Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher

To force the pace and never to be still

Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.
The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering -
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.

The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.

To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart's dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.
The Freaks by Kamala Das
He talks, turning a sun-stained
Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark
Cavern, where stalactites of
Uneven teeth gleam, his right
Hand on my knee, while our minds
Are willed to race towards love;
But, they only wander, tripping
Idly over puddles of
Desire. .... .Can this man with
Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin's lazy hungers? Who can
Help us who have lived so long
And have failed in love? The heart,
An empty cistern, waiting
Through long hours, fills itself
With coiling snakes of silence. .....
I am a freak. It's only
To save my face, I flaunt, at
Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.
An Introduction by Kamala Das

I don't know politics but I know the names

Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don't write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don't
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre. I was child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother's trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don't sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. Don't play pretending games.
Don't play at schizophrenia or be a
Nympho. Don't cry embarrassingly loud when
Jilted in love … I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans' tireless
Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,
The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,
Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I
In this world, he is tightly packed like the
Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.
Obituary By A K Ramanujan

Father, when he passed on,

left dust
on a table of papers,
left debts and daughters,
a bedwetting grandson
named by the toss
of a coin after him,

a house that leaned

slowly through our growing
years on a bent coconut
tree in the yard.
Being the burning type,
he burned properly
at the cremation

as before, easily
and at both ends,
left his eye coins
in the ashes that didn't
look one bit different,
several spinal discs, rough,
some burned to coal, for sons

to pick gingerly
and throw as the priest
said, facing east
where three rivers met
near the railway station;
no longstanding headstone
with his full name and two dates

to holdin their parentheses

everything he didn't quite
manage to do himself,
like his caesarian birth
in a brahmin ghetto
and his death by heart-
failure in the fruit market.

But someone told me

he got two lines
in an inside column
of a Madras newspaper
sold by the kilo
exactly four weeks later
to streethawkers

who sell it in turn

to the small groceries
where I buy salt,
coriander,
and jaggery
in newspaper cones
that I usually read

for fun, and lately

in the hope of finding
these obituary lines.
And he left us
a changed mother
and more than
one annual ritual.
Anxiety by A.K. Ramanujan
Not branchless as the fear tree,
it has naked roots and secret twigs.
Not geometric as the parabolas
of hope, it has loose ends
with a knot at the top
that’s me.

Not wakeful in its white-snake

glassy ways like the eloping gaiety of waters,
it drowses, viscous and fibered as pitch.

Flames have only lungs. Water is all eyes.

The earth has bone for muscle. And the air
is a flock of invisible pigeons.

But anxiety
can find no metaphor to end it.
Chicago Zen by A.K. Ramanujan

Now tidy your house,

dust especially your living room
and do not forget to name
all your children.

II

Watch your step. Sight may strike you

blind in unexpected places.

The traffic light turns orange

on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble,

you fall into a vision of forest fires,

enter a frothing Himalayan river,

rapid, silent.

On the 14th floor,

Lake Michigan crawls and crawls

in the window. Your thumbnail

cracks a lobster louse on the windowpane

from your daughter's hair

and you drown, eyes open,

towards the Indies, the antipodes.

And you, always so perfectly sane.

III

Now you know what you always knew:

the country cannot be reached

by jet. Nor by boat on jungle river,

hashish behind the Monkey-temple,

nor moonshot to the cratered Sea

of Tranquillity, slim circus girls

on a tightrope between tree and tree

with white parasols, or the one

and only blue guitar.

Nor by any
other means of transport,

migrating with a clean valid passport,

no, not even by transmigrating

without any passport at all,

but only by answering ordinary

black telephones, questions

walls and small children ask,

and answering all calls of nature.

IV

Watch your step, watch it, I say,

especially at the first high
threshold,

and the sudden low

one near the end
of the flight
of stairs,

and watch
for the last
step that's never there.
Dawn At Puri by Jayanta Mahapatra

Endless crow noises

A skull in the holy sands
tilts its empty country towards hunger.

White-clad widowed Women

past the centers of their lives
are waiting to enter the Great Temple

Their austere eyes

stare like those caught in a net
hanging by the dawn's shining strands of faith.

The fail early light catches

ruined, leprous shells leaning against one another,
a mass of crouched faces without names,

and suddenly breaks out of my hide

into the smoky blaze of a sullen solitary pyre
that fills my aging mother:

her last wish to be cremated here

twisting uncertainly like light
on the shifting sands
The Abandoned British Cemetery at
Balasore, India by Jayanta Mahapatra

This is history.
I would not disturb it: the ruins of stone and marble,
the crumbling wall of brick, the coma of alienated decay.
How exactly should the archaic dead make me behave?

A hundred and fifty years ago

I might have lived. Now nothing offends my ways.
A quietness of bramble and grass holds me to a weed.
Will it matter if I know who the victims were, who survived?

And yet, awed by the forgotten dead,

I walk around them: thirty-nine graves, their legends floating
in a twilight of baleful littoral,
the flaking history my intrusion does not animate.

Awkward in the silence, a scrawny lizard

watches the drama with its shrewd hooded gaze.
And a scorpion, its sting drooping,
two eerie arms spread upon the marble, over an alien name.

In the circle the epitaphs run: Florence R--, darling wife

of Captain R-- R--, aged nineteen, of cholera . . . .
Helen, beloved daughter of Mr and Mrs J. S. White, of cholera,
aged seventeen, in the year of our Lord, eighteen hundred . . . .

Of what concern to me is some vanished Empire?

Or the conquest of my ancestors’ timeless ennui?
It is the dying young who have the power to show
what the heart will hide, the grass shows no more.

Who watches now in the dark near the dead wall?

The tribe of grass in the cracks of my eyes?
It is the cholera still, death’s sickly trickle,
that plagues the sleepy shacks beyond this hump of earth,

moving easily, swiftly, with quiet power

through both past and present, the growing young,
into the final bone, wearying all truth with ruin.
This is the iron

rusting in the vanquished country, the blood’s unease,

the useless rain upon my unfamiliar window;
the tired triumphant smile left behind by the dead
on a discarded anchor half-sunk in mud beside the graves:

out there on the earth’s unwavering gravity

where it waits like a deity perhaps
for the elaborate ceremonial of a coming generation
to keep history awake, stifle the survivor’s issuing cry.