Vanishing Acts

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by Ranjit Hoskoté


  You cannot show someone the futility of his works and days, represent a man to himself as a skull and a pair of crossed bones while there is yet a murmur of life in his veins. And how much more tactful one must be in the presence of Alamgir himself. Finger those rosaries carefully, carefully. You can never be so careful, so minutely attentive to detail, as when you are on the brink, in the heat. Watch every millimetre that your arthritic fingers trace across the coverlet, every twitch in your toes. You have been the fiercest of men; but now, under this cupola, you are waiting for death to claim you, an ageing emperor.

  III

  Red, all red and black on the heights; and the rest bleaching to chalk. Rock, rock in every form: jagged and smooth, gleaming like a saddle polished through many campaigns, or dull as a cyst. Scrub. Desert. Rock, again, rock ignited by the blinding sun.

  She thinks I can’t hear or see her. She tends to be slightly romantic, like many angels. A touch of melodrama about the way she phrased that last thought: You have been the fiercest of men; but now, under this cupola, you are waiting for death to claim you, an ageing emperor.

  Am I death’s lost baggage, that it should so imperiously claim me? And do I not hear and see her, this girl with her flushed cheeks and tawny wings? Have I not the right to resist her feathers when they tickle my nostrils, force me to sneeze? She forgets that I am, after all, the descendant of Jamshed, who was long ago King of the Angels. He may have been banished to earth, but he never forgot the winged speech that he had spoken.

  It’s a gift I inherit: whisper or wingbeat, I hear it in my solitude. There are bearded, bespectacled old monks at court who have been trying, all their lives, to convince me that the apes were the fathers of men. I tell them otherwise, knowing better. If they could see past the blindfold of their doctrines, they would realize that we have not risen above the apes, we have fallen below the angels. I don’t think I shall ever convince them. They bore me, these scrabbling theologians, spittle dribbling down their ragged beards, forever poring through their crabbed volumes, finding ways of preserving my soul.

  I should have had them beheaded long ago, these snivelling oracles. Not that it will matter, eventually. What will it matter whether I had a soul or not, a beard or not? In the end, all that people will remember of me, if they remember me at all, will be a name. I’ll end with a couple of phrases carved into a tomb, a portrait or two in a folio—one on horseback, the emperor formally posed for the annalist, and the other more relaxed, picturing me as I stroll through a garden, between two other figures bent over their canes.

  And perhaps a city that bears my imperial title, though the names of cities are the most delicate flowers in the world. Ruffians can corrupt them with their rough tongues, vandals can hold them hostage or efface them, enemies can scratch out your titles and brand their own instead.

  I have no wish to be immortal any longer. Now that the wallmaps in my head don’t agree even remotely with what’s happening in the world of events, and I’m just a rusty scabbard clanking against a column—let it all go, I say, let it all go.

  My generals are dangerous men. I no longer want to hear from them, or want to read their tedious reports. Wherever they march, they loot villages and burn standing crops, slaughter and rape at will, spread the gospel of fire and darkness in my name. Here I lie under my cupola, without so much as twitching a ligament-and in all quarters, peasants who have never seen my face, traders to whom I have never been more than a head on a coin, curse me for a tyrant.

  Tyrant or scapegoat? Perhaps the deep red hollow of the throne in Ashkabad was a reminder to whoever sat on it, of the earliest kings on earth—those poor fools chosen by their tribe, or those unwary strangers shanghaied to play the part, who ruled for one year before they were sacrificed to the goddess of the fields. Have I not also been a sacrifice, lean and stringy though it be? My blood has streamed to the earth, to fertilise these chapped plateaux, these clotted escarpments, these wrung-out hills. I cannot close my eyes, because from each clouded eyeball, a jacaranda has burst and spread its velvet foliage, its hooded shadow over the raw, smarting wound of the landscape.

  I don’t sleep, but slide into morbid fantasies. I try to keep my eyes wide open (where have those jacarandas gone, who pulled them up by the roots?), but then the sky drips between the upper and the lower lids and hardens into a crust. A miniature sierra forms inside the eyes, and now I no longer see the angel, but only sense, feel on the parchment of my skin the light pressure of her wings.

  Portrait of a Pensioner

  From savouring the citron daybreak in a backstreet,

  its balconies roped between anchored walls

  with the gossip of clotheslines dripping

  to the pavements, from the concrete canyons

  through which, uncertain mariner, I used to pilot

  an infirm chair,

  I have been dishoused.

  My skin thick as a stagnant pond’s,

  I sit in the brooding heat

  of the profligate vegetation,

  racking sense from a map on my lap,

  proving the presence, under silted toll roads,

  of a river whose course I ridge on my bench.

