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Overview
A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams.
Tethered to Stars inhabits the deductive tongue of astronomy, the oracular throat of astrology, and the living language of loss and desire. With an analytical eye and a lyrical heart, Fady Joudah shifts deftly between the microscope, the telescope, and sometimes even the horoscope. His gaze lingers on the interior space of a lung, on a butterfly poised on a filament, on the moon temple atop Huayna Picchu, on a dismembered live oak. In each lingering, Joudah shares with readers the palimpsest of what makes us human: “We are other worms / for other silk roads.” The solemn, the humorous, the erotic, the transcendent—all of it, in Joudah’s poems, steeped in the lexicon of the natural world. “When I say honey,” says one lover, “I’m asking you whose pollen you contain.” “And when I say honey,” replies another, “you grip my sweetness / on your life, stigma and anthophile.”
Teeming with life but tinged with a sublime proximity to death, Tethered to Stars is a collection that flows “between nuance and essentialization,” from one of our most acclaimed poets.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571315342 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
| Publication date: | 03/09/2021 |
| Pages: | 104 |
| Sales rank: | 293,293 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Listening Suture
A beam of photons, muons,
say 17.3% are remnants of the deceased
or, in planetary demographics,
it’s 71.3%—I can’t say
whose dead, if any are mine
or had journeyed from other galaxies
on home or away legs, they’re here,
riding it out on beach nimbus monarchs
as if light never ends.
A silver dolphin then two
glisten black, arch their spines as pelicans
play eureka with leaping argent fish.
I’m with my family,
encore, liquid or flesh,
displacement is a body.
“There’s no center that isn’t made up
of periphery,” my daughter says,
the two of us knee-deep in Gulf water
whose clarity is Mississippi silt. I say
“And within each periphery
a center rises up.” On the drive back
lightning struck summer’s habit.
She was at the wheel
and hard rain pounded the highway,
the windshield’s lids too slow for the din.
Her knuckles turned pale.
“Here comes an underpass,” I said.
“A series of them,” she said.
Mausoleum for a Scorpio
“Speak to us of poetry and politics,”
he said to me from his seat in the audience
as I was on stage. Throughout the weekend,
before the prize was made public, he was euphoric,
buoyant, generous, said his father was a tyrant.
“Say something about exile,” he requested
a little later. We were in a small town
no one lives in, that patrons had turned
into a hostel for arts and culture, outpost
for fair and festival, colony for a future
that spares ranches, hiking trails,
vulture flocks that trim carcasses
and claim fences. The main hall was a restored
cottage where an icon was born: her mother
tended the land, her father walked to work
and home, and her brother, unaided,
built the treehouse in a pecan
we can still see. Later, the poet,
with mic in hand, took the stage and said
that he stood for beautiful things in literature,
for kind speech, then read a poem by a brilliant
woman who’d recently died. Troubadours aside,
he added, and pound for pound, the precious
lunacy of translation, “There’s no language
like ours:” We have Shakespeare, have abolished
consanguinity, erected a sky to bark up
the cellulose of time, “and I don’t say this
to be bellicose,” he preempted the thought
reserved for presidents, not prophets.
Far from morose in an age of infidels,
between his thumb and index, he held a daffodil
he’d plucked from a nearby pond, an anthem
he never abandoned. At dinner
he told me three decades had passed
since he’d come across a love poem a famous
Arab had written. He didn’t like it. That’s
alright, I thought, it’s sentimental, rhymes
in the original, and its best parts
are untranslatable. He spoke with the tender
transparency of fibers liberated
from ill will. “And that Nobel Laureate,
he’s great, but arrogant,” he clarified,
“though another cried at the sight
of a hill in the backwoods of Burgundy.”
“Shakespeare is not English,” I said,
my poker face on. “You mean
he belongs to the world?” he replied
after a brief pause—then picked up a thread
from an earlier chat, on the mysticism
that pervades Asian shores,
occasionally setting sail
to us, or we to it: “As for the Sufis,”
he said, “it’s all been done before.”
And I hadn’t taken him for a believer
in antecedence. Though it is
in his spirit that pigeons fly
as lightly as they alight.
The Holy Embraces the Holy
1.
That you have nothing to say,
your deep sadness reserves me
as a den reserves a security blanket.
That in the mirror I see you.
You were not there.
Your silence was a mask.
I read from it.
2.
