Spiral
What seeps in me from weeks of rain
making me forget
the life-give part in water.
The world this morning
reminds me too much
of my insides that night I almost
abandoned the balcony.
Three pages deep of furious
language. Scratching
worry into my journal
before I can say, please,
let me
stop. Notice,
on the outside table
this jagged bouquet:
tobacco seeds, dried,
still attached to the cut
few inches of their last-year stalks,
wrinkled fire
in a mini vase. It doesn’t look much
like promise, but it is.
Copyright © 2024 by Hari Alluri. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 1, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Spiral’ is a rare poem for me, written directly after—almost still within—the moment. It asks me to contend with multiple layers of embodied experience and memory at once, the human-made tragedies entangled with my own tendencies. It’s a poem of reminder. I am often troubled by the ways this poem is troubled. When I attempted to expand ‘Spiral,’ it asked me to resist mediation and instead move closer to a small moment whose attention, whose formal smallness, might hold with it a return to living in and responding to the world beyond.”
—Hari Alluri
Hari Alluri
