Poet’s Note:
There are four poems of mine here. Three of these are new. Dolomedes Tenebrosus: Spontaneous Male Death is taken from my last work, Available Light: Collected Poems. There are a few allusions here that I have not bothered to explain unless absolutely necessary. The first poem, I Am Nearly Not Here, owes its title to Jeet Thayil, who removed the phrase from the last line of the first stanza, and tweaked it (it was originally, ‘I am nearly not there’), and put it up there, and it looks a little more like a good hanging. The poem is on Arthur Rimbaud and his life measured against his glory and shame, and his situation spoke for me. I was going through a crisis brought on by MeToo allegations (which I have denied; and which mass destruction of one life I have tried to fight back), which material, disguised, finds its way to my forthcoming novel, One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B.
All There, the last poem here, is on my English professor, Lalita Subbu, whom I loved after a fashion when I was an indifferent Masters student in English Literature, Hindu College, Delhi. The other two poems are self-explanatory.
(CP Surendran’s novel, One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B, is scheduled to be released soon)
I Am Nearly Not Here
‘I’m not concerned with that anymore.’
—Arthur Rimbaud
A memory of yesterday troubles a remembered prayer
Persistent like smoke from an eternally dying fire. Soul, soul,
Why do you persecute me? The Road to Damascus
Disperses lines in France’s sea of wines.
*
(Sometimes, the occult of the word brings to pass
A world that another word, spirits willing, will surpass.
At its heart the magic of the letters is black, a game
Of signs sidestepping time. A word conjuring up
A family farce with Verlaine, or another, is sodomy and shame.
Send enough seas spinning around the sun, it’s gay rights
And fame. The mob, good or bad, passing the sentence,
Is always the same: onward to London, Brussels, and back,
A bullet buried in the wrist of a writing hand,
The exile fleeing land after land.)
*
“Absurde, ridicule, dégoûtant.”
*
A writer of complaints to Isabell,
And dour, dark-mouthed Mom; sometimes a teacher;
Once almost a clown in a circus in Stockholm;
Then a soldier ditching the Dutch flag,
Walking across Java, island adrift among the stars,
Pushing at the frontiers of an accident, in a trance,
Returning empty like the sea to France.
(A little more writing which no one wants,
Ink expended on sands.)
To Cyprus, quarrying stone, inanimate, hard
Like a rake’s heart. Still, these things drown fast.
Always back to France; and then by ship,
Through evenings of straw, by a sea green
As leaves of the licorice, sailing away from
Cafes, fame, and cabals, lit cities shimmering,
Sliding, one beneath the other,
In receding waves.
Sober as a glass of absinthe undrunk.
Empty as the sea
Emptying on Aden’s shores,
Where the sands halt the anabases of undone kings:
Cratered faces, next to stranded trunkless legs,
Considering their works against the distance;
There the fire and smoke of day and night
Start and end without hope or grace.
To Harar by camel, across so much sand,
The bottom half of the universal hourglass.
Here they are, all those who ran out of their time
Incubating silence, the desert an exhalation
Of a dragon’s ire
And on the head, made to measure, the sun,
A crown of fire in a rim of thorns.
In the shadow of thorns. In the shade of the rose
In the silicates of silence, perpetual revelations.
Loathing of the self, the object of a killer’s desire
Or a lover’s, of excess and shame.
In a deep house, where cisterns fail and, down the steps,
Children wail in Amharic, emptying their bowels
Squatting on the earth (an obscene act of protest
in festive cities with scented talks on books
and solemn deliberations on art).
There is no joy,
No peace
Just an attempt to escape without a trace
From the disease of naming things
Into the indifferent glaze,
Wear the old face as a mask
Amidst a new race.
There is
No
Christ
In the desert, no salvation in the confessional space
But a trader’s satisfaction in the ordonnance
Of cartons and sacks,
Of foreign wares on foreign racks;
The arrangements
Of the one ache
In different shapes.
Cold anger at what camels
Broke on their backs,
An imagined remembrance
Of sanity
In stilling the clamoring word
With the yellow silence of sands,
Coffee, guns; or the birille,
Mouth-blown in the mould,
Glinting green and violet in the sun
For the coronation of strange kings.
The night is awake. The hyenas in the back
Next to the slaughterhouse giggle over bones.
Out in the desert, the black tents of thieves flap
In the wind blowing down from Harar’s hills.
The ghosts in residence fumble, separate with blue fingers
Dawn from dreams. A decade among the dunes.
What’s it if one sings or not?
Think of the songs that found no voice.
And still the desert confesses
Nothing.
Nothing is the confession.
*
And cancer, a hyena’s jaws tightening around the knee.
Retreat, in a litter, so much trash, to Zeila, for the sea
To bring up a steamer from its secret hold. In delirium,
Walk on water to Marseille and reach Zanzibar, to lose a leg
In the war in France. Wake up from opiates to find
He is no in more in Charleville, or elsewhere,
Though we must pay forever what he’s owed,
As if he’s nearly here, in barracks, bars, and brothels,
The balance of a trade, not in barter, but in gold.
Endling
— ‘and our little life rounded by a sleep’
George*, you carried your shell, just like all of us; a bag on your back
Growing ever fit for your fears, humped in the face of Rosy Wolves**,
As you oozed backward to your end from the edge
Of the Big Bang, one step at a time, the one foot the pillar on which
You laid your body, between two uncertain breaths, like a bridge
Of jelly, and circled the endless earth in your terrarium,
Darwin must wonder what was your crime.
The stars burn back into their holes in the sky.
The fire in their pits forged your mouth, anus, eye;
Threw in the complete set,
The penis and the vagina, turned you hermaphrodite without a clue;
And yet as the last night fell, you still looked without hope for a mate
Under each secret stone, inhaled the green of each blade of grass,
The warm bath of mucous, from which babies were born.
If you were your cousin, Aspersa, you might have been farmed;
Fasted with water, salted, cooked: escargot served to a merry gang,
From the cauldron of a fine kitchen’s hell. But not you. You were devoid,
Like most of us, of purpose. A hedonist bound in a hermit’s shell.
What’s a snail’s fury, asked Thom Gunn; it’s the little man at war
With the tyranny of his limitations and, beaten, crawling back to the sun.
.
*George was the lonesome snail, Achatinella apexfulva; he was the last of his species, and died in captivity on January 1, 2019, after 14 years. They couldn’t ever get him a mate.
**Rosy wolves: A carnivorous snail, introduced by humans to control insects; it ended eating up all of George’s tribe.
Dolomedes Tenebrosus: Spontaneous Male Death
That May, summoned by screams, we went fishing.
Walked on water, blue as our blood, clear as a bell.
And I saw how you shot the finest silk from hell,
Mummy-shroud, from under your chevron feet,
The moon, and all that cried out captive to your spell.
Sucked on a soup of flesh, poisoned to perfection.
Your eyes shone like tiny lights in the nuptial night.
The world’s webbed, and we’re wedded — to our fate.
I tap and probe, eight legs courting eight of death,
The ballet of sex on a bed of leaves. We know how
This will end, all for good. My pedipalps enter you,
And inside you, the bulbs of future burn and break.
Spent, I cleave and cling to your loin: infant, and father;
And never was I closer to the beats of your heart.
Wrap me up in silk, your toxins my drip till my last.
Consume me end to end, egged-bitch, matriarch, mate.
All There
(For Lalita)
The first of the season’s flies is here bearing summer on its back,
Flitting from face to face like a traveling wart. In Myanmar
They stumbled on a dinosaur in amber, 99-million-year-old, perfect, dead.
All winged things have a beak and fly, or try, but this one is just a skull
Flown far from the hull, and found a home in sap turned stone,
Free at last of the angels of Beelzebub. It took me that long,
If not more, in ordinary time, to arrive at this morning
To you, who in dismay-not, surely, the coffee-cup held intact
In a tree of cracks, the canteen chips sweating oil, cold?-
Shook your head when we first met over my lachrimae:
‘Put in the street, the underworld, stiffen your tears with guile.
The word is nothing if it hasn’t returned from Hades
After eyes have met and love turned and left.’
I see you wrapped for Delhi winter in a shawl, dusty-red as a Marxist flag
In a rainless chawl; your face square; speaking without a pause,
Like leaves of the banyan quoting wind,
On how a novel ends, before it barely begins, or how a little rhyme
Pickles a phrase; but nothing you read or taught served to preserve
Your ovaries from rot, which on a day of do-good crime,
They presented to you on a plate around breakfast time.
Life, like a ring down a finger soaped and starved, slipped
Through your grasp: the classes and the notes, the grass kissing shoes
For more abuse, the students chattering as if the world would not end.
They shaved your head, your eyes still bright, vast with terminus.
You wore a gown chin to shin, yet you were the most naked thing in town.
They jabbed a needle in your groin — ‘Intra-Venus* in phantom terrain’ —
Because they could not find a vein. ‘The aches keep me alive,
Give me a hug,’ you said, as the dark noon met you in passing,
and the windows wept.
Down the Yamuna, where the evening sky over tree-tops flow,
Your sister stood adrift, knee-deep in a cloud, and let your ashes go.
On the bank, the mourners homeward bent found the day was done;
And close to our faces, the flies circled in vain the far, amber sun.
*The title of feminist artist Hannah Wilke’s final series on the ravages of cancer treatment. She died of the disease.
The essay and the poems are part of our Poetry Special Issue (January 2021), curated by Shireen Quadri and Nawaid Anjum. © The Punch Magazine. No part of this essay or the new poems exclusively featured here should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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