but never released.
The spigot of straitened trade restrained,
then choked its thunder; but by an abrupt
kindness, the wreckers have spared
its scaffolded length: it stands alone
among ransacked godowns and ramping cranes.
Off the pier, I watch shearwaters dip and glide.
Their beaks close on nothing; they rehearse
ancestral motions mindlessly.
I mull over curiosities like the word harbinger:
act sealed in name, it does not harbinge.
Like the strand lines, which mark tides
that will never break again;
like scallops encrusted between the moist pages
of a psalter in a sunken ship;
or like the salt at table
which is a memoir of water;
or your nightgown on the hanger,
your slippers on the rug,
sometimes, the verb forms we cling to,
vanish, leaving us
the bequest of fossil nouns.
Pavement
Don’t walk on sharp stones, my love.
We should not die
of the necessities we invent.
Speaking a Dead Language
I trespass on sentences that ash has muffled,
the lichen overgrown; then rekindle tropes
that farmers dropped in their kitchen grates
with the husked corn and blue glass beads
when the northmen rode in on champing roans.
Hindsight is a poor cousin to revelation.
Listening to the hiss and splatter of rain,
the crackle of fire between the words,
voicing my breath in strange shapes of mouth
is like looking for you.
The north-rose flowers in every direction
on the tattered map I pull from a chest,
a hidden magnet
around which iron filings frame a crown.
I flatten the continents on a table
and read there of our love,
not lost but translated,
its cadences learned again
in other countries by other tongues.
VANISHING ACTS : NEW POEMS
(2001–2005)
Moth
Pressed up against the narrow pane, the moth is rust,
its wings the colour of blood drying on stone.
The house and sky are one cubic dark, through whose thin walls
the boy moves like a silken cloth,
buffing the brass urns and pewter mugs he touches.
Clots of light, straining through his palms, float in the air.
Dawn is a mile off, but when the house gets there,
a hard edge of fire cuts through the glass
and through the night’s restraint: the boy grabs at the moth
and stumbles. His prize is just a shock
of sulphur wings that thrash in his hands and vaporize
while he falls headlong, his hands flecked with pollen-dust.
He comes to the window again, next dawn. There is no moth
to reach for. He slashes his palms on the fire-sharpened glass.
Ghalib in the Winter of the Great Revolt
Delhi, 1857
The emperor’s murdered grandsons hang
from the Gate of Peace like hushed bells
and rifles drill the sentenced air.
My neighbour, the flautist, slit his veins last night,
burning his prayerbook before he died,
true to a God of subtle tones
wasted on the deaf.
Ghalib writes to a friend:
All around us, the furies ride their burning horses.
It’s as though Timur had broken Delhi’s walls
again, his cinder-streaked soldiers heaping
pyramids of skulls in the streets,
an abacus for orphans to compute
the profits of betrayal, the penalties of defeat.
Cannon the only thunder, writes Ghalib, and no rain.
Gunners waving St George’s flag
have driven the nobles from their charred mansions,
tethered the peasants to the surly river.
The coppersmith tapping at a dead branch
fills the vacant sky
with the privacy of his grief.
The friend, with a spy at his shoulder, writes back:
When did you become a poet of adjectives
roosting in the rafters of a broken house?
Ghalib, the owl must hide in the tamarind for now,
but the genies of havoc will go on furlough soon.
You say your ink-well is empty, but your dry quill
still claws at the fibres of the heart.
A pharmacist may drug himself with lyric,
Ghalib replies, and a tiger may vanish
in the rain-forest of his hunter’s dreams.
But the dry quill is a reproach and this raw winter
could be the living tomb of my song.
Send paper, friend, these are the last pages
of my journal I’m writing on.
The Sufi in Winter
The hem of a robe,
a tree’s callused bark,
a frosted beard,
a whiff of musk,
dust on a turban.
Nothing is lost
in translation,
not even a woollen sleeve
smelling of woodsmoke.
Mountain
Dambulla
Where the rock sags, the ceiling billows like a tent above the sleeping Buddhas. We quit the cave and through a window, see a mountain framed against the slow-burning sky: dead wind, a summit floating on cloud.
