blowing up in the mined darkness first light
crouching over tents a trail of scattered boots the lens
pulled back to frame scorched pilgrims huddling
watchful as pigeons in their alcoves.
Tear this night off me, as a surgeon would strip
the sweat-soaked shirt off a wounded man.
Someone’s printed his palms on my door,
javelins guard my bed and whose are those bodies,
driven into sand, scooped up with mudguards,
and this horse, its neck dripping blood on my sheets?
Give me plainsong, not reportage, he cried,
locked up in a prison of rumours.
The Abbot of Misrule
The fear of sharp weapons keeps me at home.
From the street, a clown in a Führer mask
rakes the houses with automatic laughter.
Our windows splinter beneath a volley
of shears, scissors, daggers: the glass
sprinkles, pricks our eyelashes, our hair.
It’s got beneath the quilts, among the cushions,
powdered the pages of leatherbound books.
The abbot of misrule patrols the street:
his laugh-track shakes our walls.
A bayonet rips up
the ear’s curtain:
the last sound I hear
is the buzz of a wasp
crushing itself
against the one pane left standing in its frame.
Landscapes with Saints
Mean as knives, his burnished limbs
rotted and stank when the gateman came
to call his number. Gorakh forgot
his body was just a borrowed suit,
one size too large.
*
He’s forgotten the river pilot’s song.
He’s above parrot gossip,
beyond the hawk’s warning cry.
Wrapping himself in the torn fabric of sky,
Kabir climbs on.
*
Dropping his nimbus in the grass, he looks
at the boats riding the stream below:
close enough to touch.
When the road ends,
Tuka takes a deep breath and leaps.
*
She sees a boatman rowing in sand,
shielding his skiff from the ocean’s roar.
Such a safe harbour, brother, sings Lalla,
it saves you the trouble
of charting your course.
*
His eyes would not rest on a quatrain of walls
and scanned the desert air instead:
mango trees balancing on their heads;
himself, Khushru,
a bird of paradise judged by earth.
*
Neglect leafs through his pages. Perfumes escape
from phials left unstoppered
on his shelves. Lead crumbles
in Attar’s mind; his hands,
wherever they rest, touch gold.
*
A torn cotton robe against the wind;
his limbs, nettle-pricked, transparent as prayers.
His name burnt out,
Milarepa sings to himself
as he travels the centuries.
Miniature
On the staircase, a courtier sprints in slow motion.
At the window, the princess combs her long, long hair.
In the courtyard, wolves devour her discarded lover.
Under the roof, a page trembles at the snarling and cries.
In the mirror, the foot of the painter’s easel
shows he’s still there, holding his breath,
recording the gleam of early morning sun
on crystal and goldleaf,
echoing, in the rosy tint of apples,
the blush mantling the cheek
of the royal bride.
He knows where to paint the curtain.
Passing a Ruined Mill
in memoriam: Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004)
His mind’s gone blank as a fax
left untouched for months in a drawer,
his faded words a defeat
of grammar and the continuities we prize.
Passing Lower Parel, the train slows by a ruined mill:
my eyes settle on chimneys stripped down to brick,
look away from crippled sheds, twisted gantries,
rusting flues and cranes overrun by creepers
that loop across the city, explode in prickly flowers,
drape the windows of the room in which he breaks
his hoarded silence with visitors whose names
escape him. They pour tea into his hours,
waiting for the clouded marble of his eyes
to spark a relay in the burnt-out tungsten
of his thoughts.
*
Can you see the window through your fraying blindfold?
The window framed in straggling creepers,
a sunbird’s nest dangling from the bougainvillaea,
the surly gardener retreating, his shears still drawn
to hack, and you in the window, fresh from the rescue,
waving your wave of welcome
that was always a goodbye.
Months of slow fades until at last the curtain
marks a patch of scrubbed violet
through which the sky used to glow.
My face is as good as another’s,
the kind word acknowledged, soon lost to the clock,
a ticking device, awkward in an awkward room,
this minefield of objects that rituals alone
can restore to sense: morning bath
and towelling, bedpan and brush.
*
Clouds form his idea of afternoon. Having read
only the tea-leaves in his cup,
he dreams of books
stacked on shelves too high to reach.
Look, he’s standing square in a frame
bleached by sun, peeled by rain:
he’s never asked the weather’s permission
to leave, now he lets go the window
in which the landscape’s settled:
two shards of pane, a shred of maroon kite.
