Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil is the author of English (Penguin/Rattapallax 2004). He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a 2003 poetry award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in Fulcrum, Verse, Agenda, London Magazine, The Independent, Stand, Poetry Review and Poetry Wales , among other journals.

Moveable

Alright I admit it, I am struggling, I am.
Naming the sacred is not a job you take
lightly, not, that is, if you want to live
to any half-ripe sort of age. Until 1989,
we were frequent companions. I visited
you, entertained you—in Bombay behind
the Byculla zoo—and, merely a month later,
in HK, we lived in Repulse Bay on a junk.
After that my memory becomes hazier
with pain. Was it you I spent a month with
in Chiang Mai, smoking opium in a stilt-
house with the chief and his daughters?
We had so much money then, it was as if
we were on vacation from real life forever.
I remember: I am bringing home goodies
—imported coffee, cigarettes, geraniums
in a jar. I am sitting on a scooter,
you are in the sidecar, laughing in tongues.
Who would have guessed the disaster
in store, or how rarely you would appear
in the decade of denial? I am in my thirties,
shirtless, a baby elephant's head grows
out of my shoulders, I carry a beer-
belly and shades. My mother is bathing.
I am on guard duty, which I enjoy.
As my Asiatic time came to a close,
you and I grew reckless, racing borrowed
toys through the streets of ghost towns
patrolled by soldiers, priests, guard-dogs,
and always the inscrutable face and
lotus feet of the first Godman, Sri Sri
Baba Ba. On the airplane, we sat
by the aisle—sharing drinks, magazines,
maps to the world—measuring our journey
in statute miles. At JFK, you scurried
off for coffee. 'Back in a mo,' you said,
'and remember, yaar, the nail in your head
is moveable. So move it, why don't you?'
In the fall of 2001,1 do, I walk
from Roosevelt Station to a basement room
in Jackson Heights, past Hindi movie houses,
cut-rate travel agents, kebab halls, suit-
sari shops, paan-DVD parlours, psychics.
You, I am beginning to suspect, are not here.

How to Be a Leaf

Hold your breath until
you are God's green thoughts.
Stop eating,

air will suffice for food.
Water is another matter:
the skin absorbs moisture,

eyes adjust,
limbs grow inward.
Conjugate patience.

Sailor's Log

Tacked to the dark
swell of her back,

I wake up dreaming.
Morning

spills like milk
across the floor. Birds build

fractured arpeggios;
my friends in chaos.

They speak
the secret words I work to keep

safe in my chest.
Why say the rest?

I long to be
misery,

my race obscure in a crowded sea,
shipwrecked, dizzy,

free.

Psalm Secular

When you I taste
God awakes
from a century's
sleep or murder.
I fold my hands,
press your blessings
to my head.

I kneel abed,
mouth small praises
where thy thighs
collide. I bow, arise.
Soon the sun
will do the same,
arise and bow.

I take two pears
from the Gauguin bowl,
shine them with your slip.
We eat sweet and fast.
Juice flecks our lips.
'Gravid!' I shout,
for the poor joy of it.

And you? Laughing,
my name in your eyes,
you cry one word.
The moon that hangs
above the street
on a silver thread
lifts its skirt to dance.

The Boredom Artist

Life, said Hobbes, is nasty, brutish and short.
He left out boring, as grim a condition as any.
His tigerish namesake's epiphany,
in twenty-point captions, is a Sunday slot.
Then there's Chekhov, who, a moment ago, wrote,

The earth is beautiful, as are all God's creatures,
only one thing is not beautiful, and that is us.
Between philosopher, toy tiger, doctor, there's
a ladder of land no man claims as his.
I'll settle down there with old friends, familiars:

a monkey, my famous barking birds in pairs,
and defrocked Sukhvinder, the bald Brahmin bear.
Dawn, like whisky, half-lights a watery world:
all things breakdown to flesh, food, and fear.
It's late December in Fleetwood, downstate NY,

'glorious showers, thunderclouds continue'.
My mind unwinds as the century slows,
dribbles its years to a whining close
and defunct days peddle the news.
Listen: nothing, not even love, is true.