Video: Adrie Kusserow's The Trauma Mantras, Reading with HDS poets

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Adrie Kusserow's The Trauma Mantras. September 19, 2024.

SHERAH BLOOR: Hello, everyone. Welcome. This is our second poetry event for this academic year, and we're focusing on Harvard Divinity School graduates because we've been inviting poets from far and wide to come and visit us and we have this wealth of talent here. So we've got three brilliant poets tonight, starting with Zia Polis who is a friend of Peripheries, we can say.

And I have to do this. A previous student of mine, because I have to be able to brag. I assisted in advising her thesis, which was a really exceptional book of poetry. And maybe, Zia, you might say more about that. You might not. I don't know. But a book I expect will be published soon. She has her work in many poetry communities and festivals, has been a featured reader for open mics. Her poems are in Nailed Magazine, Mass Poetry, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, et cetera. And Zia, you want to read?

[APPLAUSE]

ZIA POLIS: Hi, folks. Thank you for being here. I feel very grateful to get to participate in this and I feel grateful to Sherah for inviting me and excited to hear from the other poets that I'm privileged to be joined by. I'm going to set a little timer for myself just so I'm mindful of your time and everyone else's time. So yeah, I wanted to read some poems. Can everyone hear me? Should I speak louder? OK. When I lean forward, this is better? OK. No problem.

Much of my work when I was Sherah's a student last year had to do with exploring particular theologies that have impacted my family in relation to questions of death, spirituality, the intersection between love, relationship, and madness. And as an adult poet, I think much of what I've been doing has been trying to untie the knot of my upbringing, and so many of these poems explore that and the place I call home. This first poem is called "Taos House." Taos is a town that grew up near. "Taos House."

Last time I saw him, he told me to fuck off in the middle of the I-25,

Breaking his own heart in preservation of his pride.

We don't talk about it, or the other misadventures.

We talk about the work he has done on the house.

13 years ago, he gave this place, gutting medicines, plumbing, purgatives to pull wall rot

And antique brokenness out through the administrations of a backwoods doctor of carpentry.

This old house he gave walls and windows and doors to

Birthed me a bedroom painted green as immature melon,

Where the ghost of my girlhood still wonders what she'll grow into.

This house slopes down to the east, afloat on an acre of yellow grass.

When we walk the long yard, a school of locust leap in a synchronized arc

Flying fish cresting the surface of this desert sea.

This house is where we recovered a cow skull from the mud.

Our exposed laundry pipe eroded with hard water and washing salts,

The packed bones of a bovine beneath the Earth for 50 years.

This house holds up a twine line and moans

As baskets of sopping laundry, hang off its shoulder, handbag heavy and swinging.

The choked cherry tree sprinkles its black fruit into the pockets of our jeans,

Rolling round in the corners of fitted sheets.

This house is sister to an ancient chicken coop,

Vacant but for the spirit's roosting between its wire ribs.

When we had birds, I watched our feathered women puncture the eggs of others and their own,

Painting their open beaks an unclean yellow.

Last time I was in this house, I just wanted to leave the cloying madness of the people who love me,

Who will always rock me in their rickety cradle amid the splinters and soiled straw.

These people are so hard to love and love so hard

That their bones scaffold my ceiling and crumble

A blessing of white plaster like corn flour, like prayer over my head.

Another one. This is called-- thanks. We'll just keep going. This is called "Two Clean Virgins."

Winter and the laundry line is rigid against the sky.

Bony with stubs of ice, milk teeth from the suckling mouth of this

The witch season. The washing machine fills pale and tender

With a belly of snowflakes, crystals, powder blue.

The chemical dew of bubbles frozen in their translucent bloom.

It takes all night to drain.

I wash my clothes in the shower, raking a frothing soap over my scalp.

Two hands in my hair, pull cords of white water down to my feet

Where each toe is a lawn dress curling the drain.

My sister too in December slings the coarseness of denim over her naked thigh

And slaps the bleeding dye out of every living fiber, poly, nylon, rayon.

This triad of angels seeps and swells in the onslaught of our hand, foot, and finger prayers.

We kneel and we knead the sweaters and gray bowls of bras filled with a swill of sweat.

Ash from the fire. Hair from the dog.

This is the labor of virgins, more bestial than vestal.

Soft girls in hard water, pulling the wet weight of our modesty out of the tub

To be hung on the back of a kitchen chair.

Another one. "The Flower of Mercy."

We sit on lawn chairs, front porch painted turquoise.

Between our hands goes a small vessel,

A paper boat sailing the things said between us.

This is the fruit of small mountain people seated in yogurt tubs on kitchen windowsills.

The hippie couple down the street with the strawberry haired baby grow it like mint and cilantro.

Now dried to nothing, a gnarled spur, it dissolves into pungent crumbs

Between the mincing fingers of my father, who was so tender

To the blonde paper crafting a canoe.

Every few years we have a visitation,

An encounter of biology in this house where I smoke a joint with my father.

I'm in love with the most elegant skeleton enrobed in dry brown skin.

This shawl of life shelters the quake of his shoulders.

He's all bone, a little pot belly paler than the rest of him.

I'm in love with this ghost man who talks through me,

Glazed over and laughing to himself.

