“A Hand in the Pines” Remnants of the Touched World in the Poetry of Medha Singh — Christina Tudor-Sideri

There are days when being seems unbearable, not for its weight, but for its excess of sheerness. One passes through the ordinary gestures—touch, breath, language—yet each is already shadowed by its undoing. To live is to inhabit that distance between the word and what it names, between the body and what escapes it. Love, too, is only ever in fragments: an echo of memory, a shard of grief, a sudden eruption of laughter in the dark of night. Perhaps it is in this fracture—where intimacy dissolves into absence, where mourning becomes indistinguishable from desire—that the truth of our condition reveals itself. The body remembers what thought cannot: the contour of a hand, the scent of linen, the silence after a voice has gone. And so one learns that existence is not wholeness, but a continual negotiation with ghosts. That there is no intimacy without fracture. To hold another, even for a moment, is to acknowledge the impossibility of holding them entirely. The hand already withdraws as it reaches. The world already fades as it is spoken. Think: the silence between us is never empty; it trembles with ghosts. To live, then, is to dwell in this trembling.

Phenomenology asks us to return to the things themselves, but no thing is ever unshadowed. The body of a lover is already suffused with memory; a river is more than water—it carries the sediment of longing, the history of departures. Every perception is already a double exposure: the moment as it is, and the moment in its vanishing. Love, memory, grief, these are not separate domains but the same texture, woven from presence and absence. The body is the first archive. It remembers touch long after the departure of the hand. It holds the language of the father, the tenderness of the mother, the laughter of a dear friend, the silence of an estranged lover. Each scar is a script, each gesture a residue. An archive, yes, but an archive that is both shelter and burden. To be touched is to be changed, to be inhabited by the trace of another. To love is to invite a ghost into one’s body. To mourn is to carry the conversation with the absent one. Everlastingly. No thing is ever unshadowed; no philosophy can trace its shadow. And yet, there is a way. Poetry gives us a way to recognize this shadow, to speak of it, to shelter it. Poetry names what evades philosophical or phenomenological capture; it holds the unholdable, it gives shape to the silence that lingers after speech and concept have failed. 

Medha Singh’s Afterbody moves within this space of fracture and persistence. What one encounters in its pages is not a simple chronology of poems, but a movement through thresholds. Philosophy itself has a shadow here, a shadow bending into personal memory, undoing itself in the textures of grief and love, in the irreducible hesitation between presence and absence. Here, the body is never just itself, never just a body. It is history, inheritance, touch, language, rupture. One feels the pull of the Bergsonian durée, yes, but time here is porous, folded, circling back on itself in echoes. A single image carries both its emergence and its erasure; each poem is a palimpsest where the present leans against time departed, where speech quivers on the edge of silence. The poems are records of life and passage in which intimacy and estrangement are indistinguishable, in which mourning and eros entwine like indistinct threads in the same weave. Afterbody unfolds as a dark cartography of absence and touch, where grief is not a gentle wisp but a dense, almost physical atmosphere that presses against every page.

The volume opens in a register of haunting, where love already arrives belated, coagulated into dusk, voice and echo at once. In After, intimacy is no longer a union but an aftertaste, a stubborn hand pressed into pines against the grain of time. Another Life turns from this solitude to imagine death not as end but as grotesque metamorphosis—bad men transfigured into trees, forgiven by the earth, even as their ruin continues to breathe beneath lorries and black water. Already, the world appears less as history than as threshold, as quivering seepage between what is broken and what insists on giving. The personal becomes porous in Lunch, Boat, where a meal dissolves into prisms of ice, politics, and fear. Love is no more than a shimmer on water, a refraction mistaken for solidity. Touch extends this lesson: to caress is to be displaced, always meeting the inhuman within intimacy. Hands gather not comfort but fragments—rubber, dust, rain—each proof that the body’s archive can hold the cold that was and the cold to come. “How do I turn back from all these hands have touched?” asks the speaker of the poem.

Whether approached in sequence or stumbled upon in fragments, the poems compel their reader to recognize the body as something that exceeds mere corporeality. “We are not our bodies / we are the places we place them,” the poet reminds us. A thought that also invites reflection of the places we never truly inhabit, of the places we only brush against, as if space were not a dwelling but a skin on whose surface time condenses like vapor. To name such a place is already to betray it: the name folds it into history, monument, territory, the weight of stone. But what persists beneath the name is thinner, more elusive. It comes in touches, in breaths, in the slow sediment of gestures that do not proclaim themselves. A city, a landscape, even a body—it is never revealed, only grazed. What one encounters is not the thing but its residue, the remainder of presence that both summons and recedes.

