POEM: DACCA GAUZES

	January 9, 2002
	Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky remembers a friend and fellow poet, Agha Shahid Ali.

ROBERT PINSKY: On December 8, the poet Agha Shahid Ali died, too young, of a brain tumor. Shahid was a Kashmiri, a Muslim and a cosmopolitan who wrote splendid poetry in English and lived in America. He was admired for his wonderful poems and for his dignity, his outrageous comedy, his sweet nature. His books include A Nostalgist's Map of America and The Half-Inch Himalayas. His poem on the "Dacca Gauzes" exemplifies Shahid's nostalgia, his sense of history, his grace, a sensibility as fine as the gauze fabrics he describes here: The Dacca Gauzes . . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes. -Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one now knows," my grandmother says, "what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a ring. Years later when it tore, many handkerchiefs embroidered with gold-thread paisleys were distributed among the nieces and. daughters-in-law. Those too now lost. In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated, the looms of Bengal silenced, and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England. History of little use to her, my grandmother just says how the muslins of today seem so coarse and that only in autumn, should one wake up at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again. One morning, she says, the air was dew-starched: she pulled it absently through her ring.