Returning Native
In dreams, his feet crunch on a carpet of pine acorns,
his nostrils flare with the leopard’s fetid breath.
He hasn’t forgotten the khansama’s stuffed capsicums,
the quilted pulaos and dagger chillies.
His tongue furred with patois lessons,
he walks on the beach, once again
a rusted child reciting from a primer,
wondering what damsons are
and what words like asphodel mean.
*
The words no longer fit his tongue:
the vowels hurt, the syllables clog
his mouth. He has been too long away.
He says Ruh, meaning stillness;
the men sharing his table hear ruh,
meaning soul. Is this the mutant’s fate?
When I speak, they picture another script,
and answer, not me, but the thought of me,
he complains to the lanes and fountains he knew.
His exclamations fade to blue
in the summer glare.
The street-signs are written
in another colour.
The Advent af Birds
for Vivek Narayanan
Gravity was faith, till the mirroring water broke
and they found themselves sibyls, suddenly afloat
without reflections, the ground cut clean away.
They gagged when they tasted the strident cries
escaping their hacksaw beaks like prey
too quick for dull reflexes.
They couldn’t furl back the downy limbs
that thrust from their shoulders, or bite off the spurs
that forked from the webs they’d known for feet.
And as they grew dizzy, pitched forward and spun
above the void, not falling but trapped in fall,
talons, sprung from their terror, struck out and rent
the curdled shell that globed them, the broken-watered sky.
They cry out in the dead winter of my sleep:
refugees, ancestors.
Travelling through Glass on a Cold Day
Huddled in our soft black chairs, we talk,
our backdrop a sky wet-brushed with cloud.
On a cold day like this
when, lions, even you shiver,
the basic question is weather.
Behind us, as we talk, glass walls rise sheer,
showcasing the sky. Stand guard, lions,
for that wing shimmering gold
is more than a flash, more than the moment’s
reflected passage: it’s been foretold
that a detail, the merest blip
on the radar will shatter
these sheer walls wet-brushed with cloud.
Lions, as you prowl the dazed avenues at noon,
beware of the window being loaded on a cart.
Sun’s-fire-whitened, emptiness in air:
whoever looks through it is transported elsewhere,
a self that shimmers on the circling thermals
before it settles on a terrace or roof,
small as a peepal leaf that’s fallen in December
and stuck to the glass that two men are hauling
down the street, knuckles bled by rope,
with nothing to show for the pane they carry
like a solid, except that random smudge
of faded green, the merest blip
on the radar. As the sky falls, screen by screen,
somewhere, immune to the question of weather,
an unglazed window stands square as a proof
that walls are only easels, lions only statues
propped up by a self wet-brushed with cloud.
A View of the Lake
Villa Waldberta
The man in white stands back to survey the landscape:
snow-melt just where he wants it and the crystal lake
an eye widening in a forest of viridian strokes.
Careful visitor from another planet, he probes,
then trails his brush across the canvas, a lull
before the sharp cobalt flick that unites water
with heaven; steps closer, dabs
at the palette, brush lighter than before,
the tempo languid, the man hardly there
except for the hand weaving images of itself.
So to renounce speed is his explicit purpose:
laying his knife aside, the man scrapes colour
from his sleeves, rests his brush; a pause
for breath, then circles back the way he came,
thawing aquamarine, stripping coats of umber,
dissolving velvet greens and speckled reds
until the canvas is down to the primer,
buff once more and void of sign
except for graphite smudges to mark
where cloud-hidden peaks will rise.
In the failing light, he lets the figures grow
again, the mountains and thickets, the clutter
that signals where the slang of boat and pier
has ruptured the grammar of leaf and wave:
his strokes are discreet ampersands that keep
the broken sentences of the district together,
gestures that compose an air more rarefied, an earth
more dense, a light more piercing than any the vista
that’s squared in his picture window could offer.
He has the exquisite manners of a ghost
trained in an older school of grace:
he does not remind the present of its failures
or, returning to these haunts of persistent desire,
play the loud impresario of the prospect.
No, he calculates differently: the high, clear flute
tuned from the whistling breath of children lost
among the pines, the icon coaxed from dripping wax,
the reason distilled by the lame dancer
balancing on the wine-press of thought,
form his reward. He defers his signature for later.
