Mukta Sambrani

stained water

The lee side of the mountain faces away from the first door to the heart.
Which is your favorite place? They are all my favorite. Above the door hang
hand-embroidered decorations. There is a small circular mirror in the middle
of each clover. Every clover has a large flower around it. Each large flower
hangs from a hexagon sealed carefully with tiny buttonhole stitches. The
windward side faces downward from the heart. When the organ on the other
side was swollen, much care was called for. The swollen organ sustained no
long-term damage but people went without sweets and fried food that holiday
season. Sipping on his bowl of over-cooked vegetable stew, father writes a
letter about the small body in pain that is mostly home bound this winter.
When the sun comes out, the druid and his large stainless steel dish arrive.
After a small meal of raisins and dates the child sits, hands and feet in
the deep water dish. The druid recites in whispers washing the yellowness
out of the child. The rest of the house is mostly quiet. It metabolizes the
sun and the absence of restless feet on the porch tiles.














Now that she thinks of it, Anna would be happier calling the druid,
"Jadibootiwala" or root and herb man. Druid sounds too foreign
to the sense of the man who wore a dusty white dhoti and tiger's teeth, or
so he said in the amulet around his throat. Anna wants this poem to appear
in small font  because this is a memory and memories when revisited have the
strangest way of shrinking the places they were set in. And the poem is
about being small.

now waiting for the summer
evidence of many kinds of birds
your song many days since
the sunshine must fall over you

to wait for summer
the sky fills with birds
many days since your song
the sun must live in your house

I have been waiting for summer
There are many kinds of birds here
It has been long since I heard you sing
I see your house bathed in sun





This is a poem Anna wrote in one of the other languages she speaks and then
translated thrice. Ishmail will ask questions about the use of caps. in the
third avatar. Ishmail will ask questions about translation. Ishmail will ask
who these poems are for. Ishmail will ask questions about consistency.

the finished or complete) preludes to a reconnaissance
For Ishmail or Shahid, beloved


From still moist and enveloped
immaculate and inimitable
you live in mine

When wonder steals the heart
my feet hurt and everything is so beautiful,
I want to cry

The blended ironies of comparables
reminders of her gentle firmness
oozing from yours, my places

Pressing absents-- forget the give
oblique luster of martyrs
feared measures, reticent

Cadence-- shall we call it?
the lulling and arrhythmic torpor
surrounding plexus

End it then-- in another resolute circle
glances will tell yet again
unfurl my palms honest from keeping

You-- my arch unbroken from the steep
or the sleep-- slippage? of hollow hours
spent mid-stream







Who writes these notes? Who names names? Whose names are these? Sons,
lovers, fathers, all Anna's beloved.



I kiss the heads of writers
velocity beckons the mould
or mud splattered in lavish re-ordering

of universe is to light as blood to spirit
mud, take me after
night bite my nape
conjure me conjure
your eyes seen in my bone

transmutation of my spectral
plain of nothing matters
ore, core or frugal
mist or missed when spread wide











Far away from here I see the fields where we ran as children on holiday from
the city. I see the dog herding us like sheep. I see fields of mustard,
yellow and green. I see Anna returning from swimming in the river to a feast
of farm fresh carrots Ishmail and Sweet S picked. I see Anna as a little
girl. I see no poets there. No contenders. No inheritance. No prize.






I burp the twice born infant
imperfections will not mar you
why, I've wondered

when all is lost to ceiling and to words
I pray for lost or love
I pray for demon, greed, hail

when the wind has jostled,
it leaves furrows in the crisp white sheets
The meeting of eyes and hand or
hand, mouth, face, riot, fest
for god of grief met early
between bench, wood and niche

Copy cutter malevolently tuned
inaccurate-- time to flog
process out weed, read not
the clearest of mediums, this

Touch my shoulder here, here
kiss my arm, plead, ask for this
I have no other what has passed,
it is gone my sweet melancholic












From fertile delta the river returned,
surfeit of impending pride and reason lacking,
my ancestor built stone, mud, shell dwelling,
shrine to the body, sustenance, evolution, progeny
laid her head, ear pressed to the ground, in wait

Somewhere further along
the plains like nothing ever
your eyes, breath pressed in
Map making up your story mark
my line, circle from shores the two
your shadow rises and the dome

To the rhetoric of what we become, afternoons
my heart playing name games with strangers,
here in my line images of or art or resting place
immaculate states, shredded webs and coastlines
intersected homes of known enemies.

You've met the enemy and it is you what
this has to do with theme of journey what her mother is
her name her nation the notion that we are one falls
away with the hand that leads to the nether.
It falls away like her need to forgive, a long shadow

What Anna cannot comprehend?
Persistence.
Or my constant need for contrivance
and contraries.
A poem is growing there.