Last time we were together, I held his body as he rattled with tears

Like a gourd haunted by its loose seeds.

My father has so many heads on his neck, I never know which one will call me enemy.

He tries to pharmacy himself dutifully with hand-rolled medicinals to keep his company hospitable to me.

Do you remember how many times we rode the waves of your rage and sorrow?

I tucked them and you both into bed when your thighs and arms were thick as one another.

There is a river that runs between us, fathoms deep and foreboding,

Where the monsters of love move beneath it.

My beloved, with the gaping teeth, were all sorts of sea creatures.

Black squids and blind sharks slide out in the creeping tide of his soliloquy.

We are dad and daughter, the one who talks, and the other in the presence of some wilted sacrament.

Old spliffy, the life raft doobie of compassion washes us in smoke.

The flower of mercy blooms as it burns, unfolding its smoldering fingers in the hollow of our heads.

I will always love you.

But to preserve my life, I have paddled away from your mad shore

Where you are but a man proud in your belonging to no one.

Not even your daughter.

You talk to me about diving, burying your head in the deep.

Salt water is antiseptic.

Is that why we cry when wounded?

Thank you. I just have a couple more. Because my friend Brian is in the room who is from New Mexico as well, I thought I would read a poem about a restaurant in New Mexico that's very important to me. It's a real place called Sugar Nymph's Bistro, and it's a restaurant. I worked at, my sister worked at, and my mother worked at, and many more mothers and daughters and sisters have worked at this small restaurant. So I'll read it. "Sugar Nymph's Bistro."

Today, the long hour decides to last itself plus a half.

Time extends and loosens one loop on the belt.

All holes become holes with halves,

And the dimension of tasks grow in the waist.

This often happens.

Halfway through the working day, the cafe clock gets rounder with each hour

And weighty enough to pull minutes back into its orbit.

A little Saturn of seconds rotates above waitresses delivering cake on chipped plates.

Along the high road to Taos, a black path clings like a thinning braid on the skull of our mountain.

Centuries ago, the woman named spring mud first fell into the arms of straw,

Birthing generations of adobe bricks for the mud buildings of New Mexico

They made sugar nymphs,

This house for feeding and sheltering all those lost to the culture.

Women over 50, gays, and young girls deserted of their fathers are here,

Held in the cleavage of a kitchen, sweltering and underpaid.

No one is turned away from the eternal rotations of potatoes and their peelings.

Today, a wiry queen, bent and mean from a yesterday of battering

Eats butter cream off of the spatula offered by a boy

Overflowing from his fishnet stockings,

Suddenly unhidden when his Catholic mother leaves him for his evening

Among these other women who have their own children who hide themselves

From those people who say that they love them.

In the corner of the cafe, a skeleton abandons herself to attacking everything dirty.

She flings her whole body behind the faucet spray,

Thousands of beads slide on their abacus,

Each droplet a round count, endless in its falling.

All measurement is lost in the immensity of dishes.

Hot water dissolves empires of cooking fat, each meal erasing from memory.

Her hand spins soap over the face of a plate, moving clockwise in a procession of cleaning.

So high is her fever for redeeming each citizen of her soiled by the table

That a revenant of sauce resurrects from the sink to claim her face.

Another dish eaten from and exhausted.

A slash of ketchup hangs like a scar in her hair.

Across the room, a girl, the one who washes tomorrow's dishes,

Notices with a paper towel torn from its roll.

She crosses into someone else's story.

She wipes this red offender from a face nearly her own.

And with this small charity, saves both of their lives.

One last poem for you. I appreciate your time. The last poem I'll read also is on this theme of women, of girls, of daughters, and of sisterhood. It's a sestina. Which just to briefly say, for those who may not be as familiar, a sestina is a poem comprised of six stanzas each or six lines long, and the last word of each line repeats throughout the whole poem in variations.

So all you need to do is just look for those words and know that they will be repeating. And I'll tell you what they are. Its fruit, known, cup, one, me, and clothes. And this poem I wrote for one of my friends who passed away last year. We knew each other for more than 20 years, so this is for her. Her name was Dawn, and this is what I'll close with. So thank you very much. "Sestina For a Dead Girl."

You and me are two halves of a split fruit.

One pitted and one stoned, who could have known

That I would carry your absence like a cup.

Though still alive, somehow I'm the hollowed one.

I guess the dead are more free than me

Out dancing each night without their clothes.

These days I'm wearing all your dead girl clothes.

You liked beige, brown, green, the sour red of wine fruit.

The smell of ghost inhabits every cotton shirt that houses me.

It's like a rented room here in your body's old country.

Am I so unknown to myself?

Now just half of a dancing pair,

Just one slackened stranger roaming the floor.

The circle of my arms making their empty cup.

You know the funeral home charges so much for urns.

How much does an ash cup really cost?

The humiliation of money clings to death like bad clothes.

I'm almost grateful to the creditors hunting you and your account down

Like one escaped hog nosing at fallen forest fruit.

6,000 undead dollars.

Such a testament to life.

Let it be known that you had debts.

And chief among them, me.

Now you've joined my posse, my dead friends.

That company of inverted angels flocking me.

