Online Exclusive: Supritha Rajan
Supritha Rajan of Rochester, New York, is the recipient of our 2007 Theodore Roethke Prize for her poem, "The Orphan of Time," published in the Spring-Summer 2007 issue.
When asked about the poem, she says, "As with many poems I’ve written, 'The Orphan of Time' began with a handful of mental images: the image of a female body discovered at a river bank by a group of people, the image of a body falling through a gorge, the color of the skyline when they find her, etc. Through the physical location of the “woman baby” and the description of her as a “woman baby,” I strove to emphasize her liminality, insofar as she is both on the boundary of land and water and is neither woman nor baby. The question for me while writing it, as for the people in the poem who find her, was who she is, where she comes from, and what she could represent.
"In terms of structure, I initially began with lines written in a loose pentameter but then began to extend the line, allowing both the length of the line and the gradual accumulation of clauses to create, syntactically, a lulling rhythm akin to the movement of water. I also included a subtle rhyme scheme to underscore, through sonic mirroring, the mimetic relationship between the woman baby and the people who find her."
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The editors asked Rajan, as this year's Hugo Prize winner, to select and discuss one of Richard Hugo's poems from the Poetry Foundation's web site.
She selected "The River Now."
Supritha Rajan writes: "Richard Hugo’s poems appeal to me for the way in which their distinctively American vernacular and settings continue to engage with the central issues found among the Romantics, insofar as Hugo’s poems repeatedly explore the fraught interchange between interior experience and the natural or city landscape. In the opening lines of “The River Now,” for example, Hugo documents the various sociological and environmental changes that the river indexes as a result of commercial and industrial forces. What is interesting is the way in which Hugo contrasts the “real” details he observes in the transformed landscape to the failures of his own imaginative encounter with this landscape to either recover or restore (through memory) what has been lost, as in the phrase “I can’t dream anything.” This declaration of the speaker’s imaginative limits continues to cast a shadow of separation and loss over the ending of the poem despite the parallel Hugo establishes between the river’s northward flow and the speaker’s blood, a parallel that alludes to a possible union of body, mind, and nature in the “bright bay that receives it all.”
Read Richard Hugo's "The River Now."
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The Orphan of Time
by Supritha Rajan
If not a baby, say then it was a woman baby
They found along the riverbed, the drowned woman baby
They’d seen fall in their dreams, a steady fall
Through the narrow cleft of a gorge they mistook
For their minds or an adyt of the soul,
Or which they assumed only mind or soul could conjure
And so could not be real—a woman baby they weren’t sure
Lived, so soundless her body seemed, as though her heart
Took thicket, as though her mouth formed an arched colonnade
Domed with silence. Her lids and face, like her swart,
Mottled limbs, felt slick with the cream that coats
The newborn though she never cried like a newborn but floated
Mute on her back as if land were water and their eyes,
Looking into her jaundiced eyes, the sky. And they brayed
Over her as one would for a felled or orphaned child. For days
Clamored and fenced her body. For days crawled
Beside her and with gossip wove phantom shawls
To warm her bones, waiting for her to stir
As if she were named viceroy to much delayed prophecy
And would, on waking into speech, sing in anguish
Of the pastless present in which they roam and build parish,
Each evanescent chord coloring the sun-faded tapestry
Of their history: lands their nomadic feet forsook,
Mornings they rose to bodies stained with entry
Unable to recall in whom and through whom
Their bodies had lived. But nothing declined in her eyes.
Her body curled into a question and under the apricot gloom
Turned gold then black the way at dusk the river
Ripples gold then black. Robed strangeness! Changeling!,
They said, herding about her body, each angling
To see if her privacy tented a deeper secrecy…
Her mouth smelled of dampness long enclosed.
Bits of bark and molten leaves hid her tongue,
Which lay grooved with signs like a runic stone.
They rubbed it, poured melted butter over it—
As if tongues flame into fires, oil quickens into speech
Or that like a holy book newly recovered and fit
For plunder, she’d reveal the cause of their local grief
And what once fled fugitive in them would shine,
Like her body, with the waters from which it rose.
But she only glassed their desolation. Mist
Swaddled mist. Light sifted leaf to leaf. Voices plunged
And wheeled in chants, still possessed by that primitive belief
Which reads in all things their likeness transformed:
Yes, a woman baby, the repeating bride to hours
Ransomed but not found, a revenant who surfaced from
The estate of their dreams and like them had somehow come
To harm. For so they knew her now. Not as alien
Prophecy but as the remnant of a former life in which
They drowned. A woman baby they murmured in unison.
Our bodies enisled and gone to sea. And they wept
And wept for the gone world from which their bodies
Took form, for the life spent shipwrecked and tossed
From wrong to wrong…For days they wept like this. Clouds swarmed
The headlands and cold rains sheeted their heads with frost
As they rocked her in their arms and sang threnodies
Softer than the river’s undersong when it coursed through her,
Softer than the begonia and balsam petals they picked
To perfume her mouth. For days they sang like this, mimicking
The river’s cabling chords, as her body rippled clear
And they saw themselves mirrored in her then disappear,
Drowning again in the country where they were born
Until their vision grew wooly and worn.
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Supritha Rajan is currently an assistant professor of nineteenth-century
British literature at the University of Rochester. Her poems have previously
been published in Notre Dame Review, Salt Hill, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere.
"The Orphan of Time" appears exclusively in the Spring/Summer 2007 Issue of Poetry Northwest. Subscribe today
