Not quite Indian, not quite Manhattan

EXTRACT

Born in Bangalore in 1954, brought up in the American Midwest, lived around the USA and now settled in Brooklyn and teaching in New York, Vijay Seshadri is a well-published Indian-American poet and essayist. In this collection of poems (and one essay), he touches upon a broad array of subjects across the emotional range, including various aspects of the urban experience.

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