by Joy Goswami
From its black round gullet spit rises, the colour of fire—
Honour burnt by the people
Who hears my words? A blood-smeared god!
On the earth’s metallic surface
Steel grass has risen
Under night’s cover, the sky sleeps
The unread Book of Lightning in his hand
The slave walks away, losing prison upon prison…
The fisherman who walks
Splashing his feet in the sea
Who upturns his hat for
The meteors’ pitter-patter
One dawn his head catches fire, explodes
The moon pierces a hole in the roof of the sea
Your patience bursts its dam
Centuries pass before
The blood stirs again in the hard wood of my fin…
A man with outstretched arms, that tree-corpse
Flowing past it
A stream of water has reached the final borders, deep into the dawn
Lit by very little light the cave is up to its neck in water…
On that shore, day
On this shore, the poet, ended, his face vivid as the setting sun
On the roof the bovine child. Its neck grows long
Goes off to drink water
From a distant pond
On the road, the night-hag calls in fits and starts
Round midnight, a skeleton salesman
Hawks his wares along a bank of clouds:
Curd, who will buy curd
On the roof the bovine child.
To keep its Rock-hard thirst company
I put my mouth to the pond and drink
Blood instead of water—I drink
Darkness, my frontier is water
On a sandbank above the water
One day there sat a bird as heavy as the earth
The globe has long since melted its pressure
Away
What hasn’t melted
Is sin as heavy as the earth
Lying buried below it
The wreckage of clawbeakfeather
Darkness, along the shores of my frontier
Are woods now, peaceful rows of houses,
Bathing and soft laughter, boats and the leap of swimmers
Unknown to whom, at night, starmarks sometimes light up
On my sand-muddied back—
The footprints of that demonbird!
Shanti shanti shanti shanti—when the golden madgirl sits on the shore eating one sunset after another sea agape waves of water dried into bloodied sandpits behind them towns dead mounds of brick-wood brick-wood dawn noon destroyed, evening midnight over, soaking up thunderous gold-dust sand-dust from the air the malevolent madgirl who sits on the shore and chants
Shanti shanti shanti into her cupped palmfuls of water the suns continually sink…
Above the slaughter, black grass
Bones underneath, skulls congealed with mud
No one is meant to know
Holding the globe like a basin to my mouth
I throw out the bones mud coal iron oil inside it
Into that empty skull all night I hawk and noisily
Spit blood, fitful gusts of blood
The sky slips by below
My mother’s name is Crescent Moon, my lover’s name is Shadow.
My ripple is an Open House—games of hit-and-run fall down
From its roof
My complete blunder a cuckoo, if you scratch the sky, there’s sand.
In my father’s mouth a betel leaf, shooting stars make way on his sheet.
My mother, down there, crumbles into the sea.
The wooden goat and wooden buffalo came alive.
Thudding capering shut in by the barrier of bed and table—
Lowering their mouths they sip scintilla off the floor
I lower my legs from the bed—in the mosaic the sun appears
In a crimson cauldron two legs, in two crucified hands a spray of wings
And I? I leave by the window
Far below, the mortal world. The wooden buffalo, the horse, the wooden Ram
Reeling under their feet—a bloodshot iron expanse
In dreams the dead peacock, moon
Light on its skin
Corner room on the roof
Prickly pear on the cornice
Thorn-pierced ancient
Birds all dried-up
In their throats the susurrus of
Winds, calls, notes
The dead peacock stands—its body
Stippled with fireflies
Strung on its chain the moon
A pendulum, black
Trees aslant, still-melting
Brick-wood houses
In dreams the dead peacock, its
Clear eyes, open
Death? Oh he comes and perches above the window
Pitcher in hand. The minute he takes a sip, they slip
Down his crystal-clear throat
Melted nebulae, flattened suns, particles of moon—
The entire Milky Way keeps flowing
Down his veins and arteries
When he moves away from the window
Turning and twisting through streams of smoke the past
Enters the room—a jumbled rice-ball
Like food-offerings to ancestors—the future!
What a difficult moon strung alongside your boat!
At the other end, what a lovely boatman!
His face is skeletal, his arms are rusted iron.
Tell him, tell your boatman, to strike his iron blow.
It’s such an exorbitant moon, yet how cheaply he agreed to break it!
