Vacating an Apartment

By Agha Shahid Ali 1949–2001

Efficient as Fate,

each eye a storm trooper,

the cleaners wipe my smile

with Comet fingers

and tear the plaster

off my suicide note.

They learn everything

from the walls’ eloquent tongues.

Now, quick as genocide,

they powder my ghost for a cinnamon jar.

They burn my posters

(India and Heaven in flames),

whitewash my voicestains,

make everything new,

clean as Death.

When the landlord brings new tenants,

even Memory is a stranger.

The woman, her womb solid with the future,

instructs her husband’s eyes

to clutch insurance policies.

They ignore my love affair with the furniture,

the corner table that memorized

my crossed-out lines.

Oh, she’s beautiful,

a hard-nippled Madonna.

The landlord gives them my autopsy;

they sign the lease.

The room is beating with bottled infants,

and I’ve stopped beating.

I’m moving out holding tombstones in my hands.

Source: The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987)

Biography

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir, the son of a distinguished and highly educated family in Srinagar. He attended the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in . . .

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