In the summer of 2014, my younger sister suddenly died at the age of twenty-four. The cause of her death remains undetermined. Her death became the main interest of this poem, which takes its title from the English-language translation of Priya, her Sanskrit-origin name, and on which I worked for the subsequent two years.
While the poem is therefore an elegy of a kind, it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper, or to write a way of inhabiting grief rather than exactly writing about grief. As a result, neither its subject nor its addressees are my sister alone, and its references range widely, including Louise Bourgeois, Nina Simone, Calvino, Beowulf, the names of horses I once saw at the only horse-riding competition I’ve ever witnessed, and more. As that list as well as the length of time I spent writing this poem might indicate, several different texts and interlocutors were on my mind as I wrote it. Four repeated touchstones were: Paradise Lost, to which I listened on audiobook often during those two years; Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song; Alice Oswald’s Memorial; and Marie Howe’s The Kingdom of Ordinary Time. Howe’s title is the phrase that often comes to mind for me when asked to describe this poem. The mood of elegy, I found, is diverse and capacious, containing bliss and misery alike; inhabiting grief happens in the day-to-day procession of the most ordinary time, which can also feel like a kingdom – one that is at once evil, or blighted, and beautiful, not to mention everything in between. These decisions motivated each aspect of the poem, including its syntax, form, and diction. The desire to write the mood of elegy or to write the experience of inhabiting grief became, as such, not dissimilar from what I tend to hope of any poem or tend to admire in poetry: that it will write into being a world that already in some way exists.