LEARNING TO DROWN (2005 REMIX)
(to
Jan Wojcik)
His older
sister let my father sneak out of the house
so he
learned to swim in the Kaveri, splashing wild, staying afloat:
Imagine the strokes into survival, he teaches his son unwittingly,
not
technique, but an instinct for what more there is to water than physics:
The stone they used to build the square is
water,
which is water before the stone. Standing after land
had already
spoken this way to telegraphic water,
I heard his voice. The ice cracked into a hand-drawn map
of the
first, the final continent. A fissure,
which is genealogy,
and this
was no different that night on the banks of the Racquette nearly
unknown to
man, footnote to the St. Lawrence, fugue
of
forgotten America— but writ was my name and the names of
others who
had dropped; writ was the name Racquette,
a truce
between tongues after slaughter.
Beneath
the bridge bending to join the shores,
taking a
looming, unpossessed church for totem,
I begged
my promise, offered myself in heavy boots
and for a
moment misunderstood gravity. I made a
drama,
doubled as
witness and mistress. I kindly stopped
for time
because by
then he could not stop for me;
and with
the darkly dreaming town colluding
I iced my
post-adolescent angst in a heartbeat.
A simple
plunge will plummet you through the black sky.
Once,
Pamela’s palm kept me floating:
in the moment before of
the moment after
crystallised
in between, Florentine, who
can’t swim
stands and
watches. And the
houses
and the
bars and Mary and Jimmy’s
remorse
and
Scooby’s and Thatha’s commingling,
and the
twenty-year old who wrote this,
and the
thirty-two years he revised,
and Jan
whose book The River Why made him
live it,
and the
fifteen-year old who told himself the tale,
and of the
now in which it is alien,
in the now
which was the moment of,
what can
be said, except that the universe stayed mostly empty
despite
the lively plots we farmed. And this
another
fraction of that irrelevance,
made
homely by microscopy.
It was
night, but no one heard me.
I’m gonna
be fished out and slid ashore by three large amphibian policemen
into an
ambulance of quite-serious nurses. To
them
I’ll say I
love you I love you and mean it
and though
behind the Lynchian curtains of that charming town
gruesomer
tales did exist, for a week I was
the prince
of Botswana
who’d not
known ice. The river, perpetual,
drawled ferocious
through
property. Dogs barked. I’d bloated my feet
in these
damp very woods. My future flashed past
me
not my
past.
“What
happened here?” they asked.
“Looking
for bodies,” joked Hugh.
(The
camera on the graphic of the rescue van;
later, the
bearded radio man.) My newly-fashioned
self
reproduced
so—in mouths intent on parable
or in
short-lived digital slivers,
in the
cops who saved my life
or the
frat boys who saved my life by calling them,
in my
help-cries that echo and expand
to burst
against the clapboard facades,
in my legs
and torso drawn
into the
maw below
the
dissembling ice floes, air viscous
as water,
the senses slowed and cancelled,
the image
persisting, ravelled
in the
moment after the half-conscious photo-still,
in a
swarming space, dispossessed of objects.
[The earlier versions of this
poem first appeared in Graham House Review 17 in 1993 and in Reasons For Belonging (Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2002); this version in Fulcrum 4 in 2005.]
Hear It:
abrupt tear in the afternoon, CNN serving biscuits
in famished living rooms. The bullet was not heard here—
only your undead voice. Rises, catches, bush fire
in the jointed bone-stem, in the cerebellum.
Megaphone hour. He feels the sun its sting
and his arm it needs that motion familiar,
hand holding brick, hand letting go:
this is the tenses chasing each other,
these are the bodies they left behind.
You sit
in the boat while Wordsworth rows in the sea of the skies;
the republicans have brought revolution to the heavens!
The world imagined, someone said, the ultimate good.
Down here your absence wanders restless, things ricochet
too rapidly, the grieving townships spiral
into the gold-heart with the force of collapsing moons.
Chris: the night comes to dissolve the dialectic,
the morning sings of broken
storefront glass.
[An earlier version of this poem appeared in New Quest
134, April 1999.]
FERNANDO PESSOA IN DURBAN
(to Derek Walcott)
Picture
yourself, child, garred
in a coign
of the newborn city:
father and
infant brother dead though life,
that other
half of nothing,
spills out
the same from the hill
into the
harbour. You take your spyglass to the
sea,
late in
the afternoon when the big hulls loom
against
the pier. You watch the ladies
overdressed
on the
embankment or the sailors
tumbling
from steamers into bars.
There is a
tunnel below
where the
cargo trains go. Could it be
you found
on foot
without
the tram for gratitude
west on
West towards Victoria where
in the
salt stupor of the market a veiny hand
patted a
fat amethyst eyeball in your palm?
In the
freshly planted suburbs, the smoke of wet dirt in gardens:
“Those who
do not belong here wear a uniform—
consider
this when sleep falls on you.”
