"Loss is an art, traversing one world to the next" by Purvi Shah

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Purvi Shah                                                           Loss is an art, traversing one world to the next "One wonders if Gwen Stefani of the band No Doubt and The Artist Formerly Known as Prince know the meaning behind their freshly minted body hennas...While hennas may   be all the rage, the meaning beyond the tradition goes much deeper. The ancient Indian art of body painting called Mehndi (actually Persian in origin), initially reserved for bridal ceremonies and spiritual occasions, has become the hot new way to adorn oneself without committing to a permanent tattoo or wearing jewelry."    -Aura Project ad The mehndi is leaving my hands, brown swirls dissolving into brown skin. Somewhere you are traveling through new architecture, celebrating a companionate life in new cities.    If blind, you could see through your hands, a universe etched in your palms. Your ankles are rust, vines of buds and leaves. I envision him leaning to the hotel tub, washing the grime of the city from your feet, soap   separated from the stencil. Love's imprint lasts long when the fingers rejoice, when the body's art is treasure.    Sap travels beyond root, cones can be rolled here or there, a technology. Here West Village women henna their breasts before marriage, etching coarse veins onto skins, parlors painting commerce from the sacred.    Riding the train in America, the thrush emerges from water pools, orange chaff unconnected to the earth growing, as if, without umbilical soils. Do the roots dissolve through inebriation like my henna lines growing wild flowers at the tub? The mark of family is on the body not the engagement ring suddenly removed at the sink not in the route the scent of perfume takes to leave the.....day's sweat but in the designs which intimate bequeathed blood.    When the liquid paint hits skin, it is a cold separation, the memory of hundreds of daughters walking towards a foreign house, parents looking askance, blurred.      They say: absence is a color, the deep brown of life which is always receding. -Purvi Shah    Photo credit: Willi Wong      Used by permission.     From Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006)    Purvi Shah's Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), which explores migration as potential and loss, won the Many Voices Project prize and was nominated for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award. Her work fighting violence against women earned her the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008. In 2011, she served as Artistic Director for Together We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight the voices of Asian Americans during the 10th anniversary of 9/11. She believes in the miracle of poetry and the beauty of change.   Check out more of her work at http://purvipoets.net  or@PurviPoets on Twitter.      Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210