I Taught Her Granddaughter Her Poems
The child recites them now, in almost exactly her cadence.
My daughter haunts our kitchen with my dead mother's voice, and I am the one who taught her how.
Six years old, missing a front tooth, standing on the blue step stool she has outgrown but defends like territory, reciting a poem about monsoon rain to a bowl of soaking lentils. She pauses in the middle of the third line... Not because she forgot. Because that is where the pause goes.
I never taught her the pause.
I would swear this in court. I only taught her the words.
My mother wrote poems for fifty years and published none of them... Zero. She kept them in a Nice biscuit tin that had not held biscuits since before I was born, in school notebooks with the multiplication tables printed on the back cover, and when I once asked her why she never sent them anywhere, she looked at me over her reading glasses and said, “Why should the poems go out? Everyone I write about comes here.”
She wrote about everyone who came there. The milkman who sang. My father's snoring, which she rhymed, viciously, with several things. The neighbor's dog. Me, at every age, including the ages I would prefer remained undocumented. She wrote standing at the kitchen counter mostly, in ten-minute pockets while something simmered, and when she was working out a line she would tap the rhythm on the steel counter with her wedding ring, tak, tak-tak, tak, like the poem was a door she was knocking on.
She died two Augusts ago, eight days after meeting my daughter for the last time. Pneumonia, at eighty-one, quietly, the way she did everything except laugh.
The tin came to me because nobody else wanted the responsibility of throwing it away. That is the true sentence. My brother said, you are the one who reads. My father said nothing at all, just held the tin out with both hands like it was hot.
For a year it sat on top of my wardrobe, and I want to be honest about that year... I did not open it. Opening it meant her handwriting, and her handwriting meant her hands, and I was busy, I told myself, I had a five-year-old, I had deadlines, I had a functioning life built substantially on not looking up at that wardrobe.
Then one evening my daughter, in the bath, invented a song about her toes and could not make the second line fit, and without thinking, without any decision I can point to, I tapped the rhythm for her on the edge of the tub. Tak, tak-tak, tak.
My hand did it.
My mother's knock, in my knuckles, on wet enamel. I sat on the bathroom floor and cried while a five-year-old patted my head with a soapy hand and told me it was okay, the song had too many toes in it anyway.
I got the tin down that night.
The Curriculum
Here is what nobody tells you about inheriting an unpublished poet: you become the only edition of her work. Those notebooks exist in one copy. The cadence existed in one throat, and that throat is gone, and the only recordings are accidental, a wobbling phone video of a birthday where she recites two lines and everyone talks over her. When I understood that, the grief changed shape. It stopped being about missing her and started being about arithmetic... One tin. One copy. One reader so far. My mother's entire literature was six inches from becoming a rumor.
So I did the only preservation I could think of. I started teaching the poems to the person in my house with the best memory and the fewest prejudices about poetry.
We started with the rain one because it has thunder in it and my daughter approves of thunder. One poem at a time, a few lines a night, sitting on the kitchen floor because it felt right that the kitchen got them back. I read each line, she repeated it, and I tapped the beat on the floor the way my hand had learned without my permission. She memorized the way children memorize, instantly and possessively, correcting me when I slipped, because the poem was hers now and I was mishandling her property.
The cadence, though. The cadence I cannot explain.
Around the fourth poem, she began doing things I never taught. The little downward step on the last word of a stanza, like someone setting a cup down gently. The way my mother leaned on the middle of a line instead of the rhyme, so the rhyme arrived offhand, almost embarrassed. My daughter does that. She has never heard it done. The only theory that holds is that the cadence was in me, riding along inside the words all these years like a stowaway, and my daughter simply heard the whole cargo. Something in a family travels below the language. We keep thinking we are passing down words. The words are just the packaging.
I thought I was teaching my daughter her grandmother's poems. I was really teaching her the silences, and the silences were where her grandmother had been hiding all along.
My father heard her recite at Diwali. The monsoon poem, on the step stool, missing tooth, full ceremony. At the third line she did the pause, that held breath before the thunder arrives, and I watched an eighty-four-year-old man put down his tea with both hands because one had begun to shake. Afterward he said only, “Again.” She did it again. He is not a crying man, my father... so he sat there not crying, harder than I have ever seen anyone not cry.
The Ninth Poem
The turn I did not see coming was at the bottom of the tin, in the last notebook, dated the spring before she died. A poem titled For the One Who Comes After. Present tense, addressed to a you, a small you, a you who stands on things she has outgrown. My mother met my daughter perhaps a dozen times. It was enough. The poem knows her: the stubbornness, the thunder-love, the singing to lentils. And it is unfinished. Eight lines and then white space, with a faint pencil dot where the ninth line was about to begin, the knock on a door she did not get to open.
I read it to my daughter and made the mistake of saying Nani never finished it.
“It's not finished?” she said, offended on a level I had not anticipated. “Then we have to finish it. She would be so cross.” This was said with the total confidence of someone who has learned another person entirely through her poems, which, I am beginning to believe, is one of the more honest ways to know anybody. We have written four candidate ninth lines so far. All four are terrible. We are unbothered; her grandmother's drafts, we discovered, were terrible too, and I have learned from poems about hope that the point of a next line is not to be good, it is to exist. Last month I typed up the monsoon poem and put it where other people could finally read it, among writers nobody had heard yet, fifty years late for a woman who insisted the poems never needed to go out. Forgive me, Ma. Everyone you wrote about still comes here. But now, sometimes, strangers come too, and they hear you.
Yesterday, passing the kitchen, I heard the step stool scrape and then the small voice starting the rain poem again, unprompted, for an audience of lentils. Line three. The pause. The held breath, exactly hers, in a mouth with a brand-new front tooth coming in.
The thunder arrived offhand, almost embarrassed. It always does. She taught us that.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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