Find me a color brighter
than crevice gone blue in her head,
so I may be her sextant
or man on mast blurred, rolling, cursed,
unfurling ensigns to the south.
Let me be the voyage out
so I may be she.












Anyone who has chanced upon my notebooks will know that this poem has been
growing growing growing inside me.






What is drowned in sleep?
keeper of the plains, sleet and time,
names and wayward child
lost on land or eaten by sea

From uterine and well formed walls
the bursting chaos and demure motions
they emerge half brother half sister, my kin,
protagonist melted like tar upon scar,
full bellied or round from cape to providence
Bell toll revokes shell plastered in bark,

stories of ancestors flung loosely on upwind sail,
tonight the draft, tomorrow dank chill pallor,
scales in her long and curving trail of emerald
or water turning stone


















If you say you remember nothing
or where you've been
the red white green mountain
and snow banks beside will not complain
they sit vacant and in wait

Glass breaks skin glass breaks glass
In the voice of concern after remembered
Empathy is the name empathy crumbles

I send you songs send songs slivers gathered
And rolled round like globes of ice or trespass
When he called you from the river's farthest
your toe rings, tear soaked turned to rain.

My sisters in mountain shrines of acorn
weaved hair to your flower song and history
invitation pending arrived saddled in the screaming

Nothing untoward happened here
Chestnut horses jumped chasms ago
Silent chase and shadows courtesy
After the fall of the drum fingers
Scope keys legend and notes serenade

Somewhere past unspeaking or silent tree
the names of familiars
carried between landscapes

covered after snow empties the red
your name found twice in my book
I take your eyes to the fields of deer

interruption of the locomotive
or my voice early this morning
closing in on the still quiet

That which is always certain,
you, my chief commissary of mace, welcome,
she weds colors with kingdom, priest with passion rests
her bow, unspent arrows, eyebrows like the curved lines
before valleys of bird wing

After eclipse, palm fronds and eucalyptus unite,
strange meets the fork of loam and sand,
paternity divests common uniques on seed
conjoined in ether brother guides brother uphill,
watch, code, cajole, make hills, their home intercepted

In the nightmare re dubbed dream hands
scrubbing profusely warning held farther knife
woman cleansed for where would the scraping
occur? In which side are the fingers and bones
embedded? The how the primitive killer of pain

At first three planks seemed to have been removed
the second time I visited the house was all roof
held together with nothing. Six feet under the gunny bags
melded with soil held odorless remains of winter.
The empty apple seed under the stairs sang to moon beams in porch light.












How does a book earn the right to influences it names? Muses are invoked,
names named, ancestors appeased, and then what? You, my reader, are the
inheritor of these questions. To you I dedicate my staccato and my
piecemeal, my shredded and my resonating, my shrieking and my lilting
offerings.

Anna Goes to Graduate School or
A Cultural Studies Seminar or
Anna writes a fascist bitchy poem

1
Tentatively,
this will become a poem before we escape the seminar room
for Kama Sutra which will, we know,
annihilate all the three, four or five thousand years of civilized history
we pretend to breathe.
It was made by a woman who lives overseas and shares a name with a popular
condom
and a text on sex we are not certain about.
All in all it makes an interesting blend of cultural text.
2
From time to time the feminist women turn to each other and ask:
Where are all the men? I am sick of my asceticism.
Let's go home and make love.
The men meanwhile are in third grade dreaming of their chicks with big tits.
3
At seminars chaired by light-skinned people
who make wonderful spouses to dark-skinned people
they find themselves asking:
How does it matter who we marry or if we marry at all?
They are faced with an endless wall of happily married mouths offering to
suck.
4
It matters enormously to Anna's feminist friend's idealism.
It is not her fault though.
The bald blond says something to the effect of: I hope I
am not taking away all the space here, as a matter of political correctness
and
my deep regard for Indian family values, may I take this
opportunity to mention all the happy times I have spent in your country.
Your university campus also has one of the best crèches. I would also
like to draw your attention to the native researcher I married. Pardon his
yawning. It
is the lunch and the air conditioning.
5
The answer to the question about marriage is that it is tentative
like most things, and the text on sex
which is neither ancient nor medieval
and mostly invites contemporary feminist and post-colonial interpretation.
6
Tentative is a nice word.
especially when one is a humanities person.
7
Tentative is good.
It makes for what passes as flirting across over-crowded seminar tables.
8
Tentative matters.
In theory, in practice, criticism, po.mo.ism, jargon, systematicity and
Plato.
9
Panini and Plato can be friends
if things can indeed be tentative and men can take them home.
10
Tentatively, purely as an afterthought, it makes sense to speak of one's
spouse
at an Indian university, especially if one married a native.
11
Tentatively, Plato and Panini
who sit across the table from them
will take the two women home
for sex, a snack and sleep and what passes for utter crassness.