*
The man
who sleeps in your mother’s bed
drinks tea
with the British ambassador so
the house
is kosmos enough. In one room a calliope
like an
engine plays; in another, a stone horse smooth enough
to ride or
a carved wooden mask with a nose-hole
stinging
skin. There’s a monocle
and a
pipe, a flyer for Ruth St. Denis, there’s a feathery moth’s wing
and part
of a chewed-up but bright pink Europe.
(You tick
in sticky names the pages of your enemies—
Plato,
Ptolemy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Conan Doyle
and the
schoolboys who scrape you on the ground until your knees go red.
You see a
girl playing in the street and feel pity.)
*
“The poet,
a fake, lacks conviction:
he’s stuck
with both absence and substance.
These are
the laws of things,
this is
the index finger, pointing.”
Camoens
who sailed in search of Portugal,
Magellan
who wrote his name in the sky elliptical—
that was
the country dreamed by pilgrims
whose
tears flowed into óur sea—
it was
ways to make every estranged brook feel special,
to hawk
deeds of Europe to Asia and vice versa.
The
cannonade drools and sputters to a stop,
the ship
pulls away from the cliff and wheels
toward a
new mass.
The
vespertine light drains by degrees
into the
night-time as if through bright
perforations
of stars. The lamps of the ports
dim in economic
sequence.
On the tip
of the land’s triangle
where you
killed the Khoikhoi for their cattle,
the Dutch
are bastards
and those
Brits to whom you owe,
those
bureaucrats and beautiful engineers,
are very
polite but rather shy.
They
slaughter hearts too, scientifically.
But song
remained at close of day. Song took
root
in the
decaying estate: song in the house of faith,
alone in
the end, after the machines,
after the
former masters,
after the
fields, recaptured by trees,
and the
pedigreed dogs abandoned.
*
Helpless,
the love of precision for territory.
Helpless,
your green discoloured bust
on an
island among commuters, on the corner
of
Commercial and Soldier’s Way.
You are
ever a stranger from Tongaat to Isipingo though
the
beaches have been seized and the cuter cottages
turned
away from loamy burial ground
to face a
reopened sea.
But we
carry Bambatha’s name
in our
mouths and inherit your teeth;
the
highway gutter-drawls into stacked flats
or tin
doors, curling dirt roads, satellite towns
on
satellite maps, and the moon is still red
and the
ancestors reach down like willows.
You among
them know well:
smoking
your cigarette, to spite the gods,
writing,
“They must eat my little boy or die,”
as another way of saying, “Let every tongue be foreign.”
[2004]
THE SOLDIER
The man at the South African border took heavy steps towards us to inspect the back seat where I, surrounded by food, sat. Not looking for drugs or ANC, but an empty seat. “Going to Petersburg? Someone needs a ride.” Playing gently with the pen in his pocket, the tip of his rifle protruding from his shoulder blades. The last one hundred miles to the border had been dirt road: the car skidded from side to side, the tires popped on stones, a puffy retinue of dust followed us. “Certainly, we will give him a ride.” (My father, in his ingratiating way.) The man smiling. “Wait, one second, I will get him.” And bombs in planes above unmarked Lusaka.
The soldier was a tall teenage boy, as scared of my mother, it seemed, as she was of him. AmaNdiya! His boots were too big, his uniform too small. We drove into dusk. The flat plains of the Transvaal bloomed— surrounded now by trees—evenly but closely-spaced trees—their green heads coiling the dark—trees that the government had raised, so it was said, where nothing had stood before. But on a landscape drawn by feet, no terra nova.
My father fixed his mind on the steering; my mother completed crosswords. The soldier sat still next to me, his arms clasping his knees. He refused the sandwiches and juice that my mother, speaking Tamil, instructed me to offer him. In Petersburg, he got out, flashed a timid thank-you grin, and turned into the traffic: the criss-crossing light, his legs jerky, awkward, his hand absent-mindedly on his revolver. Still who to say where they fell, unsung inamorata?
[1991; 2005]
THE DUMP
(to Shuddhabrata Sengupta)
1.
The dump is the very sprawl it once preceded,
distilling our dreams to grit. Mouth at every door,
abandoned to kitchens, it trailed the radial roads
and signed the city’s nascent borders with its seed.
2.
Half animal, half machine, half sapient, the dump
is death’s drowsy interlocutor:
sticky newsprint, smeared fat, pitch smoke, carburettors,
potash alum, fruit husks: submerged in the incessant
fill, they eat the earth and are mourned.
3.
Your cheap locket, semblable,
lost at the carnival, adorns another’s neck,
that of an iron bar. Crows scuff
your skin flakes, make strings there of your elastic
flesh, a patient work. No first hello, no one sign off:
the dump will crush your angel on a pin.
[2004]
THE CITY
(to Rosanna Warren)
The city was the facsimile that man built
in order for a somewhere to suffer inside.
