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Three Poems by Jeet Thayil

Poem With Prediction

Because he's old and unsure,
he counts on your faith in images
and your fear, which is as pure
as when you were a child, turning the pages
of the illustrated books. He intones castrato symbol & basso portent,
reveals the unexpurgated blood truth of fairy tales, pretends
his closed, unchanged-in-2-millenia judgments
are improvised and no 5-star
disaster
awaited you. He gives you viral in exchange for Sister
Tree and calls it fair trade. You're allowed to whine
if you stay in key and watch your rhyme.
But your innocence
will be punished, this is a rule of the Great Gagadong.
Another is, You will love and obey him and let him lick
your wound with his infected tongue.
He brings you the good news-your tick
is erratic,
you are uninspired, dear
idiot, and no meaning will adhere
to you or your dead. His wide hand will rain
with blessings and good sense.
He'll translate the world into plain
language for you who are without ability. Your need for money
is as banal as it is weak.
The real work
is his to accomplish-in a week.
Your demands are too many,
your skin too soft. You deserve the paddle of his handmade violin.

A compendium of contemporary Indian poets: your purchase in part benefits Levantine Cultural CenterTo Baudelaire

I am over you at last, in Mexico City,
in a white space high above the street,
my hands steady, the walls unmoving.
It's warm here, and safe, and even in winter
the rain is benign. Some mornings I let
the sounds of the plaza—a fruit seller,
a boy acrobat, a woman selling
impossible fictions-pile up in a corner
of the room. I'm not saying I'm happy
but I am healthy and my money's my own.
Sometimes when I'm walking in the market
past the chickens and the pig smoke,
I think of you-your big talk and wolf's heart,
your Bonaparte hair and eyes of Poe.
I don't miss you. I don't miss you when
I open a window and light fills the room
like water pouring into a paper cup,
or when I hear a woman's white dress shine
like new coins and I know I could follow
my feet to the river and let my life go
away from me. At times like this,
if I catch myself talking to you,
I'm always surprised at the words I hear
of regret and dumb boyish devotion.

Letter From a Mughal Emperor, 2006

Nothing here's worth a tick.

I hid everything except the heads. They respect slaughter.

They respect only slaughter. They forget the other things we brought them, the ghazals, the gardens, the ice and symmetry.

It's an affliction to grow up motherless, with your lady mother living beside you.

They have many images, but they have no God. They're fit only for war.

Even the dogs are second rate.

In Tashkent I had no money, no country or hope of one, only humiliation. But among the people I found much beauty. No pears are better.

There are no accidents. There's only God.

Tending to his doves on the eve of battle, my father flew into a ravine at the fortress of Akhsi.

He became a falcon. I became emperor.

Sometimes, when I eat a Kabul melon, I remember my father and you.

I've forgotten more than I've seen, but I haven't forgotten enough.

There's only one way to live in a place like this, with your disgust close at hand.

One night I took majoun because the moon was shining. The next day I took some more, at sunrise.

I enjoyed wonderful fields of flowers, flowers on all sides. I saw an apple sapling with five or six leaves placed regularly on each branch.

No painter could have done this.

I made a schedule. Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday for wine, the other days for majoun.

Your letter puzzled me:

The people are caught between constant spiritual anguish and a faith that will give meaning to the question that consumes them: the dual substance of Krishna, the yearning of man to know God. Between the spirit and the flesh, a great unwinnable war.

Dear friend, write clearly, with plain words. Writing badly will make you ill.

Once, in an orchard, I was sick with fever and vision. I was young, but I prepared myself.

A hundred years or a day, in the end you'll leave this place.

Long ago, my grandfather's face looked into mine, I think with love.

Now when we speak it's of ghazals, of metrics and rhyme or of our most famous massacres.

When he conquered Lahore he planted a banana tree. It thrived, even in that climate.

His memory is so good it gives him a second life. Mine gives only a partial one.

It's no more than I need.

Three Poems by Arundhathi Subramaniam

Madras

I was neither born nor bred here.

But I know this city

           of casuarina and tart mango slices,
           gritty with salt and chilli
           and the truant sands of the Marina,

the powdered grey jowls of film heroes,

           my mother's sari, hectic with moonlight,
           still crackling with the voltage
           of an MD Ramanathan concert,

the flickering spice route of tamarind and onion
from Mylapore homes on summer evenings,

           the vast opera of the Bay of Bengal,
           flambéed with sun,

and a language as intimate as the taste
of sarsaparilla pickle, the recipe lost,
the sour cadences as comforting
as home.

It's no use.
Cities ratify
their connections with you
when you're looking the other way,

annexing you
through summer holidays,
through osmotic memories
of your father's glib
lie to a kindergarten teacher
("My mother is the fair one"),

and the taste of coffee one day in Lucca
suddenly awakening an old prescription -
Peabury, Plantation A
and fifty grams of chicory
from the fragrant shop near the Kapaleeshwara temple.

City that creeps up on me
just when I'm about to affirm
world citizenship.

Where I Live: New & Selected Poems: your purchase in part benefits Levantine Cultural CenterVigil

As shadows lengthen,
as the horizon smudges
into secrecy,
as the ocean withdraws
into a misty November opacity,
feelings begin to grow more medieval.

And I long for you
as other lovers have before me
in a great melodic deluge
awash through history,
veined silver with melancholy,
deep-throated, brine-flecked, with yearning.

Twilight is the light
for lyric poetry,
a stab of blue kingfisher poetry,
a small blaze of longing
                     and regret
that is almost love,
too slight for immortality,
too intense to go unsung.

I almost understand now
why the women
in those poems I've ritually deplored.
wandered over to their mirrors,
tracing against their lips
the winestain of an unforgotten passion,
coiling against their necks
seething torrents of hair
into a muted tempest,
still electric with desire.

And it feels like I too could
wait for you,
while I perform
the erotic liturgies of another world,
wait for you,
who understands like none other
the prosody of my breath,
wait for you
and you alone.

But only until the light fades, my love,
only until the light fades.

 
To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn't Find Me Identifiably Indian

You believe you know me,
wide-eyed Eng Lit type
from a sun-scalded colony,
reading my Keats - or is it yours -
while my country detonates
on your television screen.

You imagine you've cracked
my deepest fantasy -
oh, to be in an Edwardian vicarage,
living out my dharma
with every sip of dandelion tea
and dreams of the weekend jumble sale...

You may have a point.
I know nothing about silly mid-offs,
I stammer through my Tamil,
and I long for a nirvana
that is hermetic,
odour-free,
bottled in Switzerland,
money-back-guaranteed.

This business about language,
how much of it is mine,
how much yours,
how much from the mind,
how much from the gut,
how much is too little,
how much too much,
how much from the salon,
how much from the slum,
how I say verisimilitude,
how I say Brihadaranyaka,
how I say vaazhapazham -
it's all yours to measure,
the pathology of my breath,
the halitosis of gender,
my homogenised plosives
about as rustic
as a mouth-freshened global village.

Arbiter of identity,
remake me as you will.
Write me a new alphabet of danger,
a new patois to match
the Chola bronze of my skin.
Teach me how to come of age
in a literature you've bark-scratched
into scripture.
Smear my consonants
with cow-dung and turmeric and godhuli.
Pity me, sweating,
rancid, on the other side of the counter.
Stamp my papers,
lease me a new anxiety,
grant me a visa
to the country of my birth.
Teach me how to belong,
the way you do,
on every page of world history.