a kind of home
ಕೂಡಲಸಂಗಮದೇವಾ ಕೇಳಯ್ಯಾ
ಸ್ಥಾವರಕ್ಕಳಿವುಂಟು ಜಂಗಮಕ್ಕವಿಲ್ಲ
– ಬಸವಣ್ಣ
(Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall
but the moving ever shall stay.
– Basavanna [trans. A.K. Ramanujan] )
the river has no centre
no real beginning, or end,
its stillness
is in its movement
i could live with that
a kind of home
*
A Room With a View
After Arun Kolatkar
“The three-sided silence
of the potato peelers makes
a prism that seizes on
a fleeting thought that crosses…”
– The Potato Peelers, Kala Ghoda Poems, Kolatkar, Arun (2004)
The window is glazed over. The morning, starched into shape
presses its face against the glass. The writer sits at his table,
and draws back the curtains. Smoke leaves his lips unwillingly
like a paramour. And from his sleepy fingers, a green tendril slopes upwards
as if the sky had planted its seed in his beating body,
as if the past was returning as a sidewinder, leaking percussion,
as if the dawn splintering in his chest, was a drum.
The sun spills into the hive. A tap coughs to life.
A kitchen snaps open with a steady stream of vitthals
torpedoing the haze that has settled on the apartment block
like cling-wrap. In the balcony below, Maestro Blast
shimmies up and down the strident scale with stern confidence –
his bugle announcing the day to the groggy eyed daily wagers
sitting on their haunches, beedis between lips, tea-stall
slowly perambulating in their eyes, riding the fumes.
The itch starts out in his gut, before befriending a bacillus
the size of a daydream under the nail of his pinky,
chomping on its morning protein of dead skin
cured with the feeble spice of a day like this.
Saawan ka mahina… and outside his head the wind blooms
waiting patiently at the kitchen window for him to notice.
The hunger courses through his fingers and into the matta rice grains
that he quickly washes before putting it to boil. As steam tinkles
the stainless steel plate on the aluminum paatre, he heads
back to the study and finally squints outside the window.
Any moment now, somebody will let god out of the stables.
The hill, already dressed up in 11 different types of green,
has been awake since before sunrise, allowing the early runners
to knead its quiet deep. A little boy stands on one side of the road
watching his father make his way into the foliage. He has been told
to wait there. He looks at the old man for a moment, pricks up his ear
and then, in a blink, he runs towards the nearer edge, facing the window,
breaking the fourth wall. He lowers his pants and points his bazooka
at the colony. The rascal sprays the city, timing his assault
with the bugle’s staccato blasts. The neighbourhood flinches.
Without missing a beat it gathers its wits, and its smoking
incense. Not one to be left behind, it responds with a flurry
of temple bells. Vitthal Vitthal Vitthal Vitthal.
The day is saved.
The colony is delivered.
God cannot be everywhere
but sound travels.
*
i became the lark ascending
after Hilary Hahn’s rendition of Ralph Vaughan Williams after George Meredith
that a ribbon of horsehairs secured with rosin hardwood
and resolve held under the chin that calloused
skin which enshrines sound in the slip of thought
from sinew that held like a compass
in the seafaring grip of a violinist’s fingers
flight unseen could conjure the meadow
of its birth the singing fancy that grows in its green
as after noon limns a lover’s eyes with the soft epiphany
of wings and a heart that trips at unwilling intervals
whoever said that there is no beauty in the tune’s ascent
or that the sublime lived in surprise has not paid
attention to the rising song bird whose slowness is his care
rise slowly then my love in the harmony
perhaps the only way to learn flight is to replace
the music in her hands with this trembling
body of down and feathers
*
Never Tread Softly
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
– It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), Bob Dylan (1965)
Follow the line as a fire-ant would
electric with smell and purpose
as elephantine as fresh mycelium cities
that nourish the ruins of a home
that bled onto the damp
black topsoil of a forgotten forest
Go to the root of the recipe
learn how the antennae become taut
with the smell of lust learn the ecstasy
of the rust-warm sheath when the burnished shell
of its entire body becomes a lightning rod
crazed with the soft brown shock of discovery
Spread the idea across its beating conscience
Learn the imagination that spawns kamikaze hexapods
a rippling quiver of searching drones seeking out the source
When one ones into many when you become that fire
that wondrous surrender that sublime line that started before time
and ends after fear that sinuous movement
sharpened by curiosity that does not think of the next
and the next and the next
When your fingers become another god
and another and another and another
when they chance
upon the score for the chequerboard melody
the siren the trance-song of freedom and bread
Don’t allow it to be quiet
open the windows of your room
spread the reed curtains
let it take you as a lover would
let it kiss your surprise
let it touch you
Don’t tread softly a fire-ant never would
*
The Orange River – A Painted Odyssey
A sestina after Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s Speechless City [oil on canvas, 122×122 cm]
(1975)
If it had feet, they would make no sound
on the ringing cobbles. But it had no way to escape, no sky
that would fly, birdlike underskin – only the passing
of time. A house drapes the empty morning
like a worn-out coat in his wordless dream. 1
And in the river’s silent deluge, a body
floats. Blood flows through the arteried body
incarnadines the water, paints the fluted sound
into the evacuated borderlands of the cosmic dream.
From the shore of that river, a poet looks up at the saffron sky
and raises the alarm. Screeching temple-bells pin the morning
to the crumbling wall. Townspeople hasten towards the passing,
falling over each other, wrestling, pushing, hustling, hugging, passing
off as friends– in the exiled city. Blood after blood, body after body
unravels the turban of the day. The face of the riot is the morning
after, and in between the flotsam – the scattered rubble – the sound
of a mewling child, heard only by confused strays, devours the sky
whole. Maybe you’d hear it, maybe you’d wake up from the dream
when the ghost-green plaster peels, and the burnt-edge of the fraying dream
folds inwards unto itself. The river names names. It mourns the passing
of those who have fallen because of their names, fallen from the flame-furrowed sky
onto the cratered earth; from the river to the sea, this moon-scarred body
will be free – free from the yoke, from the chain, from the sibilant sound
of the mind-forg’d manacles clamping down on the morning’s
wrists. For who can cage the imagination, who can stop the morning
from planting laughter and children in the wet earth of history’s dream?
The river screeches like a bugle, like the soundless sound
of news ripping open the screen, bursting through maps, passing
a stake through memory’s shivering corpse. We swim in the dark body
of the hurting mind, we hurtle through ravaged cities, we slice open the sky
like an onion, the pungent sky, the anxious, overthinking, empath sky,
and we find again, as we go, as we hold each other, the moon-tears of the morning
after. We are the soulless firebirds, the ticks that grow fat on the bodies
of cursed towns. In the sordid absence, the empty neighbourhoods, we dream,
as we hold our fears close. We look up to the heavens, and catch a bird tresspassing
between barbed wire and billboard. When it soars, a free bird makes no sound.
Between the courtyards and the chawls, this orange silence is the sound
of absence. No humans in this city, only shadows of birds and cows and passing
dogs that drift ghost-like from cooker-steam to azaan in the painting of a poet’s dream.