For instance, the twin poems Delhi, Day and Delhi, Night do not offer us a portrait of a city—they give us its haunt, its breath, its paradox. Together, they form a diptych of elegiac geography: the first, a hymn of daylight built from fog and stone; the second, a nocturne steeped in heatless warmth and exhausted divinity. What these poems resist is monumentalism. Delhi is not here as capital or empire, but as a bruised, breathing atmosphere—made not of history but of touches, of slow workers, of a dog doused in moonlight. This is a re-spatialization of the city, where time unspools not chronologically but sensually, and the poem becomes cartography for feeling—damp, diffuse, vaporous. Together, the poems refuse a well-recognized polarity of day and night, or even a dialectic of decay and renewal. Instead, they offer an ambience—a sensuous, haunted poetics of urban time. The true character here is not Delhi, but the impossibility of knowing a place at all. These are poems of intimacy without comprehension, of witnessing without control. The city is not narrated—it breathes, hums, and slips from grasp. Day ends with a false blue sky, Night with a dog’s paw flicking at flies. What endures is not progress or glory, but sensation, and a longing so quiet it nearly evaporates. “Imagine a love up there,” the speaker urges in a whisper—but of course, the poem knows better. The love is not up there. It is down here, swatting, waiting, slowly going blind.

Tempted as one might be to ask questions, to follow a philosophical register along rhythm and syntax, in the presence of Singh’s poems—these poems that do not resolve but expose, one becomes enthralled by their refusal of closure, as though caught in a clearing of broken light. Light that dazzles and blinds and stages the false ceiling of the sky, too perfect to be real, too smooth to be trusted. Clarity is always suspect; it smuggles in the lie of transcendence, the fiction that we can step outside what enfolds us. The morning does not arrive as revelation but as hesitation, fog made of breath without flame, a presence that refuses to declare itself. Illumination exposes nothing; it only changes the texture of concealment. Darkness, too, is no opposite. It is not erasure but another saturation. Night seeps, cools, weighs down. It gathers contradictions—warmth without fire, sound without resonance, labor without end. The sacred, if it exists, appears here not as triumph but as exhaustion, in the sleep of a call, in the paw of a dog brushing away flies. Holiness is dull, filthy, small; it persists where the monumental collapses. The divine wears out, yet the gesture continues, modest and unnoticed. What endures is neither the geometry of history nor the progress of daylight, but the fragile weave of sensations: smoke without smoke, heat without heat, stone built by a thousand anonymous hands, silence layered with half-heard echoes. To walk through such a world is not to know it but to be brushed by its impossibility. Intimacy here means giving up control, consenting to breathe in what resists comprehension. Perhaps this is all that remains: not the certainty of meaning, nor the promise of revelation, but the subtle ache of contact that vanishes as soon as it is felt. Love is not overhead, shining down like a star. It clings below, stubborn and ordinary, flicking, waiting, wearing itself out, blind and faithful to the ground it never leaves.

In Afterbody, the eponymous poem of the collection, the elegy is not a gesture of reverence—it is a dispossession performed with trembling hands inside an almirah, among cravats and decay. This is grief not as mourning but as inventory, as disassembly of a once-dominant presence, the father reduced to “shirts / cufflinks / silk and linen / handkerchiefs.” The poem is utterly materialist in its metaphysics—there is no abstract mourning here, rather, there is a physical engagement with remnants, a textile ontology of loss. The father is not remembered but handled, and even this handling is fraught with physiological revolt: “I choked in grief,” the speaker admits, and the line nearly suffocates itself. Every act of retrieval is a confrontation not with memory but with a kind of sensory violence—the redolence of turpentine, blood on cotton, the scent that no longer signifies the living but invades the lungs, intimate and unbidden. There is no nostalgia in Afterbody. Not that kind of nostalgia. Medha Singh is not a poet rummaging through heirlooms with sentimental light. This is closer to autopsy, but a familial one, emotional and exacting. Even the language resists elegiac softness: “shards of starched cloth,” “dry mouth,” “blood you’d retched.” The father’s absence is not framed as loss but as unfinished aggression, a masculine wound without its originator. “Who were I to be against / in the absence of your madness?” Perhaps the most devastating line in the poem. As for the poem’s title, Afterbody, it suggests to the reader both sequence and residue. The body after death, but also what the body leaves after itself: scent, cloth, disease, gender. These aren’t symbols, they’re evidences, a forensic archive of presence. But even this archive is unstable, because death, the poem tells us, is not in what decays but in what no longer has a scent. “Death are the dead that don’t.” This line lands like a heretical scripture. It rewrites the terms of mourning: what lives is what still carries scent, what still marks time with breath.

What is it that remains after the body? one might ask, again, taken by the philosophical valences of this collection. Is it spirit or residue? A cufflink, a fold of cloth, the acrid ghost of turpentine—these are not relics but irritants, reminders that the past does not vanish but ferments, infiltrates the air, enters the lungs. Grief is not a transparent act of mourning; it is chemical, physiological, stubborn. It does not speak—it clogs, it chokes, it stains. To touch what is left is to be contaminated, to breathe what should no longer breathe. Loss does not appear here as absence, but as an excess that refuses to settle. The dead do not depart; they persist in fragments, in the stubborn weight of fabric, in the stubbornness of smell. And yet this persistence is not consoling—it is invasive. The dead arrive uninvited, not as memories but as irritations, as remnants that scald the senses. Death is not silence but the relentless continuation of matter without the dignity of meaning. Inheritances are not treasures but wounds disguised as keepsakes. 

