Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










ORIGINS: A SELECTION by Jeet Thayil

The mindful killings, that which was then, this which is now, the self-murderers, the dogs of instruction, the teachers, the torturers, the ennui sold as spirit food, the cyclic insurrection of the will, the red leaf sap of tomorrow, the old toads of fervor and patriotism, the renegade eels, the death’s head moths, the spastic drool of words, the succubus in the shape of a child bride, the infant’s wild goat cries, the mother’s curse, the broken sea shanties, the one-celled spasm, the premonitions of the crow, the immortal armored cockroach, the unrenewable planet Teegeeack, the northern haar’s thin tempests, the blood nozzle, the sleep abortions worse than waking, the artery spout sold as art, the multiple hunter’s moons, the tree virgins’ song of succor, the angular nymphs of paradise, the rapist in the family, the illegal migrant youth, the tubercular smell of poverty, the hymen smears on hemp, the midnight screes, the unilluminati, the ti guinin, the gris gris, the coco konkon, the serried enemy encampments, the precipitous inducements, the staged ferocities, the prayerful lords of mayhem, the fleet angels of misrule, the black arts or kala kalaa, Theos the rainmaker, the sick ships trailed by phosphorescence, the white plague rats, the frozen, the furious, the plundered, the numb, the suicide’s retched tongue, the shamed archer’s lost thumbs, the sea’s sucked bile, the slop buckets of fortune, the reptile skull, the feast liver, the starhead nails embedded in his breastbone, the entrail filth of mortal birth, the malaria kiss upon waking, the spouse who waits, the wine dark, the decking fitted to ribs, the long gunwales of longing, the interlocked joints, the black ship’s blue prow, the white sails, the halyards, the braces, the sheets, the white-armed woman, the leather sacks of barley, the mill-crushed grain, the water skins, the mixing bowls of true wine, the Wain Harrow, the Bear always to his left, the eye holes shaped like ears, the craven foetus underfoot, the bliss sale, the adulterated habit-forming poisons, the absent cave fathers, the prideful lobotomists, the no gnomes, the trickster, the raven, the white-faced bear, the rattlesnake husband, the coyote dances, the first woman’s twinned twins, the hummingbird’s fearful trembling, the hero diguised as demon, the demon disguised as angel, the angel disguised as human, the dumb instruments of no change, the catastrophes, the misfortunes, the false feasts, the friends felled in battle, the unending books of the dead, the libations to the dead, the mist-wrapped rivers of ocean, the sixth of seven oceans, the sea of milk, the second son tied to a stake, the sons exchanged for cows, the three-headed son whose middle head sips liquor, the temptation disguised as birdsong, the creator for whom no temple is built, the god disguised as nymph boar man-lion dwarf, the thousand years of prayer and penance, the air for food, the standing on one leg, the cunning supplicant, the vengeful sage, the outcaste curse, the horse sacrifice, the horse stratagem, the fever born of the great god’s anger, the vow, the silence, the boon, the desert loo, the ticking heart of empires, the stumble fugues, the eaters of paper, the insect brain in wait, the nocturnal machinery of dismay, the committed whoredoms, the whoring after the heathen, the bruised breasts of virginity, the multiplied fornications, the broken wedlock, the shed blood in fury of jealousy, the prophets of vanity who see nothing, the lying divinations, the filled cup of astonishment and desolation, the old hatreds, the furious rebukes, the warm rivers of blood, the frogs, the pestilence, the lice, the flies, the festering skin eruptions, the rain of hail, the locusts, the darkness that can be touched, the deaths of the firstborn, the bloody cities, the untempered mortar daub, the abominations of the fathers, the high tree brought down, the low tree exalted, the green tree dried up, the dry tree made to flourish, the abundance as long as the moon endures, the darling delivered from the power of the dog, the old men full of days, the remembrance of things to come, the aleph, the beth, the gimel, the divided tongue that walks in the world, the fool clothed with skin and flesh, the fool fenced with bone and sinew, the scent of water, the genealogy that is not to be reckoned, the sacrificial bull, the ram, the heifer, the calf, the thigh bones wrapped in fat, the forty days and forty nights, the flood, the ark of the horned fish, the dismantling of venerable archetypes, the bulbous protuberance, the carven substitute, the atrocities disguised as reason, the lost hallucinate prophecies of a race, all that is ruthless, solitary and indistinguishable from insanity.