Vigil
Lover, listening at the keyhole,
married to a whisper on the phone,
the rustle of a dress.
How many rivals he has shot
across the hedges
of sleepless nights.
Hiding behind the arabesques
of the mirror, scarf knotted tight
as his breath, conspirator.
Breakfast, Interrupted by Apocalypse
The rocking-horse is a carrier
of early light.
The pucker at one end of the orange
is the north pole.
A headwind rushes the roof-tree,
the walls knuckle down.
The hills fall away
like crusts cut from bread.
And then, as the world comes to an end
around them, those who want to stay
turn back to where it all started:
crashing trees, burning hedges,
cottages going up in fireballs,
the credits rolling.
The Philosopher of the Early Hours
At 3:30, these claustral fears bind me to a chair:
the fear of being sealed in a windowless cell,
the judges shot, the warders fled; of having my eyes
gouged out, darkness branded deep
into my brain and my tongue,
only my bitter tongue
spared to remember.
I’m coming apart, my unholy halves tearing
one from another in their common waste:
by day, a pope shrivelling in an airtight cage,
his words, aspirins past their sell-by date;
by night, a panther stumbling in thickets where once
he’d plunged like black lightning.
Colours far a Landscape Held Captive
in memoriam: Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001)
They never knew you, who only recall
your smashed golds and broken reds:
those flashing conceits, tropes of a night too dark
to spell out by the fading glow of words;
those surfaces that melted as you spoke,
laying bare depths in which we’d drown
without a pilot’s full-throated voice
to bridge us to land. And as you sang,
a starburst of paisley moths lit up
our eyes behind closed eyelids, dark cells
unlit by thought of such a dawn.
You never meant to trap us in that country
without a post office, where boatmen and saints
trade stories to while away the days
of khaki captivity. No, Beloved Witness,
these were signposts you’d sketched
at the lake’s treacherous edge, to break our fall
as we hurtled down the foothills of policy.
No, your smashed golds and broken reds
were never laments: not yesterday’s colours
but tomorrow’s, they summon us to hope.
They never knew you, who only recall.
Fugue
Roots. Routes? Coracle. Oracle.
A dry pasture. Goats. Oatmeal. Bridge.
Or ridge? Or turnip? Urn. Lip. Loose. Use?
Marvellous, isn’t it, the way words unravel,
Tin Man and Lion Man? Airstrip. Strait.
Lateen sail. Dhow! Skein from skein, thread
unknotting from thread? Fissile articles.
Missiles. Parts of speech, neem leaves
in an amber jar in the kitchen.
Or vinegar? What am I smelling
between each syllable? Parsley? Thyme?
Simon and Garfunkel? Olive oil. Foil
for the oven. Cinnamon. Carrots. Fingers around a candle.
Candelabra! The skeins keep branching, ravelling,
unravelling, same thing isn’t it, drawing further and further
from what I meant? Gap.
Autocorrect. Alter Control Delete. Table of contents.
Right click. Wiped clean. Tabula rasa. You were saying?
Shore Leave
The sea floods your canals, heaves at your gates:
inside you, our child learns the sail-maker’s art.
Closing Act at the Old Theatre
in memoriam: Guru Dutt (1925–1964)
It might have been simpler to break a vase
or sift the alphabet on a credulous table,
but parlour games never featured too high
on his list: the playwright comes back
only to pursue an interrupted passion
for the study of curious physiognomies.
As in life, he stands tactfully aside
for the crowds that jostle to get their seats
in the theatre; he knows the plays backwards,
it’s the audience he’s returned to watch,
the same carnival that he loved to savour
from the safety of the dress circle.
He thinks he’s strong enough to withstand
the crush, and besides, he’s invisible;
but the revellers break like a hurricane
upon the house, a thousand throats crying
in the voices of strange animals driven
by fire or flood into the wrong country.
He cracks under their stampeding feet,
plaster moist with seepage, gutters sagging,
teak panels splintering, bay windows shattering,
worm-eaten timbers crashing to the floor.
His words, when they come, are a cascade,
the sound of stones rasping on stones.