I think you collude with each other,

Taking turns to cup my face in your hands while I sleep.

I never see you, but your signs are known.

I look for the way you raise the dawn.

Like fresh red clothes lifted off the laundry line.

Our wind loosened ecstatic fruit.

This is what you owe me.

Some sign that I'm not the only one left in the upstairs world.

I count a calendar of days towards the underground.

One final turn in the sun for another future dead girl.

Tell me the reason you left before me.

Tell me why I'm still here

Making phone calls and eating almost rotting fruit.

See how you've made me another drinker at the grief cup.

See how I dress my days in a smoke clothes of memory,

Wearing Monday to Sunday like a necklace of every known thing.

And once again today, I say your name so that you're known anew.

I make your litany, me, a church tender, a keeper of your one sputtering candle.

My mind is a hall walked through by people in their Sunday clothes.

Everyone is waiting.

Some small internal person in me is holding this vigil, is kneeling at the wine cup.

My heart is the martyr's apple.

The laughing, weeping fruit.

You sleep on a brown bedclothes,

The Earth pillowing every coral I've known.

Now you're a budding fern.

Now the forest's coiled fruit.

This is how you rise out of the one dirt like a thousand forget-me-nots.

Like the impossible lightness of a buttercup.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SHERAH BLOOR: It's very hard to tell that was a sestina, which is how you know you've written a good sestina. That was beautifully read. Thank you. Zia, do you have a chapbook? Right? And have you put it over there? Oh, OK. Well, people will have to Google that. OK. OK. Good, good. OK. All right. So I think, Zia, you must have graduated last year. And Yena Sharma Purmasir, our next reader, graduated in 2020, you just told me.

Difficult year to graduate, so I'm glad you're back and we can celebrate your poetry. So I actually heard about you from Peripheries' old designer, Jess, who was reading with you at Grolier. She said, hang on, do you know this HDS student? You have to get her to read. So Yena is a poet and essayist from New York, author of four collections, most recently Viraha, which is over there. And she was the former Queens Teen Poet Laureate. Definitely say that, too. OK, Yena.

[APPLAUSE]

YENA SHARMA PURMASIR: Does this work? Can you hear me? Yes? OK. Hi. It's so good to be here. When I was a student here, this was a space that me and two of my friends would waste a lot of time in. We wouldn't have the furniture looking like this at all. But it's really lovely to be back. I left HDS. Like a lot of my fellow comrades of 2020, we were pushed out, and I haven't been back even though I live not two miles from here. I live in Central Square.

So tonight I'm going to be reading from my third collection, which I actually wrote for Matthew Potts's forgiveness class. Current students, if you get the chance to take that class, you should. And so this book, it's called Our Synonyms: An Epic. I use the stories of Salome and [INAUDIBLE] and Mary and Yashodhara and some contemporary, real women figures to talk about this idea of feminine rage and if forgiveness is possible.

So this is the first poem. It's about Yashodhara. And so some context for people who might not know who Yashodhara is. Princess of the Shakya Kingdom. Wife of Siddhartha Gautama. Mother of Rahula, her only son. The explanation of her name. Bearer of splendor. Abandoned by her husband, who renounced the material world to seek enlightenment and become the Buddha. Embraced a lifestyle of asceticism in his absence. Attained enlightenment. So this is called "Five."

In the beginning, there was no word apart from another word.

Ocean sky.

Just the wisp of a cloud between them.

You were not there.

When you were born, they called you redacted.

No one tells that story.

The words don't exist.

You exist in memory as someone's mother.

The bearer of splendor.

He is the splendor.

You are the bear.

Hiding in the forest, drinking from the river, sleeping near the cabin.

In the movies, someone kills you and your carcass becomes a trophy.

In the fairy tale, you scare the little girl

Who sleeps in your bed and eats your food.

It'll happen to her too.

Girls grow old.

And husbands disappear.

And children steal everything.

So now I'm going to be reading from Viraha. It's still summer. I know it doesn't feel like it as we're all bundled up, but it's the last day. So this poem is called "Summer Night."

When the summer sun sets, I can leave my cage

Without the stench of sunscreen.

I hate everything I have learned to fear.

Men.

Cancer.

My own mortality.

One day when I'm not beautiful and no one loves me,

I hope I can go up to the mountains.

I hope I can go to the beach.

I hope the trees in my hometown remember me

As more than a girl.

I used to eat ice cream in the park.

I used to bike down the boulevard.

I used to fall on my knees

And cry like I invented crying.

I wish I invented something.

Is it too late?

I waited for my life and the bus drove on.

The whole sky changed.

So viraha, not an English word. It is a Sanskrit word. It refers to this idea from Hinduism. It's a type of devotional love. It literally means love and separation. So here's the titular poem. This is "Viraha."

Steve told me that half the pleasure in love was being half of something.

Separated and praying for reunion.

It's not just us, he said.

It's the gods.

I love this story.

I love how small it makes my pain.

I tell the man I'm dating, we're just like gods.

But it doesn't have the same humility.

It sounds like I'm boasting.

OK.

So I'm boasting.

Someone loves me finally,

And I'm cutting my hair over the toilet.

Someone loves me finally,

And my waist is shrinking down.

