clambering up ladders in the rain
and press-gang them for next when newsreel bombs
should explode, and the desperate generals
of armies besieged in desert citadels
demand recruits.
Fire in the rain. The hydrant hoses shoot
amnesties at the awnings and colonnades
before the torrent comes down in a winding sheet,
swallows the promenade in its folds.
*
Halfway across satellite-straddled space, a poet dies:
polyglot silenced on a surgeon’s table.
Teacher, traveller, he sowed his homegrown stories
in foreign earth. I mould a grief for him
the size of my balled fist beating against my head.
Another bomb explodes on a local train:
a playwright dies. I cannot stretch
to lift him from the casualty ward or cast
a shroud over what, marl-spattered, is left
of his arms and legs. Instead
I hunch at the desk where the front page writes
my public script, civilizes my private rage:
I clip the pain in glass brackets and type
down black borders, condensing poet and playwright
into brisk three-column obituaries.
*
By a sleight of hand, the grey creek
slinking by the rushes has changed its wavelength:
the sea, the angry sea suspends its sound
judgement as it rumbles in, preparing to pound
strategic installations
like oil rigs and the high dykes
I’ve built around my mind.
Special Effects
for Anandajit Ray
It was the year the special effects man
went on leave, giving no explanation.
We faced the disaster
like tough guys in a Western,
bounced bare-back on a cosmology of accidents.
We let clowns pole-vault over the riding school
while dive-bombers crashed and troops advanced
on a salient, with the Ring Cycle playing.
The recording angel photographed these stunts
from a helicopter.
Suave prompters lost their poise.
Door handles came off, pulleys wouldn’t work.
Those who’d smirked in the wings
now fell from the flies,
found asylum in the backdrop pageants.
Postal strikes crippled our letters.
Casualties mounted. Desperate, I opened
my clinician’s casebook.
The stains wouldn’t go
though I’d done my best.
The sun in the eye gave notice,
closed down at sunset.
The mafioso’s intestine
unwound into a hose.
The limousine bared its bulletproof teeth.
That’s when he came back, chuckling, ‘The good news is
this is where the gardener shoots
a column of water at the burning clouds,
just as a man who’s given up on life
falls from the window of your mind.’
A Letter to Ram Kumar
I
The wind has been blowing through your paintings
for a thousand years: overtures without tomorrows.
And what voices have you heard on this wind, what thunder
prophesying war? What diamond shards of sailcloth
have stabbed through this wind, fingerprinted by the dawn?
And what boatmen have pirated songs through this night,
borne descants to you through this deepening night
of dull dreams and lime-washed memories?
And what did you hear in Banaras, Ram Kumar,
above the wailing of widows, the river’s bass foghorns?
What did it breathe to you, this city shored from charnel,
its priests whirling in the blood-goddess’s dance,
its temples trembling in spiderwebs of light
spun out by leaf-twist lamps as they tip forward
into the night, this deepening night
of dull dreams and lime-washed memories.
Keep watch over the last hours before the bells announce
the docking of the blue boat at the pier.
And beware: a city can die of too much faith,
mired in the apocalypse that it spawned.
A city can choke on carrion, mangled by reedstalks
and prayers spluttering from the mouths of drains.
You have looked for the living, Ram Kumar, and found
only skulls, scoured a few bones from the ashes of kites.
Here, you will find only the mute and stratified dead.
And take care, take care. Before you know it,
the river will have stretched tight,
an oilskin over your eyeballs.
II
Buzzards settle on the sand bars,
forage among sediments of guilt.
Quirky priests, they minister unction
to saffron-flecked bodies
that will feed the vultures,
evolutes morained by the devious glacier of births.
What shivering shadow can the figure cast
on a running stream, when its raft has been shattered
by crocodile currents? Abolished by the crypt,
the figure wanders among the sepulchral houses,
dwindles to a figment
keeping vigil on the waterfronts.
A river dolphin baited by predators,
the figure commits
the ritual suicide of silence.
Pilgrim, painter, anchorite,
with knife and brush you paint the slush
in which it dies.