Its alleyways snarl to help us hide:
it is a geometry that can eat and wilt
and eat, as we do¾in the rooftop restaurants
with ice clinking in each shivering yellow
glass¾
the podgy meal of ourselves, tonight, at last,
almost. O laughter is the coin this unease grants,
near drear, when cars knead their beat and pretty boys
and girls emerge shining in rayons or nylons,
Nikes or boots, and sodium makes springtime
of one a.m. By the sour-milk death-smell, they pair.
A woman puts her hand on my shoulder from behind:
I wonder if I should turn to greet her.
[2003]
WIND
(to Anand Thakore)
When the plains ask, as they often do, when the last reservoir of heat weighs out and the chill front cuts flat through, the name of the trick we’ve played is: wind.
These lines, cracked furrows. What they aspire to is a contract with pressure, a dividend of rain.
They must outlast this landscape, its thorn-hard shrubs.
If there are others on this page with us, they are marked by a tapering mound of thatch, or the yellow shrapnel of a shrine.
Wind, the presiding deity, offers a benediction, a curse, a backdrop of sound; its distant howl plays against a rock-flute: ash, paper, hair strand.
With these instruments they have improvised empires.
Morning mist diffuses, then gathers again. Confers a soapy light on blank land.
Wind is the hint of what could happen.
[A slightly different version
of this poem appeared in Reasons
For Belonging; Delhi: Viking Penguin,
2002.]
SHIREEZA
Long before she was murdered in her home,
she told me a true story. There was a boy,
ten years old—perhaps—
alone among older boys;
a group in their late teens
or early twenties, of which
she was part. They were in a park
and the big boys began
to torment the little one,
as boys of that age
sometimes do: “Had he been
with girls?” “Could he
get it up yet?” “Why not?”
They went off to get some beers
and she was left with him
on a bench. She asked him,
“Are you angry?”
“Yes.”
“You’re shy, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Tell me,” she said, “Do you know
how to kiss?” Then:
“Do you want me to teach you,
the proper way?”
“Yes.”
She showed him. It was that simple.
“Kisses the way I like them,”
she said to me,
“Hollywood kisses. Not a lot
of writhing tongue or open-close
pumping motion, but soft,
a kind of slow and shared breathing.”
When she told me this
I had to wish
I could be that boy
ten again, that close
to the smell of her,
her small breasts
and thin, boyish frame.
[2001]
JOHN CAGE CONCERT
(to Adil Jussawalla)
(Ah, and the deepest of them
are shallow, fixed
in wallowing mud—
and never again the grace of silence
uninterrupted by applause—
but the ghouls called
in spite of our selves there, the dogged call
of tin on hot asbestos siding.)
[2004]
ODDESSA, TEXAS
One summer, I was hitching through upstate New York
and found myself, on the way to Ithaca, outside a roadside bar
on the edge of an unknown town. I'd been waiting there
for half the day. Now it was dusk, the mosquito hour,
and no one was stopping-- unsure, maybe, of whether
I was a murderer or not. The bar's neon tubes
came on, and I wondered, would I end up spending the night
outdoors again, with a cop's flashlight at 3 a.m.?
A car stopped. It was a nice middle-class car,
a Honda or a Nissan, and in the driver's seat was a fat-faced man
with glasses and a moustache. He was grinning. I put my pack
in the back seat, part of which was full of some odd
contraption. I got into the front, and we were off.
"Whew," he said, "I'm bushed. Just got done
with a good few hours of my weekly tennis." I nodded
in lieu of an answer. Then: "Where're you from…", etc.
"I used to be a bit crazy in my younger days, " he said,
"sort of like you. Lived around, moved all over, worked
different jobs. Some crazy places. Like Oddessa, Texas.
Ever heard of Oddessa, Texas? Digging for oil. Back then
it was amazing money. But dangerous, very dangerous. I mean,
it was nothing for a guy to go off to work in the morning, come back
in the evening missing an arm or a leg or part of a limb."
“Really?” “Really.”
He was talking, and I was getting drowsy
from all those fast and sharp curves he was taking.
I wondered why it was that people told unpleasant stories
driving through the postcard woods in their nice cars, back
from tennis at the club. I wondered why he was telling me
the story at all, out of nowhere, what his designs were,
what he wanted. I wanted to look at the trees:
through the side windows, the trees were dark striations;
in front, white smoke in white light.
"Oddessa, Texas." The name sounded invented.
He was still talking when we were into Ithaca, but I
had lost the thread. He took me to the cheapest motel.
I asked him, "Wanna come in for a minute?"
"Uh, no, do you mind if I don't? I have to get back
and, you know, the wheelchair¾
it's just such a pain to get it out." Puzzled, I looked
into the car again: the form of his thighs dissolved,
imperceptibly, dark below the steering.
[A slightly different version
of this poem appeared in Reasons
For Belonging; Delhi: Viking Penguin,
2002.]