Jeet Thayil

I'm back where my life and I parted ways.
I'm talking to the coffeemaker, to the face
towels folded by the sink, to the air
...

Listen! Someone's saying a prayer in Malayalam.
He says there's no word for ‘despair' in Malayalam.

Sometimes at daybreak you sing a Gujarati garba.
At night you open your hair in Malayalam.

To understand symmetry, understand Kerala.
The longest palindrome is there, in Malayalam.

When you've been too long in the rooms of English,
Open your windows to the fresh air of Malayalam.

Visitors are welcome in The School of Lost Tongues.
Someone's endowed a high chair in Malayalam.

I greet you my ancestors, O scholars and linguists.
My father who recites Baudelaire in Malayalam.

Jeet, such drama with the scraps you know.
Write a couplet, if you dare, in Malayalam.
...

I was born in the Christian South
of a subcontinent mad for religion.
Warriors and zealots tried to rule it.
A minor disciple carried his doubt
like a torch to temple and shrine.
I longed for vision and couldn't tell it.

The cities I grew up in were landlocked.
One, a capital, buff with architecture,
the other lost for months in monsoon.
One was old, one poor; both were hot.
The heat vaporized thought and order,
drained the will, obliterated reason.

I settled, 20 and morose, in a town
built by a patricidal emperor
whose fratricidal son imprisoned him,
for eight years, with a view of the tomb
he built for his wife, to remember her.
I was over conscious of my rhyme,

and of the houses, three, inside my head.
In the streets, death, in saffron or green,
rode a cycle rickshaw slung
with megaphones. On the kitchen step
a chili plant grew dusty in the wind.
In that climate nothing survived the sun

or a pickaxe, not even a stone dome
that withstood 400 years of voices
raised in prayer or argument. The train
pulled in each day at an empty platform
where a tea stall that served passers-
by became a famous fire shrine.

I made a change: I traveled west
in time to see a century end
and begin. I don't recall the summer
of 2001. Did it exist?
There would have been sun and rain.
I was there, I don't remember

a time before autumn of that year.
Now 45, my hair gone sparse,
I'm a poet of small buildings:
the brownstone, the townhouse, the cold water
walkup, the tenement of two or three floors.
I cherish the short ones still standing.

I recognize each cornice and sill,
the sky's familiar cast, the window
I spend my day walking to and from,
as if I were a baffled Moghul in his cell.
I call the days by their Hindu
names and myself by my Christian one.

The Atlantic's stately breakers mine
the shore for kelp, mussels, bits of glass.
They move in measured iambs, tidy
as the towns that rise from sign to neon sign.
Night rubs its feet. A mouse deer starts across
the grass. The sky drains to a distant eddy.

Badshah, I say to no one there.
I hear a koel in the call of a barn owl.
All things combine and recombine,
the sky streams in ribbons of color.
I'm my father and my son grown old.
Everything that lives, lives on.
...

Who has done this?
Schoolboys, drained of
all emotion but the one
that'll outlast them,
kneeling on the sands in
waves through the two
thousands, learning the
fundaments of blood
sacrifice as the correct
response to figurative art.
...

In the end it took so little to do us in:
the imaginative use of fuel,
the fuzzy grammar
of this or that group of logicians,
gifts of money
to the strongest among us.
Who could resist those voices raised in unison?
‘Travel broadens nothing,'
the Great Martyr said, ‘except your tan.'
It was the official position,
broadcast without commercial interruption
every evening at 6.
The time for lyricism had passed.
Also - kissing, sculpture, coq au vin, the tango,
and other items of behavior
too commonplace to mention.
They had G_D on their side;
we had fear.
Same difference, you might have said.
I kept a wet finger to the wind.
Depending on who was winning
I shaved or I didn't.
...

