GLAD, IN TIME
The
cats want to play.
They’ve
all got tunes
in
their heads, popping
out
of eyes and ears,
flounced
on tongues.
Will
you have me, Lick,
a
bit of bother, smooth
swing,
cymbals shimmering.
We’re
music, man,
players
and pieces.
After
us, what words
or
dance steps
can
distract the crowd
while
we orchestrate
sound
and body down—
yet
the reviewer says
oh
what an instrumental
as
we walk past 40th
and
10th on the way down
to
Hell’s Kitchen, to the river,
to
write poems and fill
bottles,
block up
sea
lanes
with
our heart’s cries.
Oh,
stop the music,
stop
spending the duracell,
atrophy
and entropy,
we’re
all in the global soup, man,
hotter
by the minute,
the
kitchen’s been franchised.
Oh
stop the poems! They only
make
the heart glad for a time.
n
Indran
Amirthanayagam, March 8, 2006
DRIVE
Tomorrow,
in the morning,
I will drive
from
my son and daughter
swaddled in the back
seat,
a white flag draped
on the windshield,
a cage for a cock
and hen,
some source of eggs,
a briefcase
with letters
my grandfather wrote
when he left for
I must not forget
the urn, my mother's
beads.
The sea breeze will
refresh
us. I will avoid potholes
with swift and
limber
driving. I came back
during the cold
peace.
I do not read
leaflets
dropped from the
sky;
perhaps I am a fool
to believe in the
witchcraft
of white, sun
bright,
sea blue, roads
empty,
rats scurrying
into basements,
whelps, squeals,
constant blackness
while I crank my
engine,
son and daughter
in the rear-view
mirror,
hood flagged,
cock in song, in
flight.
-- Indran Amirthanayagam, August
12, 2006
Email indranmx@yahoo.com
FACE
Imagine
half your face
rubbed
out yet
you
are suited up
and
walking
to
the office.
How
will your mates
greet
you?
with
heavy hearts,
flowers,
rosary
beads?
How
shall we greet
the
orphan boy,
the
husband whose hand
slipped,
children
and
wife swept away?
How
to greet
our
new years
and
our birthdays?
Shall
we always
light
a candle?
Do
we remember
that
time erases
the
shore, grass
grows,
pain’s
modified?
At
Hikkaduwa
in
1980 I wrote a ditty,
a
sailor’s song
about
rain
in
sunny Ceylon.
I
don’t know
what
the Calypsonians
would
compose
about
this monstruous
wave,
this blind hatchet man;
don’t
know
the
baila singers’ reply;
we’re
a happy
and
go people
yet
the fisherman’s wife
knows
her
grandfather
was
eaten by the ocean,
fisher
communities
have
suffered in time;
and
what’s happened
now
is just another feast
for
that bloody,
sleeping
mother
lapping
at our island;
but
what if the ocean
were
innocent,
the
tectonic plates
innocent,
what if God
were
innocent?
I
do not know
how
to walk upon the beach,
how
to lift corpse
after
corpse
until
I am exhausted,
how
to still the tears
when
half my face
has
been rubbed out
beyond
the
railroad tracks
and
this anaesthetic,
this
calypso come
to
the last verse.
What
shall we write
in
the sand?
Where
are gravestones
incinerated? Whose
ashes
are these urned,
floating
through the house
throttled
by water?
Shall
we build
a
memorial,
some
calculated distance
from
the sea, in a park,
in
the shape of a giant wave
where
we can write
the
names of the dead?
Has
the wave lost
its
beauty, considered
now
obscene?
Yet
tomorrow
we
must go to the ocean
and
refresh ourselves
in
the sea breeze
down
in Hikkaduwa
where
it is raining
in
sunny Ceylon.
Tomorrow,
let us
renew
our vows
at
sunrise, at sunset.
Let
us say, the next time
the
ocean recedes
and
parrots gawk
and
flee, and restless
dogs
insist their humans
wake
up, let us not peer
at
the revelation
of
the ocean bed,
nor
seek photographs.
Let
us run to higher ground,
and
gathered there
with
our children,
our
cats, dogs,
pigs,
with what we’ve
carried
in our hands
—albums,
letters—
let
us make a circle,
let
us kneel, sit,
stand
in no particular
direction,
pray
and
be silent,
and
open our lungs
to
shout thanks--
to
our gods--
thanks
to our dogs.
GRANNY,
A CENTURY
Reminded
of
the still pool,
buffaloes
and flies
round
the bund,
old
woman
in
a frock coat,
slippers,
chasing
pole
cats, tongue
wagging
over
morning
tea
and
a cutlet.
