Sevana Bagdasarian: In a Restaurant

Watching you in the glass I wonder
what it is like to be so alone
and why you do not eat
but starve yourself, groveling
like a monk. You let food stand on the glass
so you stare against yourself
with great hunger,
needing to show me how you wipe saliva away
(resentfully and without hesitation)
until I see your reflection in the table, correctly,
as a man starving, not
the echo I enjoy.


Sevana Bagdasarian

This poem has appeared in ASPORA, Volume I, Number 1, Fall 1993.

Sevana Bagdasarian: Carnations on Mashtots Street

I.

It all seems like cracks in sidewalks.
There is an earthworm trying to wiggle
through a sidewalk garlic press that tries to catch it
without squashing through the side.

They pass slowly, sweat drenching polyester armpits,
crosses held before a million white-laced heads, and
stumbling behind, some kid tangled up with the flag.

Truth passes by, dismal and filmy
I stand, shoo flies from my face.

II.

Shot two days ago, but his family kept him from open house,
propped on white carnations on the red velvet couch
so others could see and acknowledge glaucous blue verity.
Parades of dried apple dolls march
behind him, trying to moisten their parched faces
under the sticky heat, sweat and tears
become Sevan, one fresh water lake.

Flies circle around everyone,
one gargantuan tamzara and
he even feels it on his face, the constant
buzz around us, a huge alarm clock
following the march, ticking to wake the trees, flowers
the solder, as if to remind us that history is now
a gavel's song against an anvil

ee veree Yerusaghem, reciting oblique lines
as he goes deeper into the sultry arms of clay
the one who loves him
caressing him through several layers of antiquity
while the flies follow and sing
to wake him from hibernation.


Sevana Bagdasarian


This poem has appeared in aspora, Volume I, number 1, Fall 1993.

Sevana Bagdasarian: The Morning Walk

                                                    for Nazim Hikmet


               .... This Armenian citizen has not forgiven
               the slaughter of his father in the Kurdish mountains.
               But he loves you,
               because you also won't forgive
               those who blackened the name of the Turkish people.
              - Nazim Hikmet, "The Evening Walk", 1950

It's 1997 April 24th.
I'm going to crack my back today
sing a dirge for you
dear spine, dear numbness, a story
carved by pomegranate seeds on obsidian.

You are a buttermilk churner, your name,
your eyes, the windows of an apple. Today is the day
I find the journal of an Armenian girl,
hold the two of you close together,
as the moon smiles behind us.

            Have you ever seen the moon smile?
            Have you ever seen anyone run like spilt milk? 

You are not here, my only friend,
my only Turk with the mouth of an Armenian.
My questions are unanswered.
Questions asked a million and a half times,
by turtles who snapped beneath their shells
when you tried to lure tongues out of hiding.
I know you loved the sky
cloudy and clear, could not see it
for thirty-five years, as I do now, in Glendale,
a city full of Armenian grocers, children
who openly say "parev" with the breath
of ripe apricots, with Platonic love,
as ants crawl over that which is not theirs.
Shall we shake hands? Make amends?
It is spring. The rhododendrons
on Mrs. Keropian's front porch
are in red, blue and orange buckets
white hairs sprout from the Black Sea of her scalp.

Mrs. Keropian names items
after 120 year old sisters who chatter now
in dormant boats on the sea floor.
She names coffee cups
with black marshes of fortunes at the bottom
Sipan, Daron, and Van,
though there isn't a Sipan, Daron, or Van.

"They came to me in my dreams,
came to me with baskets of green
almonds with lashes. They stared, bloodshot
pupils dilated, and asked me to clean out their eyes!"

Should I listen to her? Should I tell them to be well?

I think I will hang my laundry out to dry.

These are the questions you should have asked. But today,
you are silent, and she is deaf. The secretive
moon takes your place, and converses 
with her cups of teeth. Her window is barred,
her grave, nameless.

Remember the crescent moon, the star,
rivers and lakes you loved, Arax and Van.
I will answer your questions,
someone who hasn't worked the earth
indeed, can't love it.

A pencil point can't be a collage.

Now that I have answered our questions,
I'll clutch your pages in my Armenian hands,
nod a brief nod, swallow loathing and love,
and wish you well under your Anatolian sun,
so yellow, bleeding.

Copyright Sevana Bagdasarian. This poem has appeared in Birthmark: A bilingual anthology of Armenian-American poetry, 1999.

Sevana Bagdasarian: Chorale

To the spirit of Dikranouhi and to all women who have
been forced to the ground on the banks of the Euphrates

There is death in this river
you can hear it sing.

The people dancing
or watching the great fish
swim in massive schools
cannot hear it.
They have not been made to listen.

I dance
and swim backwards
splashing water
on my face

for downstream
the women's bodies are found

naked and nameless
on the river's shore.

If I could
I would drain the death from this river.
I would shower it like rice
over a bride,
but today the mountain hands
disfigured and defaced
as if saying
it to has had enough.

My hand molts wet silt
touch homeland touch earth
They say if you are lost
touch earth.
If the duduk's wind changes direction
or if you forget to swim
touch earth.

Her obsidian hair reaches
downstream
becoming tributaries
she won't know which to choose.

I close my eyes to push
back her memory
but there is no stopping it.
No force to mind
no threat of retaliation.

Only the song
of the big dipper breaking
into a million-and-a-half pieces
falling, scattering
and the sound
that only those who have heard
a star's dancing fall
can hear.

Copyright Sevana Bagdasarian. This poem has appeared in Aspora, volume 1, No 2, Spring 1994.