  Its pulse beats at my fingertips,

  drums along vein and artery to hammer at the doors

  of my dammed heart, calling to a murmur

  that runs there, though low:

  a daring that has trickled

  out of season. A thin tributary,

  the faint benchmark of the flood.

  Decree

  The hunters have trapped you:

  Stag, the forests shall mourn!

  —Osip Mandelshtam (1913)

  Curtailed by November fanlights, a pair of grey eyes broods.

  In the cone cast by a hooded lamp, thick hands

  more used to shovelling snow or dragging ploughs

  now cup to cast the black ostraka,

  seal judgement on another man in another room

  who, smothered by the same darkness, waits for doom

  to descend.

  A spider without a web,

  he sits paralysed by lack of cues

  in this blindfold play.

  His patience gives out. Still no news.

  Madly, he ignores his prudent minders

  and strides past the safety nets, stands alone

  on the dial of the deserted city.

  Tail lights brush him; he longs for the sweeping hand

  of the searchlight to make its coup de grace

  but the gymnast’s reflexes tightening his grimace

  have gauged otherwise.

  Before the inquisitors

  can clip him like a card

  in their index, he leaps.

  The vaulting horse of the late hour affords him leeway:

  he clears the watchtowers and causeways

  of smoky outskirts patrolled by hangmen.

  A dissident psychonaut, he sails

  across the marble-topped cantons of midnight.

  They shoot him in that pose, again and again.

  *

  Emergencies of the small hours:

  forced landings, air-raid warnings,

  missions aborted by frozen runways and fog.

  Saturnine, he has sorted his desk all night,

  piloting by sidereal time and by charts

  that have failed, like the fuel, by the drowsy mile.

  He writes dandelion when he means yellow acacia,

  and smells both flowers as the resin in his veins

  oozes from the boles of his arms

  and lays runnels upon the page.

  Sonnets to be murmured, tercets to be sung:

  an illicit portage clocked across a looseleaf tundra.

  By daybreak, he will have addressed and stamped

  that last letter, mailed it. After breakfast,

  he will walk to the bridge and make his leap.

  By noon, as the postman pushes the note

  under a t
eak door with a brass plate but no number,

  telephones will be ringing in whitewashed annexes

  and prefects screaming. Outside, ambulances will be wailing,

  frantic gendarmes will be looking for breaches

  in the ice below the cantilevered wings.

  Truncheons tap for his missing weight, grapnels plumb

  for his frosted breath. But, baptized by the river,

  he lies beyond the trance of prophecy, beyond arrest.

  Draw the blinds. No one has permission to interrogate

  the country of stone verdicts

  that has risen to embrace him.

  *

  The Librarian at the Bureau of Missing Persons

  contains multitudes,

  has dossiers on ghosts from every genre:

  finite clauses in an infinite chain

  of xeroxed transmigrations.

  In the Bureau’s warehouse,

  men who’d been lamas in previous lives

  share dockets with anarchist cadets,

  the alumni of massacres contend for shelf-space

  with retired chancellors.

  And the Bureau has storytellers by the dozen,

  each the sum of a malingering thorax

  and a valve set damaged by shock therapy.

  The Librarian is a director of souls:

  he’s been here so long that pigeons fly

  through his ears, and children sing

  paternosters dubbed in the local language

  to chase away his sleep.

  At least I’m not wracked by the old physical fears,

  he says, that age may be ticking like an ill-made bomb

  wrapped up in a pamphlet at the back of a drawer;

  and that the horses’ skulls might fall

  from their safe brackets

  to behead me while I doze.

  I brood on the edge of a drawn sword,

  he mutters, but know all the slogans.

  *

  Like Canaletto, muffled against the English chill,

  painting speckles of gold on Venetian waves

  to justify his name among churlish patrons,

  the poet repeats his early motifs:

  a creature of crossroads,

  he peddles his songs in festive streets,

  scrabbling in disguise for a couple of nickels

  on the kerb outside the theatre

  where the story of his life is playing.

  *

  Sixteen lines can cost a man

  his life: a slap in the dictator’s face

  paid back with punctured lungs and trapfalls in ice.

  In the tundra, every poem is an elegy

  to be read on the footboard of a moving train

  and every train is a fatal pledge

  dragging the poet to the rimlands of destiny.

  When the Librarian at the Bureau of Missing Persons

  shuts his catalogue with a clap,

  some numbered poet’s case history gets stamped,

  flattened between two neutral dates.

  *

  The poet is not at home.

  These poems

  are messages

  left on his answering machine.