Onion
skin,
oils
stained
and
cupped
in
the armchair,
where
Granny sat
for
a London
year,
thrice
upholstered
now
over
30 years—
London,
Honolulu,
Rockville,
our
houses
resistant
to shifts
in
taste, history’s
rubs,
Ceylon
rolling
still
out
of the station
at
Fort. Granny
100
now.
-- Indran Amirthanayagam, October
2005.
MEASURED
In Memoriam: Reggie Siriwardena
On a sun-bleached lane,
flanked by orange and lemon trees,
in the middle of a slow-sipped
afternoon I conjure Reggie
translating Machado.
For years I returned
to the island to fill bags
with new poems and stories
by this spare intellectual
who fought to be classless,
who ordered my poems
and built me a house
on the map of a land
whose names have changed,
whose shoreline's roughed up,
whose people have fled
and dragged themselves back
in the undertow, beside themselves
with joy on seeing the familiar
white bulbs open behind barricades
to cast their aphrodisiacs
and unravel the most stitched
consciences.
Reggie,
one of our original liberators,
I leave you these words
framed by ocean and lagoon,
under king coconut and banyan,
decorum and decree, I leave you
my translations of the general chaos
in Siriwardena-measured verse.
--Indran
Amirthanayagam, January 8, 2007
NICANOR
BUTTERFLY
--for Nicanor Parra
The
woods nearby have vanished.
Where
shall the heart go
to
see the butterfly, to die,
yet
bread cooks in a few
new
furnaces around
the
globe, and at Las Cruces
the
poet has not quite
split
the atom or woman?
The
butterfly’s resplendence
remains
a metaphor
realized
only in language,
while
he speaks still,
takes
notes but will not travel—
for
what?—nor draw
stick
figures with conundrums,
but
writes and writes
infinite
series of notes,
claps
his hands and waves
like
the Pope
to
the schoolchildren
who
spot him
on
the porch shouting
“Nicanor,
Nicanor,
Idolo,
Idolo”
while
the waves crash
on
somebody else’s
beach,
at Las Cruces
the
poet returns
to
the sitting room
to
have afternoon tea
served
by two
tea
maidens.
Indran Amirthanayagam,
Chile, April 2005
PILL
FOR AN
I
did not visit the Black Pussycat,
the
Fat Flounder, or even Macy’s
on
for
another return. I must devote
myself
to compressing the city
into
a compact, multi-purpose
pill
to pop on those occasions
far
away on
where
the blue-green jeweled
sea—turned
nut brown, in the wake
of
the tsunami--witnesses again
patrol
boats and small arms fire,
lobbed
grenades and thatch explosions,
rapes
of social workers and hundreds
upon
hundreds upon thousands
in
flight from their villages.
War
has returned to the hamlets,
coves
and palm-fronded taverns,
and
in
of
united
in the global accounting
of
war and war’s alarms,
everybody
bruised, jaded and afraid
waiting
for the Messiah or the flames.
Indran Amirthanayagam, August 18, 2006
SWING
A BONE
--for the jazz,
man.
Swing
a bone
catch
a skull
in your pocket
Let
your sweat
jingle
jangle jangle jingle
bone
bilious
bloody blowing
brittle smithereened
bone
spool
unraveled
gene
code
condemned
bone,
my
friend,
pure
bone
at home
on
the street,
on the phone
I
tell you
swing
a bone….
It
doesn’t matter
where
you swing
Sing
Sing
Hell‘n
Heaven
Monterrey
Man
knows not
‘cept
he’s got
the
bone
and
you don’t
have
the phone
bone
phone
we’re
talking
bone
language
Mr.
Coltrane
swing
soprano
bone
Thelonius
Monk
fish
swim,
man,
closer
closer
to
the keys
bone
Mingus
muttering
base
bone
chattering
Ornette,
my
man,
trumpet
the
bone
violin
the
sap
saxophone
Bone
bone bone
Let
drums roll
We’ve
got
a
bone to throw
in
the room
Hey
Monk
black
and white
Hey
Coltrane
tenor
the sax
Hey
Mingus
deeply
does it
boom
the bone
Ornette
smooth,
man,
smooth
that alto
sax
in my ear
I’ve
got a phone
call,
man,
phone’s
ringing
and
ringing
from
the other
side,
Man,
Hey
God,
Got
a bone?
Monk,
don’t go,
Mingus,
stay,
Coltrane,
I invoke
you,
Ornette
don’t
leave me
man,
with God
alone.
I
need a bone.
n
Indran
Amirthanayagam, March 31, 2004
n
Jazz
Festival, Monterrey