Transforming the Strange by Renée Gregorio
I’m down to my last couple days in NM (HOORAY!) so I thought I’d post another poem I read at the Palace of the Governors.
Transforming the Strange
By Renée Gregorio
In the hills of the north, beside the stream
a wooden, water-powered fulcrum-pestle
fills with water, pounds down slowly
into the grains of rice in the mortar.
On the road to My Son,
three women in white ao dai, conical hats,
ride their bicycles down a dirt road
as one conversation, as white heron
stand on a soaked field.
At the marketplace, old women
chew betel nut, their lips and teeth red with it,
or they crouch down low, smoking cigarettes,
just talking to each other. Their rootedness,
desired as the day sun breaks through this sky
now flooded with clouds.
Indigo cloth stretched on lines of rope
dries in morning’s sun on the dirt path to Lao Cai.
I pass an old woman, smile at her and say hello.
She pats my hips hard as she goes by—
I like the way body becomes language here.
The way strange becomes everyday,
that the roads open out in front of us,
juicy as bitten pomegranate seeds,
abundant as monsoon rains,
delicately edged as the hand-laced
cotton cloth we buy to cover our table
when we arrive home.