Circa
The archivist returns to the earliest drafts
of the master’s poems, folded away
between the pages of old notebooks:
it’s like carbon-dating a few fine bones
buried in an avalanche of conceits.
Philoctetes Curses His Tormentors
Because I could not stanch the pus from this burning wound,
you marooned me. I was a hazard to the ship, you said,
that rag-sailed hulk with its rotten timbers.
Anyway, I rolled with the wave
and what do you know, Philoctetes held out:
there were wildfowl to shoot and berries to eat.
The bow was the one stringed instrument
I heard on this island: I made that music, harping
till my fingers bled. It kept me going ten years
and today, I’ll stroll down to the beach
to trawl your wreckage from the shadow of the reef,
fish your corpses from the combers.
Padlock
Returning, I stop up your door
with my sprung shadow,
a futile padlock
marking a disputed border.
Why speculate? I dodge
the light spittle of rain. There’s
a stubble of rust on the iron key
left out on the garden table.
South
Closing the gap to your streaming hair my arms
stretch across the white lightning-hit air.
Through split trees, spit-ripped rivers,
I wade ashore, come south to find
your trail dried. Sweat pricks like rust
in my pores. The spade offers its testimony:
a memory of desert agaves
knocking at childhood’s door
with the sharpened shafts of shadows.
The Surveyor’s Camplaint
What is land but the wry code left to be broken
at the map’s edge, a challenge deferred
to another day’s work in mist and rain,
or left to bleach through a summer of trumpets,
a dream lost to measurement, found again
in heavy leaves, fallen like keys on the doorstep?
My fear of houses is about leaving:
the shutting of doors, the creaking of hinges,
the fastening of bolts, the snapping of latches,
pausing at the step before taking a train,
moving on. My fear of houses
is about folding places up, putting them away.
In a province not my own, my gifts begin to work:
tractor, cloud, bridge across the river
activated by degrees; slurry pouring into sinks
from which houses should grow; oranges
gathered and heaped up. The landscape itself,
like a stalled engine, growling to life.
Stonecutter
He’d tracked tigers through the foothills,
carved an alphabet in rock, man-spoor
that wanted for voices to sing it.
Alone, in his eightieth year, he chipped
a last petal from the rose of silence
and checked it for blemishes or veins
before wrapping up his tools in oilcloth:
the chisel a patient opener of graves,
the mallet used to absences as complete
as rain gone missing in the desert.
He buried his phrasebook, muffled the last echoes
of common speech, then locked his breath,
escaped the shutdown of the senses,
all colours narrowing to black.
He had decades to go
on the road with that last petal
chipped from the rose of silence,
his fingers drumming on his tool-kit,
sketching shapes in the parched air.
He knew, he knows he must finish
with his last breath that winged statue.
Annatatian ta the Ustad’s Treasury af Verses
for Jürgen Brôcan
No poems, really, from the Ustad’s middle period.
Just a few notations he’d left to brew.
Her ivory comb. A strand of wool torn free
&nb
sp; by a trailing fingernail, redder than any gulmohur.
Jade bowls standing on a smoke-blackened shelf.
In the window, the river’s spilt silver.
A tortoiseshell cat playing on the doorstep.
And, cancelled in a rage of strokes,
the grey-eyed sitarist drowning, out of earshot.
Just this broken song, suggesting he had chosen
to tarnish his rhymes with a warmer breath
than the court would permit. He sings
of his draggled woollen coat, his winters
spent in a potter’s kiln, roofed in colour
by fickle skies, the river a shrivelled skin of ice,
the wildcat his one companion, the drum and blast
of rain his only music: he’s begun, already, to hear
the perfect cadence beaten on the heart’s shattered anvil.
Footage for a Trance
for Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The hours stop in my veins.
Evening falls, a spotted tissue
draped across dayglo streets.
The clocks go on marking
the time in another city
where the trains still run,
taking people home.
*
Over my shoulder, I see my country vanish
in a long unfurling of cornflower-blue sky.
My limbs are clear as glass.
The wind grazes my shoulders,
the animal buried in my voice
wakes up and growls.
Vanishing Acts Page 12