*
The sea outside his window, he knew that sea
long before God parted it for Moses:
he’d probed the edge where shelves drop
into trenches, he knew where
the oysters slept, their dreams growing
in rings around a stone.
Who would believe he’d begun to dream
the ebb would suck him in, that he’d forgotten
how to swim? One last time he dived.
When he surfaced, the havoc birds were waiting:
they swooped down to peck
at the few pearls he’d found.
*
That music’s made of chance, he found,
ten years after the dance had claimed
his steps, its canny measure turning around
to fix him to the floor. That music maims,
he found, as seedy grandeur pinned him to a desk
high-piled with books, papers unread for years,
letters to which no answer would ever be sent,
the lamp hovering above his head
a menacing crown, more fire than light.
And there he sat, while the paper rustled away,
shedding the weave of his words like a blotted skin.
*
Did you never climb a three-bar gate
to pluck forbidden mangoes?
Did you regret the gash that opened
in your skin, wet with the hand-pressed
rawness of gathered juice?
He told a palmist he’d befriended
that he suffered the commonest of chosen things:
the need to make of sullen seed a tree.
Your tree will shimmer, its roots anchored in p
assion,
said the kerbside sage, but mind, it’ll bend,
its branches heavy with poison fruit.
He saw that truth, and said: Not yet,
and stroked its prickly leaves.
Golden Orioles
for Anju Dodiya
The window’s aflame with sunset
but she isn’t looking or really there.
She floats above the couch,
a hypnotist standing by
to catch her dreams. She’s shivering,
afraid to close her eyes at night:
Will her lids burn, her images escape,
her eyes fly away, a pair of golden orioles?
The wakeful hypnotist falls asleep at last.
She drifts, the room too small to detain her.
She dreams of flying naked through the air,
unhindered by the costume of who she is.
Dome
for Masud
Dates never change
on the calendar of faith
but light and wind are playing tricks
with the past.
Words split like isotopes
in this peacetime landscape
of abandoned courtyards, empty cradles,
withered gardens, broken roofs.
Only the madman, in his garland of dried flowers,
has the right of passage here
and the blind beggar who recollects nothing
except the spider ticking in his wired skull.
For a second, between two versions
of an echo, the past doesn’t happen:
the dome remains, a roc’s egg
veined blue, shelled by wind.
Confess
to no crime of identity.
Wait until the guillotine falls
in the vast silence of the heart.
Café Monsoon
The clouds are his dominion: he’s been charting
the monsoon’s course this evening, scanning deserts,
pinning oases to the tablecloth, his compasses linked
to his nerves, to the winds outside.
Behind its double panes, the room is proof
against squalls and dust devils.
Weather striates the carpet: humid reds purl
through gritty blues. He shades his eyes
against thigh-bones bleaching in sand,
small monuments he measures, bending to catch
their music, far tremors of an absent sea.
And he must hurry, this is no place
for the slow salt statue he’s become.
He flees the restaurant’s humming chill,
the outside blinds him with sudden warmth:
he’s stalled, stonewalled by water
running down his forehead;
two kidneys of steam
frost his glasses. He rubs at each lens
but cannot clear the dripping lawn
that’s occupied his eyes this rain-dark night.
He trains himself on loping shadows
that close in, then snap out of reach.
His mind is sharp
but rain and the night are sharper still:
his footsteps are shaky, the landscape indelible.
The Sword-maker’s Lullaby for the Infant Prince
The new sword recalls no blood,
the old sword tastes again
the wheeling seasons of slaughter:
horse’s neigh, falcon’s cry, men crashing
into ditches, arrows in their throats,
heads rolling downhill on streams
of flies, helmets catching the noon-glint,
hedges of blade-glare, mowing, hacked.
Old steel is best: hilt firm, fire-honed edge.
It slashes through the honeycomb fabric
of treaties and intrigues, dresses the torn flesh
to sing in mummers’ tales.
Cunning as poets, the oldest swords can drowse
on your walls, but roused, will recite
the butchers’ anthems burred beneath our tongues:
yes, even yours, little boy among the dreaming spaniels.
Long-distance Call
It’s raining in my sleep when the telephone rings.
The wire crackles and there’s your voice
at my ear, clear in my misted hand.
