by Carolina Ebeid
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
I can’t say whether the other commuters stand arrested
by this music — the accordion player
near the vendor’s hutch — but it comes toward me, world-
sorrow drafting through the hyaline
shell of myself in thought. Reconstruction-delays,
the stench of piss and nothing
weather shaped, nothing ocean spun. Steam hammers
and dynamite tunneled out
a labyrinth, this inner ear where eros doesn’t linger.
Unbeautiful in its volts and watt-hours,
its generations of mice. The wall is dinged and saccharine-
glazed where he plays in a suit.
I follow his fingers’ miniscule work over a column of keys,
drawing out and in the melody
of that pleated lung. It lifts away from us climbing the stairs
past horse patrols and jewelry hawks,
past scaffolding, and saplings blown like tonophants,
past fruit stands, placards and idle
Greyhounds, the corridors of silver buildings, the thunder
with silver veins — it lifts away
because it seeks the high, lone sun. Admit his music,
Cause of All, it is handmade.
From You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior by Carolina Ebeid, Noemi Press, 2016. First published in Poetry magazine, January 2006.
Please Note: Ebeid’s line spacing couldn’t be faithfully replicated using Substack. The original published poem image is below with the intended spacing.
What handmade things arrest you, grasp you close?
What human-made sounds lift you above and away?
When traveling in Mexico last month, I stood arrested by my senses hourly. Handmade things, their energies and personalities, outlive and outglow mechanical things. I inhaled the handmade world with its dust and smell and colors and sweat and dung and jazz and felt my cells sing. I want to be where things are personal.
Today, I cursed aloud because while we were away, my mother’s doctor’s practice replaced kind people who answered the phones with human-sounding robots. Fuck off, I only want human beings! I wailed at ‘Sophie, your AI-assisted medical admin’. I will spitefully look for a new medical practice because I can’t handle - or won’t acquiesce to - the insult.
Her doctor in Mexico, Dr. Idalia, answered her own Whatsapp messages, came to the home whenever we needed her, and gave my mother long, sincere hugs and a kiss on the cheek when she arrived.
My mother bought the oddest, cutest little cacti with long, floss-like white hair to give to Dr. Idalia as a gift when we left. Cephalocereus senilis, to remember her by.
I also can’t get over the doorways celebrating passage with long, variously colored ribbons, hanging and swaying in the breeze, welcoming one in. The doctor’s office had ribbons cut in an arch over the door, like a girl’s fresh and hopeful bangs. I can’t get over hand-painted ceramic signs embedded in brick and stone walls next to doorways, sharing an affectionate nickname for the house.
I can’t get over the toy my sweetheart bought for me from a cotton-candy-and-toys-cart at the park: a little bouncy ball a human being had poked a paper clip through, to affix a long tail made of blue and silver Mylar strips cut from an expired helium balloon. It spun like the sun, like the verve of using each atom.
What handmade things arrest you, friend? What has stopped you, breathless, lately?
Thank you for reading and communing.
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