As starlight, as ash or rain,
as a smear on the moon,

as a tree, say a champakali,

as a leaf or a man impersonating a leaf
torn into shreds
and fed to the wind,

as the smell of a small dead animal,

as a tremble on the stair,
a mouse or air,
a tear, a heave,

as fear glimpsed from the window of a plane,

as a telepathic ginger cat
that appears in a slit of moonlight
enters the locked house
and leaves its stinking spoor in each locked room,

as a boat on the Muhatupuzha about to drop
its load of two children and a woman
into the monsoon current,
and if the river had taken them
how much pain would it have made,
how much would it have saved?

as my mother trying to push the monstrous head out from between her legs,

as the stalker at 4 AM
swing creaking in the park near my house
downturned face white in cellphone light,

as the god that swaggers the top floor of my spirit
or the ghost that twists in the basement
or the slave that inhabits the middle,

as an inconsolable soprano nearing the end of Ave Maria,

as a cherry red Stratocaster Elite
found in a pawn shop in Vancouver
and bargained down to eight hundred dollars,

as bad heroin in a Delhi alley
pink pill crushed up and sold in a twist of paper
snorted hungrily for no pleasure,

as a woman (again and again)
whose hair curls, mouth moves or eyes well like yours,

as a figure by the side of the Expressway
urging me to crash the car
in a voice so calm and wise
it took every shred of sanity not to give in,

as good heroin in Zurich,

as a bloated white face on the ceiling of a borrowed room
talking to me all night
in words I am too high to understand,

as a violin creeping through the
trees in front of Humboldt University
and I understood music as the hunger
that eats those it stokes,

as the careful lizard that patrols my brain,

as the dazzled bird who steals—gems, junk,
whatever comes - to build
and what did I build but a house of dust?

as a ritual between newlywed insects
as an insect, horned shivering convulsed
tiny tyrannosaurus throes,

as the white of my beard, whiteness beyond snow or stupor,

as the abandoned child you were
who said goodbye to wind and water
stepped into the opposite of air
said no to earth-blood

said stop to body-blood
arrived as white shadow
without features or desire
as a drop of sacrificial oil

made your atoms integrate
tumbling dripping under
in your hurry to enter
the kingdom of eternal life,

as illness, as liver disease
and the river of red wine that cures it,

as the black grape that made the wine,

as a black burn on the leg that appears overnight and stays for years,
as an unexplainable lump on the shoulder,

as the sound of someone close crying softly in the night,

as a dead girl with blood-red lips
blood-red eyes and cheeks
blood-red wrung neck,

as crematorium smell of
camphor and meat,

as whatever you want,

just come back.
...

In the end it took so little to do us in:
the imaginative use of fuel,
...

I am over you at last, in Mexico City,
in a white space high above the street,
my hands steady, the walls unmoving.
...

The midnight's cataracts whiten,
and here's the sea hissing
its one stuttered consonant.
...

Your lips go from sunny side to suicide in a single click.
You're too fast for any sniper.
You know when to hit the ground and stay down.
When you step out, armies rise up or die by your eyes.
...

At 48, the youngest
director in the history of the Civil
Center for Falconry,
Universal Understanding & Aesthetic
...

Leap tall buildings in a single bound? Forget
you, buddy, I
leap years, avenues,
financial/fashion/meatpacking districts, 23
...

When you stop on Market Street
for more anesthesia,
pick up some supplies
— brandy, papayas,
...

When the flooding in the basement got worse
she slipped into a silly dress

and danced to The Best of Nirvana.
...

Let us govern those who undertake the telling of stories.
Censorship is good governance. Self-censorship is an attribute of the highest civilization.
If an actor speaks of God,
...

Listen! Someone's saying a prayer in Malayalam.
He says there's no word for ‘despair' in Malayalam.

Sometimes at daybreak you sing a Gujarati garba.
At night you open your hair in Malayalam.
...

I was born in the Christian South
of a subcontinent mad for religion.
Warriors and zealots tried to rule it.
A minor disciple carried his doubt
...

Who has done this?
Schoolboys, drained of
all emotion but the one
that'll outlast them,
...

As starlight, as ash or rain,
as a smear on the moon,

as a tree, say a champakali,
...

Nothing here's worth a tick.

I hid everything except the heads. They respect slaughter.

They respect only slaughter. They forget the other things we brought them, the ghazals, the gardens, the ice and symmetry.
...