It falls chunk by chunk into the water, the water flies high and low…
Say, don’t you wish you could be in that scene again
When, shifting a mass of water to eat those meteors
It’ll float up—the sea-god’s monstrous fish-face?
Today the body is a sapling
The wind a wandering boy
The girl a lantern
And this courtyard—mother!
Under the gooseberry tree my mother’s white shell bangles
Lie broken—the new schoolhouse rises next to it
The joint family comes home from the burning ghats, last rites done
The ancient husbandless peek from behind the fence—
Whose newly widowed face is that?
A chameleon runs. Ahead—the carcass of an old house
A dead tree, columns of poisonous ants crawl on its body, too
The crematorium came up there ten years ago
Fallen acacia blooms on the path, blankets and rattan baskets
Under the gooseberry tree new students engrossed in sums
On the grass My mother’s broken shell bangles—
On which a clear white sun falls
Each time I’m cut open
Animal blood will be found—if I’m hung
Upside down from a mountain peak
The birds will scream—the sky will redden
In the sea
My buffalo-head, its twisted horns
Will be seen instead of the sun
Thousands of corpses, wars
Rise towards the past
Peaks tipped with frost
Behind them the little houses sit
Their lights on
For the men they have lost
Feast-of-love sky in the room
Swinging moon on the floor
The lantern beside the bed
All it does is blink
All night the new moon
Slices the road into thin strips
Still looking for a corpse worthy
Of writing a single shred of poetry
Ma comes and stands
At the window
At low tide, the river
A couple of burning snakes leap out of the water
I come to pick up my iron-fettered flute
&nb
sp; From that river
At the sky’s high window
Ma comes and stands
Moves away
True sorrow in that gooseberry-smell
Not a leaf stirs in the tree where Betal lives
In that gooseberry-smell a grief-scorched light
Scrounging for glowworms on the skyways, Betal gives up the ghost
A dead face rises in the window opposite night
The gooseberry-air goes boom! in forty-nine directions
Knocks him flat out of the window into a steep drain
In between, the earth turns, the five vital airs turn
The sun clenched between their teeth
Zodiac signs sprinkle lightning on my solitary face
Splitting sunrise and sunset right down the middle
The blood- and glee-stained poet reawakens
The neighbours can’t get over their astonishment
Tongues wag: Would you believe it!
He’s just as wicked—gobbling up the sun and the rain
Blowing away the trees just like he did before!
There’s a bridge on the way—no water—sand
There’s dust on the way and a giant weed-choked well
A crematorium? That too—
Those who lay shrouded on the funeral pyres
Have left for work in the outskirts, pushing their cannon-carts
Was that a sudden breeze?
The breathing of suppressed straw?
Leaning into the graves, the bomb craters, I see
Mothers, their hands clapped across orphaned mouths
Like wide-open knees
The chopping-block
Put your face there
In the blink of an eye your head will shoot into the field up front
The last fatigue of hunger, salt, the last drop of sleep—
War, the last sport
Last-blood drips into the sky—gorged on blood
The sun a red clot
The bombed-out city, trees draped in flags—
In the evening, the cannons a blue cast
God’s messengers come out carrying balloons—
The day’s hunt over at last.
Place the greens below the mound
I have brought the sacrificial animal, a goat
He has forgotten his previous beheading
Yet the mark remains
Garland-like round his throat
Beheading is the issue here.
Hence the dug-up earth, soft to the touch.
All proof soaks up fear.
Never tell anyone what you know, or how much.
The ocean has aged
So many heavy mountains and islands on his back
Seafarer, your boat
Seems almost like a toy
Don’t hesitate, such a light burden
Can easily be given to the old boy!
They rise out of the water on to the banks
Fleeing their whole lives
From one age to another
Missiles come flying, arrows
Clamour of sons daughters wives mothers elders infants
Refugee camps ablaze
On this road dark skylamps
Eyes
Cracks, pits, holes—each
An opportunity to collapse
Cross over and on the mud
A crop of new teeth
Foils all attempts, insomniac,
At an underwater nap!
Casting skylamps on this road
Made of water, the blind
Find their way—beside
An evening sky
Two companions walk,
Thorn bite poison unseen
Primal insect
Eradicated from their path
Only my peacocks leave
Entire notebooks—snakes
When the thunder falls tada!