I mean, my mental illness isn't going away,

But it isn't really hanging around either.

When I say I'm lonely,

What I really mean is that I miss someone.

When I say I miss someone,

What I really mean is you.

We're in the age of supermoons. There was one a couple of nights ago. There are two more left. This is my reminder to look at the moon. This poem is called "Moon Time."

You thought I was wet when I was just bloody.

Stood up too quickly and out leaked the mess of me.

I want to have a baby,

If a baby will have me.

Until then, I'll keep loving men in need of mothering.

Nurse their idiot ideas,

Cradle their dwindling self-esteem,

Clean up their shit,

Put them to bed.

The last time I had sex might be the last time I have sex.

I'm still deciding.

It's not that I regret the snoring mouth in my ear.

It's the memory of his slouching body stretched out in the morning.

It doesn't fit our nothing story.

Who cares about his soft belly, floppy hair, medium roast laugh?

Every man is the same man.

Every baby has the same stupid slobber smile.

Every mother thinks she's so different.

Her big fucking heart the size of the sun.

And then she has a son.

That's always fun to read. I wrote this next poem for one of my best friends and being here, remembering old friends who aren't with me. And maybe you can relate to that. This is called "Red Cardinal."

There is a world in which I die.

You don't.

My best friend, you live forever.

You go alone to the places we said we would explore together.

In Vietnam, you buy an expensive camera.

You take pictures of your face the way I took pictures of my face.

You hate the vacant expressions on my Instagram.

No one ever knew me there.

I can't point out the glittering silver lining from beyond the grave.

Honey, I don't have a grave.

When you want to visit me,

You'll have to collect a bouquet of superstitions.

An out of focus dream.

The pink supermoon.

A red cardinal on your windowsill.

This terrible world loves you like I have loved you.

Which means you know it and you think it happens to everyone.

It does not happen to everyone.

We're in bird territory now. I'm going to read a poem called "Shloka in Bird Song." Shloka is actually a type of meter that the Hindu epics were written in. So the Ramayana is in shloka. The Mahabharata can also be in shloka. That's all you need to know. Here's the poem.

There are two birds on a branch

And one eats its heart out.

Because it can.

Because the heart tastes good.

Like pulp.

Not everyone likes pulp.

The other bird watches.

The other bird is never hungry.

The other bird wants for nothing.

There are two birds on a branch,

And you would think the branch has no story.

This is the song of two birds always together on the same tree.

Don't worry about the tree.

There are two birds, and the love between them

Is nothing like the pattering of a hummingbird's heart.

It is the endless noise of quiet that slowly seeps its way into everything.

There are two birds on a branch,

And in one version they fly.

Their perfect bodies like an arrow in the sky.

There is one arrow in the sky,

And there are two birds.

And then there is one bird.

The other bird is gone.

The other bird, with its beautiful red body, has more red than body.

One bird cries, and it breaks the mellow of the riverside.

One bird, without her mate, an incomplete pairing,

A metaphor with no reference to a real thing.

One bird, and you want to look away to find the arrow's hand

And curse the man who is like any man.

This is not about a man.

There is one bird,

And she screams into the abyss of solitude for the injustice of all things.

She is one bird, and we will never know which bird.

If she ate the fruit of life while her lover looked on,

Or if she looked on while her lover, stunning and indulgent,

Bit into the most fleeting ripeness.

It doesn't matter.

There are two birds.

There is one bird.

A branch.

A tree.

A river.

You.

Me.

We sit together in my open heart that overflows with bird song.

I am your sweetest thing.

And you, my companion through the universe.

I see the glory of your crest everywhere.

When you are gone, there will still be

Hills and mountains and waves.

When I am gone, you will eat your heart out because you can.

Because the heart, loved, and loving tastes good.

I'm reading two more poems. I'm going to read something new. I think the life of a poet is you're constantly working on your next body. So this is going to be like a pre-birth for book five whenever she fully emerges. This is called "Rituals."

From the same mind that remembers birthdays

And knows when to carry an umbrella

Comes the life stopping impulse to check

If the basement door is still locked.

That mind that believes anything seen once

Must be seen again and again.

That mind is rewriting the same poem.

Maybe Sisyphus was an artist.

Maybe it's only crazy if it isn't helping someone.

Do you think God has obsessive compulsive disorder?

Could we be so lucky?

Do you think he comes back to check

If we're still right where he left us.

My angels. My demons. My life.

I'm so human. I make mistakes.

I forget to say sorry.

And even when I do, how can you trust me?

I'm an unreliable narrator and a reliable friend, daughter, sister.

Everyone wants me to watch their pets.

I imagine the pets are watching me.

Over the feeding bowl, hunched on the couch.

The same hand that wins their trust and cleans their shit

Is the hand I'm pressing against my chest.

In between my deep, hold tight inhale

And slow, let loose exhale is the entire world.

I really could be God.

I really would come back for you,

Whoever you are.

And if I am, don't pray.

Don't wait.

Abandon all faith.

You, the door, the stove, the meat, the bed, the sheets,

The drain, the paint, the stairs, the machine.

The unseen disease.

Please match my great act of love.

Let me go.