Here Anna would like the reader to know that Anna's bitterness for school
doubled after Ishmail married in spite of Anna and the futileness of
footnoting and research methodology finally got to her. Anna also started
experimenting with personae and appropriating other people's lives
guiltlessly upon reading much literary theory. To the reader who wonders
about Anna's encounters with poets and artists mentioned here, Anna would
like to say that despite her third world background or because of it Anna
has been an avid reader and listener. By Panini (proper noun), Anna does not
mean bread and by Sarma, Anna means canine goddess or goddess of canine
potential. Anna hates footnoting. Going to University has jaded Anna and
cluttered her plain speech with terminology.

The artifact museum was bombed the day war broke out. The curator and his
staff perished instantly. Soldiers were called in to take over the artifact
museum. Calloused hands caressed the breasts of goddess statues. I see this
young soldier boy keeping the vigil in the halls of ancestors. Some smile in
spite of the disfigurement. Anna thinks he fills a notebook with poems. Anna
wants to present a rendition of his notebook to the world. She has no doubt
he understands everything in spite of his inexperience. To her he is as much
a curator as his scholarly predecessor. Anna believes in the potential of
things.


from the notebook of the artifact museum keeper









Ishmail thinks the scenario of the artifact museum is presumptuous. Even
forced. Of course he does. He has to be Anna's diabolical double at
all times. Anna hasn't been to these places he argues. Of course she hasn't.
The garb of fiction needs the lining of history he says allegorically. Of
course he does.  Ishmail can't speak without using a figure of speech or
two. He says the conceit needs to be more probable. You can't pass off your
work, informed by your experience as someone else's, he says. To which
Anna's argument is that she has never worked in a museum. But what about the
lining of history, Ishmail says. What of it?

muse
after dark snickering portrait gallery
painting the absent breasts with oil
stolen from lamps for my bust wife
words lost glass swallowed with food
fists rain from droning belly names
lists and numbers if future voices and eyes
round from staring or pretence ask in lexis after

meme
keep all windows closed after
and open before hours
answer questions
for posterity flash light
missing
don't use up lamp oil
the bust has no nipples
enumerate
ghosts return in time

mem
suggestion of cup lies
your mouth for fruit
and water how fic
tive? Monogamy to
read the rings folded
under throat or tree
upturned scalp on earth
river for your flight
wisdom your wing burnt
unbound heels skin
pulls back under
stone cured osmosis
your offspring come
be you your stem cut into
my thumb without gulch
arrow or head rests
people and place leaves
rust come passion com


Five poems for mothers who speak no English

I really love you / believe me / It's something I inherited / from my mother
-Attila Jozsef in the love poem to himself

Poems not to be mailed

neruda

or the death or rape
of earth mother of corn
abandonment of all in raising
whispered fears for hair or color
that spell turning whisperer wind

manto

in beginning to escape neurosis
or insanity precipitated by or
fleeing this or here alone
from flames pure and enclosed
the vault feels cold after

borges

epiphany or all of Vico
resurrecting deities of fertile death
mixed syndromes of identity fuse
raining nightly black blood instead
infinitely making the temporal eternal

tagore

to heat turban tied oppression
from knowledge to freedom wailing
mystical rivers divert from song
love begets stick or stain
masks for patching holes endured

brecht

filial or heads rolling east
asphalt to dark wooded rock
places left hollow by ocean
oracle bringing ear to conch
eyes growing deep in sand




Post script

Pay no attention to the poems mother. You know how you said I am always
saying this or that or reading or writing too much.

What the postman might translate

I am thinking of you on the front steps, cleaning, always cleaning.
Ask the school master if he received the dictionaries I sent by airmail.
The children and I pray everyday and hope your knees are better.
This letter is short because you always say I write and talk too much.
And I am thinking of your eyes. Think nothing of the rumors mother.


Glossary for mothers who read no English

Death: Condition necessary for rebirth.

Eagle: Predatory bird. You know what it is. Like the buzzards flying west
with eyes or limbs torn from the dead. Clumsy too. They drop things all over
the mountains and fields.

High jacking: if you think nothing of it, it never happens to you.

Holy War: it is hard to say when this term was first used. Think nothing of
it.

Noble: like the French nobility before the revolution. People who tax the
landless.

Racial: Like communal.

Turban heads: Funny name for many people. These people have a real sense of
humor.

Uncle Sam: Like Donald duck.

Vico: He thought a little like a prophet or the school master.