Twilight’s secrecies are about to shroud that right-angled sky. They hold back for the instant it takes a langur to look up and blind us with twin setting suns. For two seconds, the massif prints itself on every face we see.
A waterfall drips out the minutes that remain. An attendant, impatient for prayer or video game, waits for the last reluctant visitors to collect their shoes and leave. He enters the full moon, thumb-printed, in his log. We turn to check if anything’s been left behind
and find the peak, behind a half-shut door. Slipping through which, our feet ready to climb, we stumble down a rock-cut path picked out by glow-worms, small ambushes of light. The mountain darkens to a deeper shade of night.
Madman
He stares up at the dying stars,
this madman in a soot-black robe.
No door opens to take him in,
this madman in a soot-black robe.
He dips his pen in a darkened pool
and breaks his nib:
it’s only the shadow of a cloud
that’s passing above
this madman in a soot-black robe.
His long walk is a chase of leaves
through a park misspelled
in leaf-stripped boughs
that offer him no roof,
no respite from the flickering snow:
he hides his chin in a threadbare scarf,
this madman in a soot-black robe.
Or is he the shadow of a cloud
that’s passing above a darkened pool?
He breaks his nib in a chase of leaves,
shuffling below the threadbare boughs,
testing his will against this blight,
this snow that glimmers in the narrow beam
from a window half-opened to the night.
But no door opens to take him in,
he stares up at the dying stars.
His turn will come, he strops his knife,
this madman in a soot-black robe.
The Scribe
The faithful witness tears his flesh
with a blade he’s tempered in the dark:
the phrases searing down his arms
spell a sentence that’s howled itself
hoarse i
n his mind for weeks before
this final spasm, the knife a shriek
he couldn’t hold back, the pain
a horse he couldn’t curb.
Though it’s gone, its hooves gallop on
inside his chest,
pounding all that’s hidden there
to dust. Then the knifepoint fire catches
at his shirt, his face, his hair:
crowned with flame, he breaks through a door
boarded up with planks of night.
Running, flailing, stumbling
and waking the crows to a false dawn,
I watch myself burn.
Overleaf
What’s left of my body
after the whirling blades of light
have done their work
on skin and hair, nails, nerves and skull,
after the flesh has been stripped
by cathode rays and moray eels,
after the censors have blacked out the face
I once owned, and on a guarded beach
the wind has dried the last of the wet bones?
What’s left of my body
shuffles around damp rooms
where incomplete sets
of encyclopaedias rot.
It straightens rugs with a fraying toe,
tests door-knobs, recoils from open shutters,
switches on lamp-globes,
an ageing emperor making notes
in a darkened aquarium.
Overleaf: the simplest instruction in the book.
Turn a page in an atlas of predators
and you can outrun the leopard, outswim the shark.
So turn the page
on these strangling hands, these narrowed eyes
that watched bayonets carve pictograms
in flesh, these ears that prickled with screams.
Wake sweating, but unhurt, and let the children sleep
for now. It’ll keep,
what’s left of my body.
Six Portraits of the Literary Life
I
Like Marx, he goes up marble steps to write
volumes in a Reading Room. A wasted man.
Outside, the rain snatches at the dog-eared light
and at lovers sharing an umbrella.
II
The poet strikes you as base metal
transmuted by the portraitist.
Before the lens, he communes with himself,
long hair askew, a clock-tower grading his poses.
III
The poet advertises his virtues, which are as sunny
as the beach holidays that competing airlines offer.
He can’t stop by for coffee, he regrets, he’s en route
to the Promised Land of the Recommended Texts.
IV
His buckram spine now eased in paperback,
the enfant terrible turns ageing pope
of his own cult, his whisper amplified
by a hydra of microphones.
V
Like the magician in the Indian rope trick,
he conjures away his poems
with commentaries and vanishes.
The last note on his desk is a scrawled Cf: also.
VI
He comes back to an empty house. In the fridge,
fears multiply, fruits of a silence after early fame.
No, Heraclitus, I must be caustic with you:
the road up and the road down are never the same.