You can crush the moon like an insect tonight
between the thumb and index finger:
the body is like that in the hours of sleep,
the body that now is only voice,
only a string of characters
that the sand has smudged in blotting.
Wailing down a helix, it looks for the single sail
whipping
in the sleepless, the weathering wind.
On the moss-greened ghats, the switchblade grass
smoulders in a drizzle. The steps are washed
by a tide of hermit spectres.
Pilgrim, painter, anchorite,
with knife and brush you paint the slush,
the silence.
III
But, Ram Kumar, the figure must return
or the swan will not take wing tomorrow
from the lotus-carpeted lake;
the nayika in the miniature will not live
if the blue god does not return
in the rain-draped month of Ashadh.
The cry drifting, draining down the ghats,
cannot bear the wound of separation
from the dancer with the flute. His yellow robe
trails on the cypresses, but the clouds
have swallowed him.
Accusing, the words of Siddheshwari’s thumri
fly up at you, like drenched black swans in the night.
When the figure returns, it will sing you fragments,
tell of the storm’s mauling, the bitter warmth of a day
cupped in the debris of landslides, ice rubbed to flame.
Gliding on the first snow’s flurries, it has shed
the shuffling gait of the soldier’s forced march.
Currents swirl from your brush. The sun-wind tilts
your frames so drifts of haystack and cloudstream
can sweep away hillocks, ridges, emperors’ tombs.
This is the storm that Turner saw, stirring slave ships
in brine, milling the tribute of silver and spice
to spindrift till the whorled cyclonic eye
engulfed sun and sky and time within its
glowering rim.
We lurch downstream, churned by the tempest,
our sail thrummed, funnelled around its rigging.
But you have rowed through floes,
thwarted avalanches and cliff-falls,
left the feldspar ravines of despair behind.
These are notations for a landscape
that you will throw away once you’ve climbed
into the hills, like Wittgenstein’s ladder.
I wash my hands
in the clear water of your paintings,
escape my face
as the masks come off in streaks.
At the snow line, the silver oaks thin out;
then a shrill tug of pine
and the sail snaps free, a blue vibration,
a crevasse prised between band and band
of what are hills on the painter’s striated screen.
A hoopoe wakes up like a hymn in the head,
a rip cord is pulled
and then:
wreckage floating down rivers
and landscapes opening like parachutes.
The Grammarian’s Marriage Poem
The most beautiful is the object
which does not exist
—Zbigniew Herbert: ‘Study af the Object’
I
The most beautiful bride is she who does not exist,
she who bears no heroes, carries no firewood:
the classical absence pinned with jasper brooches,
she who is hope, the high-strung trope
of an extinct rhetoric, her limbs fragile as hieroglyphs
that I must collect with arms thrown wide
as metal detectors. She is a puzzle that I must assemble
into a body of coherent evidence.
II
The most beautiful bride is music, not sculpture:
she will wear flowers of water in her hair
and sew garlands at nightfall from fistfuls of corn,
gather splashes of stars at her wrists.
In the wilderness of speech, she will be my farewell
to the sins of too much talk, too much prayer;
in a high-walled town on a plain flat as a palm,
she will absolve me of all my crazed pieties
of hindsight. She will be the rain of grace
bursting from the pods of the wishing tree.
III
She is a sphinx, the most beautiful bride.
Defying the logic of her own riddles,
she will relay me from cuneiform to runic,
cursive to blackletter. So copied from hand
to hand, version to version,
the words of my charter are amended:
I will always be other than I am,
a translation of the original text of the tribe
burnt in sacked cities, buried with jewel-hoards,
torn apart by ravening wolves.
IV
She crafts me on her parchment sheaves:
I am no territory but only borderlines
born of her artifice. She writes me even as I write
this marriage poem for her
and I climb out of the dark night
of her beloved body, the most beautiful bride.
Autumn Prayer for a Vanished Nymph
after Stephen Romer
Console me with bindweed
from her hair.
Gardener, reader of the leaves that tear
and fall from heaven’s open hymnbook,
tell me what wild annunciation of despair
will reach her ears, what tenacities
of passion, worn from rock to tears,
will urge her back
from the sapphire depths
that have swallowed her.