A satellite bounces our words from orbit to orbit
as we spin. I’ve woken up as mortal
as when I slept; you, call made, slip into bed.
Our cities are our cells, our case and tense,
local time the text we’re fated to read;
but between the snatches of news we exchange
the earth’s been well thumbed.
Paete, Laguna
for Patrick Flores
The carver? You mean the Redeemer’s right-hand man. Not a merchant of torsos, hardly that. More like a surgeon, I’d say. He’s studied the lesions of hate, greed’s eczemas, and does sutures if you repent. That’s the Virgin waiting for her diademed head, and those three saints, baby-naked, should soon be wrapped in satin. He’s walking among them, sawdust in his hair, checking lathes, gouges. His nails drive deep into wood made flesh.
He’s handing out scripts to angels, taking them through their paces from raw prototype to flight model. Innocent of paint, gilt, lace and haloes, his martyrs grieve and lust as common clay. He’s crafty. He won’t save them from what awaits: bonded to their slaves, they’ll stand for ever in a chapel or cathedral, piety’s gardeners, wielding instruments of healing and devious hurt.
He counts out the weeks in bruised fingers, wax plugs, lacquer skins, ivory pendants, turning these prayer-soiled bodies, these impious arks of lovesong and lament, into sovereign powers that arbitrate between men and their fate, guard their journeys. Even he, their carver, prays to them: that’s rough water he must cross, its black islands rippling, gleaming like the humps of rutting bulls, and he must swim it in the long fall of light parsed with the raining shadows of gulls. He kneels to the powers he’s brought into the world of sweat and strained muscle: they deflect the bullet from his heart, lift the crumpled shroud of night from his face.
They’re heavier-than-air now, heavier than the kamikaze crows diving in squadrons towards the lake, pecking at the afternoon trawled up in a net of smog. They can depress the earth with their footsteps. They can glide through bolted doors and wall-eyed windows that stare from cracked facades, fly to console those who kneel and confess, begging to be redeemed, to be hatched again, preferably from a golden egg. Tactful parents, they can watch over children who hunt rebels in southern jungles, blow up citadels, hurl grenades in such fast motion that you cannot tell whose side they’re on, whose cause they’ll die for.
Shooting is believing, any moving target promises salvation. They trade binocs for AK-47s, these children watched over by saints, aim rockets at tank convoys and helicopters, take a break from their monitors to spit out wads of gum, spent magazines. Does Counter Strike wake the saints to martial visions? Do they grunt, curse, bellow in their cerulean dreams? Riding in carriages, their wheels squelching through blood, do they direct parades to church, alighting to the beat of snare drums, climbing to their high niches, receiving tributes of hymn and penance?
Outside the church, it’s raining shadows: the gulls are homing, their parole withdrawn by night’s magistracy. The saints play the flickering game of shadow and candlelight in the nave. Only their eyes are real, the eyes of children sparkling in wooden masks. The saints have annulled the seasons this evening: news of conquest and massacre is not whispered, the choir sings heaven’s praises undiluted, the morning shall be laid white as a tablecloth. Redemption is a fine red stroke petering into misty skyline.
Their pasts are safe with their maker, and their dreams: he’s put them away with his tools before shaving, bathing, choosing a starched new shirt for Mass. Night scares him, but with sun in the windows, he’s a relaxed connoisseur, cherishing the crooked timber of hu
manity, the regularities of the misshapen day.
The Orientalist
He went back to drafting policies of state
but never forgot the courtesan in the Sanskrit play.
She wrote him letters on pages folded
in triangles like betel leaves
but did not wait for the beloved and spring;
creepers soothed her, her lamp-lit hours passed
among the scented shadows of lovers.
Quietus
Silence is clean, a frigate leaving a harbour
with no siren wailing.
Silence is a tureen that needs no scouring
for the last stains of grammar.
Silence is fire,
a threat with no reprieve.
Silence is a panther
that stalks us through jade eyes.
The Interpreter
He receives no mail, leaves no forwarding address;
without passport or destination,
catches flights at deserted airstrips.
He interprets signs that no one cares for
any more; chases after the receding horizons
of the world that used to be home.
His hands tremble, his shoes are scuffed,
his mind divided into zones
of unexploded shells.
One day he will forget the passwords:
trapdoors will yawn between his nouns
and the things they named.
Vanishing Acts Page 11