That's a really heavy place to end. So my last poem, I guess I offer as a blessing or a hope. Or if you're witchy, a spell. This is "Protection Spell."

You are a sailor.

I am the moon.

My best thoughts are following you home.

You around the corner of the world

And there, against belief, is the tide of peace.

Oh, may no one ever hurt you.

May no one ever want to.

In my clearest dreams, you moved through a mustard field

And the bees let you.

Real love is yellow.

You blend in like a star.

I told God about you like God isn't in charge.

In my strangest dreams, I'm in charge

And the universe echoes my sky.

My religion has exactly two rules.

There is always someone like me praying for someone like you.

There is always someone like you.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SHERAH BLOOR: Thank you, Yena. That was so beautiful. I want to talk to you about the two birds later. It's just so good. And your books. Yeah, for people to-- OK. OK, so we have another graduate from the PhD program a little while ago from religion and anthropology, right? And this is Adrie Kusserow. And I learnt about Adrie when I was teaching for Michael Jackson, who was a very beloved professor here. He's an Australian anthropologist and poet and who taught me about your work.

And you were in the fourth edition of Peripheries. I was going to read it out, but no one wants to hear me read. But I'll put it there if anyone wants to read that poem. It's very good. But we're here to talk about The Trauma Mantras, which is your new book from Duke University Press. And this is Adrie's memoir. It's talking about her work as a medical anthropologist with refugees and on humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, South Sudan, and the US.

At the same time, it's a reckoning with the Anglo-American approaches to suffering, aid, and individuality, and rigorously reflects on Adrie's own perspective. This perspective, the stories we tell about self and other. Adrie is the author of two other poetry books, which I think are there as well, as well as an ethnography, American Individualisms. Her work is in Best American Poetry Kenyon Review, New England Review, all those places that you would want to get into. And she is the chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Michael's College in Vermont.

[APPLAUSE]

ADRIE KUSSEROW: Hi. Thank you so much. That's good. OK. Can you hear me? Yeah. So I'm going to be mostly reading from The Trauma Mantras. And The Trauma Mantras, it's exceptionally hybrid. It's a critique, in many ways, of Western conceptions of illness and suffering. It's a travel memoir.

It's so many things that I wondered, OK, what am I going to pull from for this reading? And I actually decided I would pull from more of the spiritual poems because I felt inspired, especially by coming back to divinity school. And I wanted to start with this one that I was hoping Wendy McDowell could be here. This was one of the first ones she published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and this one is called "Lady Slipper, Red F."

As a child, I awoke to the furiousness of bees.

All morning, my mother and I combed the woods for red F's, trout lily, trillium.

I learned young the smell of God and soil.

The first time I saw a lady's slipper, I felt embarrassed.

The pink veined pouches, simultaneously ephemeral and genital,

Floating toad balloons.

Half scrotum, half fairy, half birth, half death.

Without the formalities of church and school,

Lust and spirit first came to me as one

Through the potent hips of spring.

But flowers, like fear once inside me, never lay still.

Amidst my restless stalking of the woods,

I wanted something bulky to thank, to name, to explain

All the impossible grace.

So I dragged my thirsty body over the hills, into the trees.

I let the plump red F's orange fingers, tiny as rain,

Crawl across my neck, onto my cheek.

Half reptile, half elf, half earth, half magic.

Years passed.

Spring after spring cycled through me.

Again and again I arrived in heaven through touch.

Lust, even, for the wrinkled pouches of lady's slipper,

The soft, lemon-bellied F's that waddled pigeon-toed across my palm.

Now I walk my daughter through April's black mud.

It's been a long winter.

She hasn't quite unfurled.

Still, she sticks her ear into the cacophony of crows above us,

The way a dog sniffs at a tight current of scent.

Across the meadow, the peepers gossip in their giant cities.

Salamanders toddle over the black soil,

Back into the cold ponds they think of as mother.

Awake. Awake.

What if God is walking through us, picking seasons, histories, humans off

Like milkweed from a sweater,

Wading through us, a slow giant through warm ponds,

Feeling the odd tickle of religions like tangled weeds.

I watch Ana now in full bloom, despite the rain,

Running outside barefoot, setting up doll's nests in the fields,

Collecting moles, covering them in leaves,

Naming them even though they're dead.

She skitters across the garden, singing.

She, too, is learning young

The restlessness of rapture,

The way beauty is hard to sit with.

The way it bends the body into prayer.

The way ripeness must be touched.

Soft, black earth of the garden.

She and her brother all fists and toes.

I watch her digging into heaven,

Soil, toads, bulbs, buds,

The craning neck of spring, and all summer,

The sweet, long, green meadows.

So the next one want to read is called "The Sweaty Tribe." So this isn't a book of ethnographic poetry, prose, poems. And I really, really try and-- I'm not just looking out at the world and critiquing others. I really try and see myself as part of this sweaty tribe. So this is called "The Sweaty Tribe." It's based at Daya Dan Orphanage, missionaries of charity in Calcutta, India. And it starts with a quote by McKenzie Work that basically says Calcutta becomes the Disneyland of suffering.

