}} INFERNO by Vivek Narayanan |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










INFERNO by Vivek Narayanan

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.

 

 

← Vivek Narayanan