The studies done so far
have not been good studies. We agree:
more research is needed, more money allocated,
so that we practice what we return to when we say,
don’t judge me. I took LSD once.
I experienced no visual or auditory hallucinations.
The drop possibly had no drop in it.
Or maybe the vendor thought to protect my friend
a young medical doctor then, from herself.
Or she overpaid. Or the hit was a gift.
3.
We went hiking. There was a rattlesnake
and I heard what it had to say.
April snow was melting in Zion national park,
we had no wet or dry suites. I saw two currents meet,
one held off the other: at the interface
a mirror. God’s face in slo-mo plumes
of dirt and gravel. Then in a self-contained
area blinded by a bluff we came across
a woman calling out to “Bob.”
He was her husband, she said.
She could have been Japanese,
had an accent as I have an accent
with certain names. We offered her a few discerning
glances into the woods before my friend whispered
one of Zeno’s paradoxes to me:
which story did we want to see
through on acid?
4.
Six months later in Paracas, with the same friend,
before I became the son of the mother who loved me
or loved me not, we visited the national park on the Pacific.
The resort was where stone desert is alive with sea
and no greenery negotiated life. Mindfully we went about
acquiring more debt: dinner was included,
but we didn’t have enough for lunch or breakfast.
Complimentary tea or coffee with warm bread
and rolls of salted butter was what the Queen said we could eat.
By the third morning, we went for the gratis like it was a jugular.
5.
That your sadness was a silence
and your silence no mask.
That you have become epic,
no chronology sustains you.
6.
In Paracas I shroomed. No hallucination.
My grip on reality was wicked. The waves
delivered the gust to shore and I summoned
my magic carpet, straddled it like a bike,
my tiptoes on the ground. On the cliffs a fleet
of red condors pulled out their panopticons for the seals
a hundred meters below. The wind was an exalted rubble
off the edge. With their wingspan some condors rose
as if free falling then floated above waiting.
7.
Condor Legion: the air
squadron that bombed Guernica.
Historians: when they are
“camp followers” of empire.
Poets: when empire’s tragic clowns.
8.
For dinner, freshly caught large sea bass
worthy of display for the dining room guests.
We did not tip the waiters, we were not yet
the great doctors of America. The driver,
we tipped. He played our kind of music
on the car radio and took us to a cave
where water cymbals crashed into stone,
and nearby fisherman pitched their rods
along the shore like streetlights.
9.
That you have nothing to say.
That your deep sadness is free
to be deeply sad near me,
some of what love is for.
10.
The week before, we’d been on the Inca trail to Machu Picchu.
The stuff about altitude sickness is real,
but so is the stuff about coca leaves.
We ascended into mist then frigid rain.
After long rain a full moon
made love to snowcapped mountains
in a cloudless sky.
11.
In the Sacred City, I wanted to visit the moon
temple on Huayna Picchu. Time said I had to take the hill
running and hopping
at a comfortable nonstop pace
so that I might make the last bus down
to Aguas Calientes. On my way up I passed
a depleted man sitting on a rock.
His half-life was visible in a plastic water bottle.
On my descent, he was near the top,
a decaying wolf who couldn’t blow a house down.
I stopped to water time.
He gulped, said he was French,
asked me where I was from.
12.
Did he say “French,” or did I
infer it from the few words he muttered
in his deep state of rapid heartbeat
and mediocre oxygen exchange?
He asked me first: after I insisted
he'd take an extra gulp from my canteen,
for heart and lungs to turn serene.
I took his question to mean
that he wanted to credit my kindness to a place
when he gets to tell his story.
I gave the credit to Palestine.
13.
His face, which had been a theatre of struggle,
went blank. Suddenly he was playing poker
alone. Did I have a face? Could I have passed
for several options, Algerian, Spanish, or could I
have been an Afrikaner?
Maybe “Palestine” was the last thing he expected to hear.
Or his face had nothing to do with the word.
Maybe he anticipated “American” first and foremost
because I did say “water.”
14.
That in the mirror I pulled up your hands.
A pose you’ve shadowed
all your life isn’t always a pose.
That your hands were all water,
all night, light was with us
stabbing us in the back.
15.
Years passed for years. Into a patient’s room
I introduced myself with an apology.
For two weeks he’d been a hopeful captive
subjected to the merry-go-round of doctors.
A dying man with another dead person’s heart
that gave him all it could.
And in this world, a person is rarely transplanted
more than once. “Yes,”
was the transplanted man’s response,
“you guys are like clowns in a van.”
