First Day, Second Show: the Aranmanai series |

First Day, Second Show: the Aranmanai series

In the first frame, the ghost is always long-haired, femme,
crawling, trellis-like, upon a beam from the ceiling

or wall, or the swift-cooling gulmohar in the verandah,
a sleight of angle, a finessing of limbs, a latticing

of vein and waxen flesh, an offering to our sensibilities,
not an affront. My womb, my woe, she is spelling

in ash and vermillion, in background score and lilting
violas, in the frenzied grabbing of a collar or the flick

of the wrist at some emasculated comedic figure. The hero,
the husband, the locus, the curved arm of his machete lurid with

the memory of warm blood, is convinced of this: in this
world, the child is a deviation from the congealment of

passion–the way it coils around the formerly virginal
form of the wife, now ghost, the way it imbues her

with the uberty of a demi-goddess. Give it back,
the ghost says to him, as he carves into the wraith

of a cleaving desperation. He will not spare it, he
has decided, and he will beget heir after heir,

until the goddess manifests, ready to follow, ready
to concede, as he thunders: this is not my seed,

but these are my fields. Who will rescue the yield,
who will find the talismans plastered across

the makeshift tomb of the (now former) wife,
not merely scorned, but blooming, avenging

the curl of a palm, the rooting of toothless gums,
the trimming of the daughter, my crop.