Pilot
The pilot wakes up with total recall:
he wears the penitent’s shirt of fire,
the bombs still whistle past his ears.
Cities explode in the pupils of his eyes,
children run down empty roads
in his mind, stripped naked, burning.
He hacks at the spiky lantana
with a rusty bayonet. He fights
jungle shadows, his reflexes still at war
though the ceasefire sounded decades ago.
Marooned in his fear, he anticipates
an ambush that never comes.
He wards off an enemy who signed a truce
that passed him by. Bolt-action hero,
he keeps faith with a forfeit empire,
patrols the island, tests his barricades
twice a day. Belted in his cockpit,
he’s flying blind into the rain:
he’s on autopilot,
the sum of the places he’s hated.
Emigrant
Leaving, he looks out of the window,
skirting the edge of the silver wing:
a tear widens in the quilt of clouds,
through which he sees (or thinks he can)
miles below, traffic lights blinking
their green and amber arrows
as rain smears the windscreens of cars
and soldiers jump down from dented tanks.
He clutches his passport. There’s no room
for back numbers in his baggage.
The clouds stitch back the widening tear
but he gropes for a towel,
feeling the cabin temperature rise
as though, miles below,
the city of his birth were burning.
Alibi
Wipe your fingerprints from the air,
rinse out the mug from which you drank
last night’s coffee.
Clear the view in the window
with a sweep of plush curtain
that takes cloud, sky and mountain with it.
Cut the photograph from the frame,
grab the red hair-band from the onyx jar,
the spectacles from the desk.
Cover your tracks.
Walk through water.
You were never here.
Symptoms
for Farhad
His hair has been falling and his beard
drips raggedly from his chin.
He smells of fish whenever the wind changes;
the harbour controls his moods.
He forgets the lines he has just read,
cannot recall the letters that spell his name
and loses the thread of his tales in a maze
of past events: Would sulphur help
or mercury? He has no clue.
Will he find the parrot with red eyes?
*
Yesterday is a closed door.
Behind it stretches a well-loved landscape
of dusty blue sea and chalk-pink hills,
a choir of clowns playing with striped pumpkins.
When he wakes up, torpid admirals
tie him up in knots.
*
Islands collide as he stumbles
through the Gateway of India:
he sits on a bench
to steady his mind’s haywire gyroscope.
He’s arrested by a cat on the prowl:
the sun is a fish in its eye.
*
Strangers make him dizzy,
he faints in a crowd.
He sees himself thrown back
from every shop-window:
a clown-god of the crossroads.
*
Water sloshes in the canals of his ears,
cutthroats chase each other inside his brain.
His hands tremble as he hunts for his keys;
his pockets bulge with fever-hot pebbles.
Zigzag lightning flashes in his eyes; he watches
as zebra crossings climb the steep houses
on Colaba Causeway, striping the night sky.
He wakes up retching,
wishing the palm trees outside his window
were the birch grove he had grown to love
in a country nine thousand miles away
and closer than his skin.
*
Ash Lane, Cochin Street, Tamarind Lane,
Mangalore Street, Ropewalk Lane,
Rampart Row, Cruickshank Lane:
the names rap out a prayer,
forests and seaports echo in the Fort:
the names of streets, mottled bookmarks
stuck in a book whose pages have crumbled.
This city is an album of proverbs
that hides the parrot with red eyes.
Diagnosis
for Nancy
Her hand travels across my chest like a stethoscope
searching for an erratic beat, a slowed-down pulse,
some clue to the season, weather gone wrong
like a heat wave in December, or rain in March:
searching, perhaps, for a fugitive heart
that refuses to break cover.
And not finding the havoc of typhoon or depression,
but only the sagging breath of one who would cool
from heat of action, be healed into more
real gestures of rest and sleep,
her hand offers truce:
Break cover, rebel heart,
and speak.
The Editor‘s Last Nightmare
Towards the end he stopped trying to edit
the footage that unscrolled in his mind the tape
playing over and over headphones blurred with calls
a shrine guerrillas ramming the gates footfalls
Vanishing Acts Page 10
