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Vanishing Acts

Page 9

by Ranjit Hoskoté

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

 

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