The snakes come to life
Twisting turning roasting charring burning
I let them loose over hill and plain in canal and culvert
The peacocks see them and run
A palpitation of bodies shedding hundreds of eyes
At night a haunted house
Rears its head in my notebook, a moon
I see those perforated peacocks leap with nervous wings
On to its roof its walls
She, a last-minute seashore
On the other—liftoff in its outspread wings, an eagle
Pounces and rises again, a reptile in its talons
A shackle on its leg
The sacred pot of an auspicious start
Under the pot snake-eyes, gems
Cut off the thumb, that still leaves the forefinger
And the pen
Ear to the ground, underground the blood circulates
The earth’s heart stirs—her lips? They stir too
Sorrow has carved a hole in her throat with a razor—
Take a sip
There goes the needy one
Having murdered his son
Here comes the mother
Having sold her daughter
On their way back home from the hoard
Sand falls instead of tears, coins, discs of blood
Then, all is water. One day those round stones alone
Will throb with fire and walking on that fire
The mad will roam again, looking for
A drowned world rage sorrow seared
O horse, your head
Is installed on the table.
At night Smoke dribbles from
Your gaping mouth
And in the middle of that smoke your four-legged torso races
All over the field
The bat deserts the deodar tree in the rain
The bat drinks my blood
And flees to the sky
Fleeing doesn’t save him
At night the bat can be seen
Crouched on the moon
Spewing its bloody guts out, no, not blood, sand
See that grave on the shore of the house
In the sleep of its shadowbank, I began
My past calls across the water: ‘Listen
Every auspicious hour, on the hour, the ferry leaves.’
The crow that sits with a pebble in its mouth on the roof of the house
It knocks the morning unconscious with its caw
Lousy money, each and every time I propose a dumbshow
Before the toy fort
Wretched fame, crashing through the roof each and every time
I try to escape
Padmini sucked her friend’s finger dry, ergo
You, too, are blood in the baby’s spoon
Impossible to read this obedient poem solicitously
Sitting between Ma and Baba
See the blood of households flowing from the courtyards
Slush at everyone’s doorstep—come on in, slipping and sliding
On the way, the fugitive future, chains
On his hands and legs, dogs on his tail
The crow flies up to perch on Orion’s shoulder
Fills the pitcher of space one dropped star at a time
See that grave put to bed on the shore of a shadow
On its house-shore the sand is dry
The eastern sky, drunk, came and stood beside me
And my fear shattered
Today how dead-sure how deer-swift how lightning this race
How vast, how blown-away-sand this hand
How pavian this dance
How well-deep how closed-up how tongue-out this envy
How all holes inevitably graves
And all pursuing ghouls how suddenly sunk
Today how urgent this verse
Which even the devil would not dream of buying
A mad woman has been sitting at the ghat
For such a long time after her bath
Behind the temple an ancient
Banyan. Hanging roots.
Dogs on the cracked
terrace.
Many years ago, one chariot-festival,
The daredevil boy who leapt from his boat never to surface again—
After such a long time, he rises
From the water, sprints, swings like mad on the hanging roots
His entire body covered with moss, one eye eaten away by fish
No one can see him, even the temple god is drowsy with dope
At just such a moment, on just such an afternoon—
He drops by to see his mother
Listen, you better not forget about standing in the middle of the fire!
About the cracking and sinking of the earth
You better not forget the hands that came out of the cracks
Caused by the earthquake
About standing in the desert, on tiptoe
Putting your head into the belly of the sun
Aeons later, when the extinguished sun fell off the sky
Then, driven by hunger, finding nothing else
Leaving no trace behind
You better not forget to eat each other up…
Insects climb. Insects on the bole of a tree.
A lungi-clad farmer pours paddy-seed on his palm, blows
Watches it spill
A nitwit boy comes racing down the sloping tar-road
Yelling, Watch out! You’ll fall! You’ll fall!
I break open Valmiki’s anthill
And come running back to home and hearth
The heart—a hill of earth
On top of it play
Bones. Dice. Bones.
The heart, a hill of earth
Claim the right to take
Spade and shovel to it, will you?
Coming away in clods
Earth flesh earth flesh earth—
Dice. Bones. Dice.
Far off, the wounded planet
Is still afloat—
Offer it a fistful, an earthful of