  FROM THE SLEEP WALKER’S ARCHIVE

  (2001)

  Altamira

  Morning wells like blood

  in the stag’s hollow eye.

  That horned fleece is yours, priestess;

  this stone axe, mine.

  I won’t wear my minotaur mask again.

  I’ve spent the night carving

  this ring of bone for you:

  print your palm in vermilion

  on this rock-face and today

  spouts of fire will drive the bellowing wind

  mad. Your name swells

  in my mouth. Stop me

  with the bloodrush of your hair,

  the long ripple of your spine.

  Reliquary

  This altar has sent up no smoke

  in a thousand years.

  We climb past spurts of grass, the gulled turf above

  the crypts of the bone people.

  Nothing has changed the harsh ancestral faces

  of the cliffs: they still spit in the eyes of the sea.

  The turquoise wing, the whipping sail

  brace this island against the spray

  and salt, which pit the clasps and telescopes

  we’ve brought along like afterthoughts.

  Loom and harrow give the stubbled rock roots,

  net and needle ring it in;

  the dolphin dives for sagas, the raven

  is a black instinct. Together, we shall fill

  sun in the reef‘s raging anchor-wounds;

  together, we shall climb

  to the charred brake

  and kindle our nakedness.

  Nocturne

  Nursing your silences, I watch night

  wedge its broad shoulders tight

  in our window.

  My nerves ache with the curfew bells

  ringing in your head, cradled sullenly

  in the crook of my elbow.

  The air of cherries, your wordless breath

  fills my empty flesh with a flaming

  chorus of swords.

  Night Shift

  All night, the whistling migration

  of rumoured kestrels kept us awake:

  we heard their wings beat close to our ears,

  their beaks ripped cold meat such as appeared

  as we undressed for a bed unmade

  by bristling shadows and taloned fears.

  We spoke little and could not lie

  still, or in each other that night.

  In the early hours we fell asleep at last

  but, our pillows stained with winter sun,

  awoke as soon. Outside, the roofed trees hung

  in a lake of cloud; the surly lamp-posts

  remained in place in the past, unshaken

  by the night shift.

  But we came rough,

  in retreat, to breakfast, disarranged,

  trimmed closer to silence, gripped and changed

  by the draught of wings, night’s grey, destitute tears.

  Speculum

  The month slips from your shoulders like a robe.

  The violin draws a sonata

  from the reluctant prelude of your lips.

  Then scarf, sash, chemise: unpeeling all your skins,

  you brace bare before the cheval glass

  (confessor to all the arms it has seen,

  the flocks of hair, the peaches of breasts).

  You offer it some more tangled skeins

  of blood and lymph, ancestries, incests:

  gifts of a brain on edge to a hinge that holds it fast.

  Draw back, my lady; yet see, the further you withdraw,

  the further you retreat into the mirror’s ironic eye.

  Snared subject, would you step from this poised predicate

  and risk your speaking body? The echo is worse than mime.

  The Madman’s Kaleidoscope

  Kloster Pernegg

  Bless those who sleep, whose gravid eyes

  may burst with the angels that they see:

  unkempt angels who destroy their gift

  of prophecy, before it scorches the lids

  off those who sleep, burning them awake.

  We suck the flowered blood of those we love,

  make them real. Their fruit grows to flesh

  in our cloistered thoughts,

  ripens in cold gardens

  that the sun has never breached.

  Faith will undress us, only to find

  the sorry figure of its own loneliness.

  Ice has burnt our keys black and fire

  plays about the door-jamb. We leave

  before we can set our love in order

  or stack the dreams that flicker across the bed

  like patterns i
n a madman’s kaleidoscope.

  Helical Histories

  Osmotic as an agora,

  open to storm and tide and tread,

  our bed contrives, though seamless as a skin,

  to simulate our every nuance in its creases

  until it folds

  in one calyx our separate fires, and we forge

  a ring of elbow-room and breathing space

  for our wants to wrestle

  (my foot in your slipper, your hands

  in my hair) till there is no sense

  in which our speaking tongues and wet ears

  are any different from those

  of those strange women

  washed up at Colchis swaddled in blue silk,

  shearing the harbour buzz with their cries.

  And how their beads glowed, like the deep eyes

  of spectral cats, drunk with mystery, with watching.

  And those strange men with windshocked faces

  brought off the ships still mumbling spells

  to calm the waves, out of mouths fallen open

  like torn sandals:

  men whose legs kept rocking

  on land, keeping time

  with the sea’s perverse, erratic swell.

  But stronger, if slower, than the sandblast furnace

  of the sea, a tinctured speech of gland and seed

  unstoppers these jammed refugees in the agora.

 

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