

The urchin-cut waif in the vignette above
is the child she was. Voyeur, clairvoyante,
she stares in at windows, her head a gourd
hollowed by the age she never reached
in life, her hair a silver floss.

Objects are lessons; the light seeps
through the slats, sets off a shimmer
on her lace. She's crocheted the evening
and its creatures: the silken thread
that she pulls from her pattern

knots tight around my neck.