Poem: Dacca Gauzes

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• 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 gauzesknown as woven air, runningwater, evening dew:

  a dead art now, dead overa hundred years. "No onenow knows," my grandmother says,

  "what it was to wearor touch that cloth." She woreit once, an heirloom sari from

  her mother's dowry, provedgenuine when it was pulled, allsix yards, through a ring.

  Years later when it tore,many handkerchiefs embroideredwith gold-thread paisleys

  were distributed amongthe nieces and. daughters-in-law.Those too now lost.

  In history we learned: the handsof weavers were amputated,the looms of Bengal silenced,

  and the cotton shipped rawby the British to England.History of little use to her,

  my grandmother just sayshow the muslins of todayseem so coarse and that only

  in autumn, should one wake upat dawn to pray, can onefeel that same texture again.

  One morning, she says, the airwas dew-starched: she pulledit absently through her ring.