Stovepipe Hat, Button Nose and Two Eyes Made Out of Whale Bones

I mentioned Ali a while back, and my awesome wife bought me a not-inexpensive collection of his work for my birthday. There seems to be something worthwhile in each of his poems I've seen so far, but this one really caught me with the imagery. It might not stick with me as much as his "Ghazal" that I posted before, but I am so simpatico with the themes he gravitates towards that I don't much care about ranking his stuff into mediocre, good and great categories.


But I love seeing a man grapple so hard with identity and culture and disconnectedness and uprootedness and heritage and measuring up to the past. Definitely a poet after my own inclination: he even wrote the introduction to T.S. Eliot in the "Poetry Speaks" anthology, and anybody who crushes on Tommy Stearns can't go too wrong, in my book.

Snowmen

Agha Shahid Ali

My ancestor, a man
of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag
of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton
carved from glaciers, his breath
arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear
evaporation.


This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed
from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.


No, they won’t let me out of winter,
and I’ve promised myself,
even if I’m the last snowman,
that I’ll ride into spring
on their melting shoulders.