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Pilgrimage

The arch of my foot aches.

Soon, we’re walking through nettles, a yellow paddock,

               fresh ginger packed between the gum

And tooth.

In excess, sugars become fat, a kind

               of sealant. Organs bleating

On the forest floor.

A first step.

Blue radiance, paper that receives ink, coffee with cream. By day 8,

               I can’t remember life

With my family.

Bhanu Kapil’s collections include How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize; Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015); humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009); Incubation: a Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006); and The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001).

Themes

About this Poem

“In 1995, my father proposed a pilgrimage to Badrinath, India, describing how, on his last attempt, the snow had come early. Turning back, he stopped for two nights in Kankal, a bare-bones ashram managed by my mother’s elderly cousins. Thinking of my father walking in the mountains for days, I was curious about his thoughts. What happens to intrusive imagery on a long walk? Do we inherit the desire for walks of this kind from our forebears? The last time I attempted the pilgrimage, it rained so much that the path fell off the mountain into the valley below. I, too, turned back and made my way to Kankal, knocking on the heavy, wooden door until someone let me in.”
—Bhanu Kapil

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More by this poet

Collude

with the anemone zero.

Drink 12 oz. of coffee in Longmont.

Are you parched?

Is your name Pinky?

What color is the skin of your inner arm, creamy?

Valentine City rebate: a box of chocolates from Safeway.

Yours, yours, yours.

In its entirety.

Bhanu Kapil

2019

Humanimal [I want to make a dark mirror out of writing]

47. I want to make a dark mirror out of writing: one child facing the other, like Dora and little Hans. I want to write, for example, about the violence done to my father’s body as a child. In this re-telling, India is blue, green, black and yellow like the actual, reflective surface of a mercury globe. I pour the mercury into a shallow box to see it: my father’s right leg, linear and hard as the bone it contains, and silver. There are scooped out places where the flesh is missing, shiny, as they would be regardless of race. A scar is memory.

Bhanu Kapil

2008

Humanimal [Feral children are fatty]

4. Feral children are fatty, complex and rigid. When you captured the two children, you had to brush the knots out of their hair then scrape the comb free of hard butter. Descent and serration. No. I don't want to ask primal questions.

Bhanu Kapil

2008

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Pilgrimage

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