Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
1. Paradiso
Like Yudhishtra and his dog for paradise
first dragged through a hell where enemies
had been given time to rejoice
in their misdeeds or Dante gone to where Beatrice frees
him only after the descending circles
had penetrated earth’s core and the breeze
of a limbo that combed and made continual ripples
in the emanations of beating heart,
sequence is the key to heaven’s scruples:
sequence is what I’ve taken apart
to know the movement of these bodies
with the indifference of their own light in the dark.
That which occurs here tarries
elsewhere, and that which does not occur occurs
nowhere else. Threw myself in flurries
to search for “eternal calm”. Bore the worst
indignities. Faith is that thing born from hope and
the fiercest, cruelest imagination. There in the pursed
light, evolving, nucleosynthetic, had an opened
start so complete every single star
was a name. Token
of gratitude, the rush, the far-
-thest sheen of names, and the name of the holy river
too, in celestial run. Avatar
of the historical arts, of grammar
and of the observant husbanded sciences
with the perfection of a poem but not its fatal tremor.
Then the end of all thought was also the coming of alliances
and the arrogant day-maker was no longer the sun,
the night’s shepherd no longer the moon in all its glances.
Touch was the limit of theory, and theory and touch were one.
2. Purgatorio
With the pagan poets you’ll find me, where else
but in a purgatory dawned at the Ganga with Libra
on the rise. So scour, if you like, the face for the tells
of eternal lassitude: the turning tetrahedrons
in the eyes—a pair of upright faces to absorb the black,
a third face to spit fire back at the sun, and another the zebra
patterns of dreamed-in sleep—and the nose aquiline, intact
but humped, fit for villains or emperors or exiles, the lips with
a creeping silver camouflage of hair, and on the sack
of the jowl as well, a walk to the end. No one skips that—
and moreover the terrain is always uneven—
as when the Pandavas crossed a massive peak
a vaster desert eclipsed it,
when, further, on leveled terraces in tacit agreement
with the ascent of the cloud-gathering slope
each, one by one, dropped, prey to their vanities.
Thus Bhima’s bereavement
that fell first on Draupadi, she, great dark-skinned Hope
as living ember, who had done no wrong save her partiality
to one among them; then Nakula and Sahadeva, after they’d groped
to the climb’s next level, simply
in result of the childlike pride they’d held in
their wisdom and in the beauty of their souls;
then cruelly, consecutively,
Arjuna, for his pride in having been a hero of the epic;
then spelled in
the last letter of the slope, Bhima himself, perplexed,
picture of goodness and loyalty, feared paladin,
only because he’d loved to eat. Then only vexed
Yudhishthra and the stray dog who’d followed him,
that hapless being
who was not renounced even by the one who’d
renounced all, indexed
in the final pages of the land. Hearing and seeing
would come to join at that margin, but before that there was
more than time enough
for a world to take full stock of its own engineering,
for the pause to appear in notation, the smoothness be found in the rough.
3. Inferno
Every king, son, must once behold hell
not just as that other place where hair was moss
and the muddy ground yielded constantly to the swell
of arms and grasping fingers, where the ice when crossed
revealed its panorama of tear-trapped faces,
but all those zones on Earth now lost
to our tender feeling, all those traces
we’re immune to or immured from
wherever, whoever power shall suffocate in its embraces.
Ask of these precious remains where they’ve been procured from:
any underworld’s secret is the one it mirrors
without the benefit of indifference. And the fury of the forum
showed in lava split, the sedimented layers
betraying the hurt of the past:
how in each era persisted the policeman’s terrors,
known only to the poor and the outcast,
how on fancy tables each night we ate the unfortunate ones,
teeth clenched on the skull-bone, how that much and more held fast
to an amnesiac, circling guilt—over the corrugated dunned
roofs of the shanties when the plane approached
the airport, or in the current of an importunate stump
of limb to your skin, poached
at a light; or simply turned away from us, as we are almost
turned away from them, scotched
under bridges or flyovers or in the bushes or even along a coast,
near the tideline, turning, turning in an endless tableau of sleep.
And if time must cook every creature in its own special roast,
if time will only pour its bodies as libations into the heaped
fire of battle, exhaustion is but the innocence of the dog that follows you,
exhaustion a simple token exchanged when you can no longer bear to weep
for all that you haven’t done, and all that you have, before it swallows you.
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