Here comes another white girl in hip-hop, dreads, tattooed in Buddha, Krishna, Shantideva, her body a roadmap of past religious Kwik Stops. You can smell them, all patchouli and caged nerves, ponytailed and sandaled, toting their ratty knapsacks, grungy journals, emerging from the taxis, bone-tired, hauling their boulders of guilt up the crumbling stairs, their tiny portable traumas.

Winding their capes of doubt through the muggy faiths of others, stumbling up the steps, repentant. And I have to love them, because I am no better, though sometimes I think I am, sitting on the stairs on my lunch break, watching them arrive. Months pass, even after the monsoon takes its heavy skirts elsewhere, still they come, dogged through the swollen heat, their sticky, discontented moods, tall blonde hungry ghosts, padding after the nuns, sheepish and sweaty.

That I am part of this sweaty tribe I have to admit. Over and over I baptize myself, bending into the bodies that litter the cribs, wincing at the small, clingy deaths in midstream, rising up with another twisting, sticky child, kneading the gnarled bodies that refuse to flatten, muscles stiff as pipes. At Daya Dan we are all addicts now to the ecstasy of being humble, of being no one, of bowing our heads. So very tired of our righteous, lonely theologies.

All of us dunking ourselves in India's dying, coming up for air, dunking again. The toddlers turning toward us, whole fields, restless and rebellious for touch. Mary, the oldest orphan, still here after all these years, sitting like a queen, perusing her kingdom of cribs, holding court with her sweat drenched devotees. They found her at Hawara Train Station, dragging her legless torso on the Calcutta Times, limping monkey trailing behind her.

On hot days we gently hose her down, avoiding the leaking plum where pigeons made a meal of her eye. This is how it goes at Daya Dan. The nuns starched stiff with Christ, tying a defiant toddler to a crib, barking their orders to the wet-eyed, overwhelmed Westerners. And I have to love them, the wet-eyed ones, because I am no better, though sometimes I think I am.

Next one I'm going to read is "Quarantine Dreams." And this kind of floats back and forth between Underhill, Vermont, where I live, and Dharamsala, India, which is the home of the Tibetan government in exile.

All day long, I watch the snow fall, The single crow on its perch the only punctuation mark I've heard all day. Across the field, a fox pounces for a mole as if in a cartoon And my heart is buoyant as I watch it flip and flop, Hurl itself nose first. Downstairs, my son is trying to find a tune on the piano, riding the notes without trying to control them, something flowing through him not entirely himself. He's quieted his mind enough to follow the pull of something larger, like a tug from a line deep underwater.

From my bed, my antennae, I prick up the hair on my arms, the first to sense another presence. The notes rise up through the ceiling and soothe. Day five of quarantine. Someone told me to analyze my dreams. That quarantine dreams are the stuff of buried trauma. But I refuse to mop them up with pop psychology, out them in this tiny stuffed cages of the American trauma sphere. They comfort me in the way they leak into the morning, seeming to come from everywhere but me.

What a shame if they rise merely from the individual body. The stuffy therapist den. How lonely that would be. Maybe in sleep with the mind's government soldiers off duty, the non-human, the shadows, the collective past floats in if we're lucky. I let myself sleep. And in between, I let memories gather until enough of them form a plot I recognize. I'm careful. I don't go after them too hard. I don't want to scare them away.

My first trip to India, there was no dream, only the fog moving in while trekking toward the pass, until I couldn't see the yaks five feet away or the yellow beaks of rhododendron pushing up through the snow. Once again, I had strayed off the path and my group would be pissed. Lost, I slept in a dilapidated retreat hut, small as a doll's house. The rats crawling over my zipped up sleeping bag until I punched them off like potatoes with my fists.

The next morning, the caretaker monk with the scarred cheek told me he had a dream I would visit him, but I knew I was just lost. Perhaps the monk was using the dream to make me stay. I had been told not to trust any men, even monks. I had never thought of dreams as that solid before, raised in a place where the hierarchy of reality is based on materiality. I could tell for him the dream was as real as wood or stone.

So I considered committing to the weight of it, let it pin me like a paper weight on my flighty self, and stayed an extra day. In the evening he brought me salt butter tea, started rhythmically slapping his hands, his eyes glistening fiercely, breaking me into what he called the luminous ice of unknowing. I was hungry and cold. Every time he slapped, I winced from his shock therapy. He kept telling me the slapping would wake me up from my dream.

At least that's how I remember it now. Smiling the entire time, he told me how he'd fled from Tibet after the torture, his long frostbitten journey. How resilient, I thought, picturing the hardiness of physical material. Picking up a stone to symbolize. I let the stone drop into his hand. No, no. Sempa chempo, he said, pointing to the sky.

Resilience was fluid, not solid, spacious, humble, flowing like water over rocks, a gentle, expanding compassion rather than a stiff bouncing back or a thickening of borders of the self. He giggled. Resilience was not a Marlboro man with a stern jaw, but a vast and spacious mind that did not individualize suffering. How strange, I thought, not to personalize trauma. But I liked this place, this new place where nothing, not even suffering, was really mine anymore.