And yet perhaps to speak of death is to misunderstand it. Death is not what is buried but what lingers. The true dead are those who no longer emit, who no longer press themselves upon the senses. This is why mourning fails, why elegy falters: because nothing is gone, everything intrudes, and the living remain ensnared in the tactile aftermath. Breath becomes the only fragile affirmation. Not transcendence, not reconciliation, only the bare fact of respiration—air forcing itself into lungs that do not want it, carrying with it the taste of what has not yet decayed. To live in the after is not to be liberated but to persist among remnants, to navigate an archive of stains and fibers, to acknowledge that survival is no triumph but sensuous and unending labor. What the body leaves is not memory but evidence. And evidence does not soothe; it accuses, it unsettles, it forces one to keep breathing in the rot of what was once command. There is no closure, only the ongoing task of inhabiting the afterbody, the world of residues.

In Rewilding, the body is no longer a site of experience but a conduit through which the world’s ancient ecstasy shivers. And yet, that ecstasy is not pleasure but the soft disaster of being alive. The poem refuses the easy association of “rewilding” with natural return or pastoral redemption. Instead, it stages a trembling collision between grief and green, between language's failure and the insistence of matter to go on. “Ecstasy,” we’re told, “is to lie outside oneself.” But what is outside the self in a world already overexposed, overly-penetrated by abstraction, history, refinement, and death? The poem does not answer, but it moves—slowly, elegiacally—through wind, wheat, flickers of light under water. These are not images of serenity; they are beginnings, tiny rifts where the world bleeds from one mode of being to another, where “invisible things become apparent in visible things.” It’s ontological escape, the unseen erupting quietly into the seen.

This is indeed the philosophical terrain of Rewilding, a poem I will insist upon, in spite of others in the collection deserving of the same attention. Not a return to nature but a descent into its unsteady ontology. What is the courage of gardens? Not bloom, not beauty, but endurance. The poem is not interested in nature as spectacle, but as a model for surviving time’s brutality without becoming monstrous. “Look at the life with bones and words,” the speaker commands. And we do, but what we find is not transcendence but rather exhaustion: word made by the “refined, consummate and dead.” Civilization becomes a mausoleum of gestures, ossified into literature. Against this, the poem aches for something more trembling, more alive, more unbearable: “the courage of gardens / that endure the quiver of time.” A shift into the unbearable follows: the cremation of a child in snow, attended only by the speaker and the mute blanket flowing along the spine. A devastating image that arrives with no melodrama, just the rawness of unspeakable grief. Here, rewilding is not ecological fantasy but emotional survival: how to remain standing, how to remain human, in the face of ultimate loss, without consoling oneself with the ciphers of art, the lies of legacy, or the seductions of transcendence. Rewilding is not interested in escape or hope. It wants something deeper, darker: a form of life that can stand inside catastrophe without aestheticizing it. A form of love that doesn’t turn away from the cremated child. A form of ecstasy that isn’t rapture, but surrender. This is a poem that teaches us how to quiver and not break. How to lie outside oneself—not to flee, but to feel. Not to recover the wild, but to become it. To rewild is not to return. There is no return, no pristine ground waiting behind the wreckage of time. What we call nature has already been crossed, exhausted, named to death. Yet something still trembles through it—a residue of life that resists refinement, refuses to harden into monument or masterpiece. This trembling is not joy, not serenity, not the pastoral promise of renewal, but a fragile ecstasy: the soft disaster of continuing to be.

While these reflections turn only around certain poems, each could equally summon its own meditation. The choice is not exclusion but fidelity—fidelity to the style of the work, which breathes in fragments and shadows, and fidelity also to the motifs and thoughts that first pressed themselves upon the mind in encounter. To press upon them all would risk reducing the tremor of the book to catalogue. What remains unsaid is not lesser, only withheld—like silence between breaths, or the shadows between branches, necessary to the very shape of the light. To read such a work is to know that its entirety belongs to the reader; what has been offered here is only one hand extended toward it. And yet, even in part, the work discloses itself as whole, for each poem carries within it the persistence of the others, and together they form a field too expansive for any single account. Medha Singh’s Afterbody does not merely collect poems; it enacts a philosophy of being and nonbeing, of the body as residue, apparition, and event. To read these poems is to linger in the thresholds where memory brushes against oblivion, where love leaks into death, where the singular tremor of touch opens into the seismic tremor of history. Its arc is not progression but persistence. From first dusk to last fragment, what remains is, again, the soft disaster of endurance, the residue of contact, the ache of breath. To read Afterbody is to experience poetry as philosophy’s double. Where concepts collapse, images remain. Where phenomenology reaches its limit, lyric breath goes on. Singh has written a work that demands to be read not only as poetry but as ontology—a cartography of absence, an archive of spectral touch, a hymn to the impossible intimacy between being and its after.

***

Afterbody is available from Blue Diode Publishing

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer, translator, and researcher whose work unfolds at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and critical theory. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue, and the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Forthcoming are An Absence of Sea, a breathless letter to the Other; and Reliquary: On the Phenomenology of Kept Time, a monograph that undertakes an investigation of temporality, archival desire, and the phenomenological status of preservation. Her translation work, aimed at recovering underrepresented literary voices, includes texts by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca.