Not quite Indian, not quite Manhattan
EXTRACT
| He's unafraid to rhyme, sometimes, and his lines are nicely weighted. It's noteworthy that there's not much "Indian" in his voice, and its absence makes his poems seem curiously placeless to an Indian reader "" yet there's a certain power in that. |
| DIVINATION IN THE PARK 1 Under the bursting dogwoods, et cetera, having just finished a pear for lunch, I lie over the earth, to feel it swim inside my posture, and sleep. |
| While full-bellied women pole home with small children, and black waves fling grappling hooks and grab by inches the torn-off, uplifted rocks |
| stranded offshore like apple trees in the fog. |
| 2 The upper parts of the earth are slowly thawing. Less than slowly, the groundwater rises in the crevices and exposed places, five strata down where the fossils are. |
| The winter was mild. In the bulbs and empty hives spring rubs the velvet from its new brace of horn, and around the drowning rocks the feral light of equinox sheds a pattern on the ocean. |
| 3 To think that before today, of all the days, I was less than a snake sunning on a rock, but that now I'm the lord of the serpents in the temple, |
| worshipped and adorned in my eloquent lengths. So what if I fail the test of time? I cling to the earth as it banks and glides. Miners enter my abandoned skin |
| with strings of lights and diagrams. Gods on couches ring the horizon. |
| MY ESMERALDA Some people like each other and are therefore like each other, but I like you and therefore I'm so original a burden on my time that all the lifeguards ring their bells when I rise from my exclusive underneath to wash in your England of seaside hotels, |
| climb my perch and send off, over the panorama of what's most yours "" those glowing herds of prehistoric bison, sunk in clear light up to the eyes, browsing elsewhere extinct sky-high ferns "" my messenger birds, speckled and superfine, to soar the asymptotic line that touches you at infinity. Big Mama! |
| Not once in any of the meretricious annals I'm forced to read have I read of you, nor through the maps I have to make sense of have I ever watched you pass. Among words, you're the meaning of 'glass,' and you as a river will cut your own channels. |
| ALIEN NATION I think I'm around the wrong people today. Though I know their cousins (who say I'm nice), veiling their faces they tiptoe away "" some impassive, some afraid, and others grumbling that they'd sooner fillet me than talk to me twice. And look! In the wind that blows where it lists, their gun ports blazing wide open, sail phrenic experts and therapists, miracle workers, psyche massagers, waving their hand-sewn Jolly Rogers. All merciful, unthinking (but compassionate) One, |
| what on earth, exactly, provoked You to melt the blanket of snow that pacified the scrofulations of this blistering veldt with a cold as keen and sweet to the tongue as the coconut's meat and made it strange enough to walk inside? |
| IMMEDIATE CITY Tall and plural and parallel, their buff, excited skins of glass pressed to glass and steel bronzed by the falling sun, the city's figmentary buildings dream that they are one with the One. Ignoring the office workers trapped inside their neural nets, they orient their ecstasy up past the circling jumbo jets. Older than the rocks is she |
| across whom their shadows float. A million rivers navigate the necklace at her throat. The light that falls and falls shatters in her million prisms. In one of her million cubicles, a man tunes his inner mechanisms, types an endless memorandum. Time moves slowly, then not at all. A boy and two girls are trading secrets down the hall. |
| The Disappearances |
| Author: Vijay Seshadri Publisher: Harper Collins Pages: 151 Price: Rs 295 |