Faceless (as, in fairness,
he was to me) I burst out laughing.
16.
A few days and he mentioned endings,
said that a chaplain randomly assigned to his floor
asked him if he wanted to speak about faith.
The chaplain was Muslim, Ali,
and the patient was not that kind of Texan.
“If only more Muslims were this nice,
the world would be a better place,”
the transplanted lone-star said to me.
Leaning against the wall, hands behind my back,
I nodded in cold agreement.
17.
“You’re a, a …” he asked. I nodded yes,
neither one of us uttering the word.
“And you have a sense of humor, too.
The other day you laughed at my joke.”
He loved sailing.
18.
That you have nothing to say.
From the unrequited to the unconditional
to the imaginary. That your sadness
unbuttons my heart, kneads its clowns.
That a heart remains a heart in its beyond.
Isomers & Isotopes
1.
Our paradise is trampled.
Our childhood wasn’t insured,
it endured in damaged dwellings.
1.
No paradise is untrampled,
it formicates us junkies.
We spin to love,
murder, suicide, and our lips
are our hips, silage and cud.
1.
As grownups, for decades
in pecuniary bliss,
our resale value tripled that of our parents.
2.
From room to room
the rain had risen from the sea,
from room to room our cells merged their fires
with the darkness of our sleep.
2.
The beat follows you affectless.
2.
The rain had risen from the sea to gentrify us,
Oh Aspergillus fumigatus, the detritus
was mostly next door.
2.
We met our deductible
and it was low.
We rolled our years
then smoked our years.
3.
I was a visitor,
was just visiting when she died
in the hospital where I was born.
3.
I was visiting her faculties as a plastic tube
sealed her windpipes which a mass
from her esophagus had burrowed into.
3.
In farewell she wrote on clipboard
“Revolution ‘til we triumph.”
4.
She went through a lot to get here,
through concrete and dried up in it.
Then pirates took her in. She learned their songs
and the earliest of them was in a wedding.
4.
“Ma’am, your fat pads are not who they say they are,
and since the rise of the eye-snatchers
we can’t be sure of your retinal Hancock.”
4.
I drabbled and droned semantic remorse,
Eddie the monster, Eddie the horse,
and was just at another queen’s court
when my parents crossed as time on a rock
that pokes a rib chronic.
4.
“Ma’am, the shaman who offered you
the first stems to sprout in snow,
did she say her name?”
5.
In stereo, in stereo
we prolong the music,
we’re good at rotating
light, polarizing it,
there’s language between us.
5.
And clusters discrete from other clusters
to prevent our closing up on ourselves
as we wait for the sun to change its ways.
5.
Reliably the weather
invariably comes
with maps.
6.
If white came first, if red
stole the brain’s flow until stars appeared
portals for blue.
6.
Omnipresent
the beast follows you affectless.
6.
Smooth gray hairless scalp
of a head preserved in rotting,
casing vestigial
and orbital cavities.
6.
The torso displays
arachnoid limbs and pterosauroid wings.
The splendor’s in the thing’s fluidity:
it flows in water and you walk on air.
6.
This isn’t Death but the God
of your childhood enuresis.
Decades have passed
since you last wet your bed,
still your body insists
on messengers on mute.
7.
Dreams like phantom limbs.
Dreams of bladders on the verge.
7.
Therefore, the villages
are tickled with irrigation
and krill travels deep in a gray whale suit.
Therefore, herrings pleat coves
white with egg and sperm.
7.
As for sirens—those always cease when they reach me.
Those I always hear.
Table of Contents
ContentsCanopus
Taurus
Leo
The Holy Embraces the Holy
Pisces
Every Hour Has an Animal
Problems of Moon Language
Sandra Bland, Texas
Neon
Listening Suture
Syzygy
Unacknowledged Pollinators
Solstice
Descending, Rising
Oxygen
Carbon Copies
Cancer
Blue Shift
Calligraphy for a Sagittarius
Mausoleum for a Scorpio
Equinox
Isomers & Isotopes
Aquarius
Elegy for a Kaleidoscope
Capricorn
House of Mercury
Postcard from a Virgo
Gemini
Domicile, House, Cusp
Aries
Three Leaps of the Gazelle
Black Hole
Libra
The Old Lady and the House
Altair
Event Horizon
Sirius
Year of the Metal Dog
&
Venus Cycle