I learned in Buddhism, when you reach a place where the world seems fluid, like a dream, something you can swirl your fingers through, so little inherent substance to anything, it's a good thing. Like finger painting, you revel in the colors and textures, bold glops and streaks. The pungent smells like giant moist paws, the giddiness of freedom. All of this merging and swirling, all of this before the canvas dries and we're trapped.

Let's see. This is, again, another one that was in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. This one is called "Anthropology of American Yoga." And again, as a child, I think-- and also as an anthropologist, I definitely spend a lot of time imagining looking down on planet Earth and thinking about how humans look from that perspective, the patterns that we might see. So the subtitle of this is The Dalai Lama Looks Down on a Yoga Class. So this is the Dalai Lama looking down, and then he zooms in more and more.

Peering out onto the vast space,

The universe, with its sullen orange and pink mists,

The planets hanging quietly as spiders,

He finds Earth, its bald swirled head,

Its whirling cacophony,

Limping around the orbit like a disheveled bride,

Ozone clinging like an ill-fitted wig.

Earth, dragging its bumpy train of Chinese plastics,

The refugees pushed up like rice to the sides of borders,

The swarms, the migrations pulsing north,

The bodies floating in flood after flood,

The hissing and praying, humming and tingling,

As minuscule embers of the internet glow.

In America, millions of dilated pupils absorb Kardashians,

As Mexican children huddle in an ICE cage.

Televisions squawk their bright lights,

Hawking shiny arguments. In suburbs,

Pale teenage boys float like baby moons

In the blue fluid of their screens.

All across America, yogis

Rise and fall,

Shifting from asana to asana.

A flight of birds, a school of fish.

These sea plants slow and fluid as underwater ballet.

Tendrils curling up and out,

Dreadlocks poking like tarantulas from their crowns.

Nothing like India, where the stern Yogi barks out asanas as if bored.

No props, no blocks, no choices, no options,

No accommodations for special feelings or unique moods.

I hear the Dalai Lama warmly chuckling.

The American yogis have a ways to go.

Their moans and sighs so long and overdrawn

Poses, birthing long, laborious vowels,

Announcing the depths of their stress.

The countless choices of poses given riddled with,

You decide. It's up to you.

Their warrior pose a bit too self-righteous.

Ujjayi breathing more like Darth Vader than the vastness of ocean.

Shavasanas like islands,

Each psyche shipwrecked by its own perceived uniqueness.

How he loves them.

But over and over,

They need to be reminded.

In one year, 98% of their atoms

Will exchange for new ones.

Thoughts rise and fall like meteorites,

Fireballs aglow with a feisty energy

That, yes, eventually fizzles and withers.

With each outbreath, the entire cosmos

Released from the body's cage.

Let's see. The next one I'd like to read is about being in a place in Costa Rica with a lot of surfers and a lot of yogis. This is called "Mushrooms, Jungle, Yoga." Nosara, Costa Rica.

Tired of the scalding beach, its acidic sun,

The taut hip surfers like circus stars

Dancing on the backs of waves.

I walk inland in search of shade and quiet

And maybe a bit of death.

The dusty streets, murderously hot,

Narrow into muddy jungle paths

Where ruffled mushrooms sprawl and spoil

Like raw meat.

So bold as they're dying.

I want to die that way, too.

Every rotting cell fully engaged in the leaving,

Drunk with resignation.

Blackbirds on stilts hide in tree limbs and watch me pass.

Leaving the jungle, I see the main tourist road ahead

Lined with hibiscus, splayed red throats retching their stamens out.

I know where the road goes.

To a yoga center whose entrance is exotic and stunning.

50 stone steps to the top, where Ganesh is perched.

Then 10 more to where the stone Buddha hovers

Over the sleek, glistening check-in desk

And its twittering skinny girls so eager to help.

Then 5 more to the top,

An ecstatic emerald pool,

A white woman floating on her back like a crucifix

In a stiff, well-earned delirium.

The juice bar, loud with volcanic kale eruptions.

Here, the long-legged blonde goddesses of Lululemon

Hold court curled like cats into padded hammocks

In their sleek black leggings.

So I scuttled back down the stairs,

Knowing I'm not quite ready to leave the slouch and slog of the rotting jungle

Where nothing is tight with anything.

Just the humble mounds of Quasimodo

Moss draped everywhere.

Swamp, mangrove, bleeding fairy, fungi.

Fragile dapperling, bridal veil, stinkhorn, trooping crumble cap.

In grade school,

Why did no one tell us to lean down and inhale

The ripe rot of our self as we sat,

Washed and preened,

Stiff as soldiers at our desks,

And opened our fresh notepads?

The white paper cold as milk,

And so earnestly began our noble wars against mortality.

Why did no one tell us to put our pencils down?

That we are already gloriously dying,

And there's no shame in that.

No, children.

There's no shame in death at all.

Let's see. The first book I wrote called Hunting Down the Monk, I've been very interested in how the-- I know these are very stereotypical terms, but East craves what the West has and the West craves what the East has. Both are looking at each other and both are seeing fictions of each other. So I wanted to read this poem that's about one of my trips to Bhutan. And this one is called "Bhutan East Wants West Wants East" And it's based in Thimphu, Bhutan.