Sashi or how moon could mean sun

We've never met but I am writing to you from having known your son. He was
very gifted. I know you know this or perhaps don't believe me or don't know
what to think of this letter. We walked together, he and I with many other
people, drunk and full of optimism. We talked. I was a hypocrite
for wearing leather while vegetarian. To rise fully, you must fall fully
first. I know that
now. I hope someone reads this to you. I know you thought long and hard
before you named him.


image off

image of
f
ear/
missing pages between
ribs of
ten disintegrating/
beak off
erring mammal/
mammy glands and
nectar well
preserved/
deep between the w
all
fest /erring/ oon/ ivity/
myd
og/ sentence/ see
i sure
peed my p
ants/ enis/
stroking feet my
aunt's envy/ a
sincere at
tempt a
t yielding the yoke the yoke.


the many uses of ash

to cleanse ANOINT as forensic evidence after evaporation as blood bone wood
to scatter and to keep swallow BRING UP consume note-- always use metal
detectors treasures and toxins flags and banners LURKING PHOTOS TURN AFTER
ANALYSIS objects of wrath note-- be sure to burn the heretic's books before
-- and power.


of f ear

She has a fierce bird for hair. It stares the dog or wolf bust in the eye.
Both the angry dog or wolf bust and the bird snarl. Although her nose,
breasts and feet seem impeccable, she has tusks for arms.The dog wolf or the
wolf dog may or may not have a lower body.

The canine bust may be a growth in the rectangular desk she rests her tusk
arms on.
She sits in a chair, her feet sticking out from under the desk in the manner
known to resemble office assistants, research staff, writerly people and
others confined to tables and chairs.
She wears tiny green shoes.

To her left, the desk wears a phallic appendage. The enormous ghost of a
tongue grows like a wave from the wood. The tongue has testicle like plump
feet sticking out underneath. Suspended, they dangle. Her feet, her wrists
and neck are narrow. On the wall off to the right, the absence of window is
felt by a mostly dull landscape painting. In the two shades of brown light
coming off the walls her body is luminous.


revisiting old rooms most days I copy
1
In half light demonic shapes spell absurd and ungainly turning green like
dainty shoes.
Or feet under the gleaming like a phantom tongue of a desired object grafted
in wood.
The lady of swan and tusk sits idle in the bloom of appendage. Knock on wood
for fears
exploding the sun blossom in the frame.
2
Little or no murky colorlessness marks ascent of unknowns in not uncommon
rooms
roam ladies of lust and grace. Bird woman and bust fornication committed
produce
fantasy for prosthetic or animal hands unfelt on flat surface supplies feed
the humongous
passions and dullness of the room.
3
Fear the love of the opposite tendency for brutal indulgence in fragments or
humorlessness of body poised met with remorseless threat. Having avoided the
instant the faceless head stand breast fruit tusk hand phallus submit or
whither snarls dog of wood body in anger. Avoid complexity crossed feet bird
neck swing away from impact of iron beak on flesh jaw rabid contemplation
waits outside the room unfascinate.

triptych

fire
sending away my eye, one in each direction
will save from fire or fire

stone
her fascination with the unfamiliar will
force burial on the burning sinking stone

wash
death by drowning in car
washing away the stain


sema

hair root blossom apple tree bosom beat
thou shalt not
celebrate
he who makes from clots of blood she un end tie down clusters
explode from fruits turning yellow for sun
keep my hands so i may swirl
body naked under habit
unlocking light under world dark left
behind turn from under tilted honey
leaning head into axis taking
with the right from heaven to give unto
after wind Ishmail or Isaac
indigo me phis to co bal tic ur an i
mal a pro phet a pros thetic lou
d able my sons law to will serv i tude suff ice
running between mountains and thirst
pebbles to feed Shaitan my dust
the other rises wingless between lush and lust
like fingers un equal held in prayer
the day transit between blocked spaces
what is lost
relentless shroud and hope only known to stone
for forgiveness never knowing if the arduous
climb will be mine between times beholding happens once
again or perhaps never
may i be
the whirling between deaths
arms and feet my head
stone turning in your light
mouth organs morph form motion from song
in fast inner ear
sealing the speaking in the bole speechlessly
igniting bead after string cast my shell the destined
center folding out
between exile and redemption or drops of water rites my passage the only sky
known to me from falling
outward heaven only rising like sour pomegranate upstream to tongue bitter
skin stolen
before its time from home or keeper keep me so i may
what is found in absence lids for your cups lashes one to a hundred weaving
in bright strands your fabric sea green motion of the sphere rolling my feet
your word my hands your name my mouth your
gifts abundant branches kissing earth


return me
so i may turn to you
sweet dew on blade or grass
wall less i walk







Ishmail is curious about these poems especially because they seem to have
single titles and seem to have a real scheme and intent. He says he lives in
the hope that someday all my work will find order and balance. He does not
think that any of this series is gimmicky. He doesn't? How is that?