Possession, the incurable fear of loss, invents
a vein of hate, poisoned longing’s precipitate,
but shapes no answers to replace
her brooding gaze, her swanning breasts,
her tanned arms, spanning to measure themselves
against the swimming birds, the sunstream’s fluency.
Gardener, rouse me from my trance, reclaim me.
I have done with the dowser’s lying wand
and a wretched twelvemonth of reasons.
Now stoke the banked fires, teach me to trace
the capricious etymologies of desire.
Apolla and Daphne
My love was simple:
savage possession of the fleeing Other.
Grabbing at your shoulders
it was pungent odours of wood
I embraced. Your silences
congealed in resin, clothed you in bark.
Love, thwarted, ensured its opposite:
journeys end in lovers’ meetings
but pursuit ends in slaughtered game.
*
Alchemies of root and stone.
In Ovid’s tale, my sturdy fingers
scratch chlorophyll from your arms;
you break, running, into leaves.
The poet’s justice forces conclusions
from the outstretched arms and twisting hips.
But in Bernini’s marble, our chase remains
in suspense, my fingers frozen an inch
from your laurelled hair:
the sculptor preserves the rough suitor’s shock,
the terror of the unwilling bride:
unslaked thirst about to mingle
with the water it seeks.
*
The gods who monitor, unseen, our acts,
pronounce no word of censure
nor bar me from their table:
throbbing in my throat,
the python of my loud lust
strangles my gift of prophecy.
How else could this cautionary tale have ended?
With guilt quenching itself in fire
or justice dripping from plaintive song?
What oracle would have guessed
that a tutor’s boredom, in later years,
would translate the rape as a lethargic lesson
in the classical patterns of desire?
Legend Recycled
The king is drawn like a sunstruck crow
to the fishergirl’s creel:
his enchantment is complete,
he must possess her.
And beside the green river sabotaged by weeds,
he forces his will upon her.
The king’s son, revolted,
swears never to marry.
A jongleur of herbs,
he turns his celibate hand
to the management of gardens;
dying, becomes a parakeet.
The king grows balder, less passionate.
He courts dowsers who paraphrase
webfoot forecasts for his sunburned crops.
He lives in a quiet country without hurricanes:
himself, enthroned between the kerosene streams
of dull speech and diligent policy.
The fishergirl hovers, half-translated,
between wharf and palace, and neither is home.
Every night she comes unstrung, climbs to her terrace
and vomits the grief and hate of her queenly state
in torrents of fish:
striped, silver, riddle-tailed, arrow-headed fishes
released like toxins in the dominions of air.
Place Legends
for Richard Lannoy
Mather Goddess
Pepper vines ring the jackfruit tree
that is her shrine. She claims
tributes of colour: indigo is hers,
and saffron, and carmine.
The rain has washed her altar.
You cannot see the blood that quit
her veins when the storm-god’s iron mace
split her head, pinned and broke her arms.
Her stone skin breathes, sweats, watches
over anthill Harappas. It is not blind,
/> this torso tapering to a cleft
between child-wide hips.
I do not deceive myself.
She grows inside me.
*
Hero Stone
Stone smeared with vermilion,
the raddled god stands guard
over furrows where dead cities sleep.
Once it was blood, still warm
from his victim’s pierced abdomen,
that anointed him.
One hand carries a drawn sword,
the other dips out of sight
behind the relief of the horse.
Perhaps that hand, surreptitious, feels
for what the rustic sculptor
did not carve:
his testicles, twin planets that the god
is afraid will withdraw into a cleft,
twin planets without which he cannot ride.
Templates
This is a seventh-floor window in June:
the wind is maritime,
a whiff of the seventeenth century
carried from rusty canal gates, tarred docks
above whose roofs the spectre of a smokestack rises.
After-images from an almanac
mildewed by the passage of many monsoons:
a knackered mill, its chimney straight as a rocket
aimed at the cloud-hidden stars
Vanishing Acts Page 9
