89 POETS & WRITERS^I
N MY marrow and in my beat-
ing blood, I hope that, in the
end, Children of Grass is not
a poetry project, or a pho-
tographic thesis, but a work
of translation. Like love and
all the other translations, one
hopes that whatever is lost can
be found again in the morning,
but if it cannot, it should be well
replaced. If Meg Day’s poem
about silence becomes a portrait
of noise, is it a happy marriage?
When Leila Chatti writes, “The pit
is a tub / and you are washing in
your body’s black water,” what is
needed? Should there be a bath?
Must the water be black?
We brewed Leila, in a Philadel-
phia apartment, in a spotless tub,
w i t h fi ve c ans of ins t ant c of fe e and
gallons and gallons of hot water.
Her hair smelled of lilac, and all the
rest of our world like French roast.
And Leila, as she absorbed that
water, made me wonder—from
where does one draw the poem:
the poetry or the poet? Slender
and radiant in in the tub, stepping
lithely out of it she was wrinkled
like old fruit, soft and wounded,
but thanks to caffeine jitters car-
ried the vibe of a metal rod, freshly
thwacked with a tuning fork. One
struggles to imagine the thousand
words: the changing in every voice,
the revolutions in every telling.Leila Chatti