I'm back again, working for the government in the last country on planet Earth to get internet. Here to preach the dangers of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, the sexy fictions global media spins about the West. The government calls it selective modernization, letting in only the best of the West. But all I see are guns, gangs, and actors bleached in fair and lovely on the tiny TVs now in every store on this street.

They tried banning MTV, fashion TV, World Wrestling Federation. But now the flow is impossible to stop, the channels breeding and multiplying. Even among the farmers far outside the city, satellite dishes cock their chins south, magnets to the subtle, sly presence of envy creeping into houses like stray cats, magnets to the subtle sly presence-- sorry. Creeping into the houses like stray cats, coyly rubbing and curling around their hearts.

Each day I walk to the top of the Thimphu hills, where the sun leaves its afterbirth everywhere. Prayer flags drench the pines. A monk scampers away like a red fox. Couples park their cars. Condom wrappers are lodged doggedly in the mud, asserting their rightful place in the path to enlightenment. Dingy Indian buses painted gaudy as prostitutes careen around the battered road to the capital, taking villagers to Thimphu, where, among youth, lust for the West huddles like fog.

Packs of roaming boys dressed in black jeans and t-shirts scour the streets for drugs. The ones who eye the Westerners hungrily, black eyes nibbling feverishly at the manic commercials flashing from the storefront TVs. These boys who failed their exams left their farms, mocking their prune faced grandparents, huddled in dark corners, mumbling mantras. They want computers, not soil. Bollywood, not Buddhism.

Now they sit hungover at the dingy youth center, unemployed, faces pimpled and tired, confessing their shame to the Welsh monk who has made it his life to help them. Gutted and global now, the wet viscera of shame leaking from them. He sits patiently in his faded burgundy robes, trying to bring them back into the fold. Meanwhile, tucked above the cobbled streets in the smoky Thimphu disco at the Ohm Bar, CNN shouts its noble manifesto from its perch above the liquor.

Schools of ghostly European expats sway, waving their drunken limbs, light-headed want from this geography of bliss, geography of want. The Bhutanese boys snorting coke in the bathroom, emerging in black leather jackets and slicked back hair, going straight for the Western girl who looks like Britney Spears. After their treks, yoga, or meditation, the Westerners lay their drunken bodies down on the stiff hotel beds where all night they try and meditate.

Let it go. Let it go. And still they come back to this density of longing, hard kernel of desire where the bulky psyche chips its tooth and winces again, stumbling back to the breath. Meanwhile, outside my window, deep in the alley below the Bhutanese boy, high on meth, wailing a kind of love song for the West while barking dogs mince the night til it bleeds.

I'll close with one that-- again, I think this is a Divinity Bulletin one. It's one that I like to read. It's a fun one to read. It's called "What Makes Us-- meaning my husband and I, in some ways-- Not Buddhists" "What Makes Us Not Buddhists." Sometimes I'm kind of struck by, when I come back from Buddhist countries, at the ways in which my family likes to think we're Buddhist, and yet we're not.

So it's very interesting to come back and have that perspective. So this is based in Ladakh, Northern India and Underhill, Vermont. Yeah. In Ladakh, it's tsatsa time. Fields of monks and nuns chant, torsos bobbing, their mantras thick and shifting suddenly, in wild Buddhist murmurations. Monks in flip-flops shuffle from cremation pyres, hands filled with bone fragments from last winter's dead, smashing and grinding them with stone.

Pulverized, mixed with silt and water, sprinkled with mustard seeds, packed into pudgy clay molds in the shape of a tiny stupa. They'll place the tsatsa high in the mountains to be pummeled by the wind and snow, crushed by the wild blue sheep as they pick their way through the cliffs and eroding soil. Tsatsa are never meant to last. It's late September in Vermont. The light like weak tea. We are all so sick of quarantine.

My husband plants his tulip bulbs, their shape and color identical to the tsatsa. He, stocky and stubborn, leaves the house in a huff. Plants them fiercely as a way to hang on, nailing beauty in place. A way to not let go. He digs and digs down nearly a foot. His shovel violent. His psyche swelling on fire.

My mother, hungry for company, hobbles into the garden to watch him tentatively as if she is a burden, her spine bending in irrelevance as if trying to duck under the entire world, her loneliness hanging off her like an old coat. He digs and digs with a kind of joyous violence. With each bulb, he plants deep bombs, a nod to a stubborn, bullheaded beauty, a ritual fuck you to all that threatens to oust it from this world.

All winter he eyes them from his watchtower, guarded by a high fence, cursing the rodents and deer, holding on until May, when their thousands of dark red tongues will rise and obliterate everything in their wake. Meanwhile, our prayer flags flutter. Free floating gills, sucking at the air sharp and greedy.

Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

Thanks.

SHERAH BLOOR: Thank you. That was amazing. We have to all digest that, and I don't know if there are any questions, if there might be. But maybe we should just wait a moment and just see if there are questions, or if we want to just break up and talk amongst ourselves a bit. I'll give you a moment. I must stop doing this because I think it always happens that people are too overwhelmed at the end to actually ask. OK. All right, so let's just a chat amongst ourselves a bit and say thank you to the poets. Thank you for coming, everyone.

[APPLAUSE]

Another event on the 17th of October. Please be there.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor. Center for the Study of World Religions.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.