Buoyantville

Plane Song

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:03:04 GMT

The plane turns at the edge of a city

(where true darkness begins - it is all
forest below; perhaps a few hikers
are sleeping against the sounds
of owl hoot and foraging bears)

and follows the curve of the river

(the undulating water in half-moon,
a paino keyboard calling to be heard
over the herd of TVs flickering
at the end of suburban cul-de-sacs)

as it rushes towards an airport

(a car's headlight nosing the mist
is as clear as a skylight towards
which a blinded eye looks, stopping,
sometimes at the curl of a rhyme)

where you are supposed to arrive.

(with a mind that is racing away like
that car next to the river, deep
into a wild beyond the hikers' sleep,
with a hunger greater than the bears)

Note: I could have easily titled this "After Tranströmer", as I wrote it falling out the sky last night, for the debt is there.

Sándor Márai on various types of slaughter (from "Embers")

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:01:37 GMT

“According to current wisdom, being human began with the opposable thumb, which made it possible to pick up a weapon or a tool. But perhaps being human begins with the soul and not the thumb. I don’t know…. The Arab slaughtered the lamb, and as he did so, this old man in his white burnous, which remained unspotted by blood, was like an oriental high priest performing the sacrifice. His eyes gleamed, for a moment he was young again, and all around him there was absolute silence. They sat around the fire, they watched the act of killing, the flash of the knife, the twitching of the lamb, the jet of blood, and their eyes gleamed also. And then I realized that these people are still intimately familiar with the act of killing, blood is something they know well, and the flash of the knife is as natural to them as the smile of a woman, or the rain. We understood — and I think Krisztina did, too, because at that moment she was seized with emotion, she blushed, then went white, breathed with difficulty, and turned her head away, as if she were witness to some passionate encounter — we understood that people in the East still retain their knowledge of the sacred symbolism of killing and its inner spiritual meaning. These dark, noble faces were all smiling, they pursed their lips and grinned in a kind of ecstasy as they watched, as if the killing were a warm, happy event, like an embrace. Curious, that in Hungarian our words for killing and embracing (Oles and oleles) echo and heighten each other.

“Well, of course we are westerners,” he says in another voice, sounding suddenly professional. “Westerners, or at least immigrants who settled here. For us, killing is a question of law and morality, or medicine, at any rate a sanctioned or prohibited act that is very precisely delineated within our system of thought. We kill, too, but in a more complicated way; we kill according to the dictates and authorization of the law. We kill to protect high principles and important human values, we kill to preserve the social order. It cannot be any other way.

We are Christians, we have a sense of guilt, we are the product of Western civilization. Our history, right up to the present, is filled with mass murder, but whenever we speak of killing, it is with eyes lowered and in tones of pious horror; we cannot do otherwise, it is our prescribed role. There is only the hunt,” he says, suddenly sounding almost happy. “Even then, we observe rules that are both chivalrous and practical, we protect the game according to the demands of the situation in any particular area, but the hunt is still a sacrifice, a distorted residue of what can still be recognized as a ritual that once formed part of a most ancient religious act. It is not true that the huntsman kills for the prize.

Notes: I have just finished Márai's "Embers", a masterpiece, in a reading sprint - a less than common occurring these days staying up till 3 am last night, and then doing a final lap soon after waking around 10 am this morning. I had already committed a quickie with this novel - a sin of omission - reading the first forty pages after picking it up months ago, and then shelving it, like I am wont to do with most of my books, given a "compulsion" to buy more books vs. reading what I already have at hand.

So in penitence, I am going back to this wonderful novel (last novel that had this effect on me was Munoz Molina's "Sepharad" - something about empires/world in twilight), pen in hand, re-reading some wonderful passages like the one above - very apropos, I think, given the news of the day was all about drone stikes in Yemen - and sharing them here.

Reading Wallace Stevens - pre Irene storming and post Mineral, VA quaking

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:00:29 GMT

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut
out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.

April 18, 1904
from - "Souvenirs and Prophecies", ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1977),

Ghazal - a translation

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:59:34 GMT

His face is the lamp, and this world the shade.
Yet he hid himself from the world, vieling his face.

The councilor hasn't seen my ardor's strength
Nor has he seen scattered locks across my face.

In all event before my eyes his face.
I haven't seen the moon since the night of seperation.

All kinds of beauties had come out on parade.
To confess, my stunned eyes were blind to all.

What had happened in the chaos of passion, I don't know.
But when I came to, I found in my hand the torn collar.

Translated from the Urdu of Asghar Gondvi's "Zahid ne mera hasil-e-eman nahin dekha" (h/t to Aisha for putting up Abida's rendition here)

California Notes

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:57:53 GMT

[1]
After months of work, a chance to vacation out West. And you are thinking of what is happiness, the experiencing self, the remembering self, and the difference between memory's sepia-ed motion picture reel and the clarity that is unfolding time. When the fellow traveler next to you shuts off his laptop, and you look up from the New York of wandering Julius, you see through the aloft porthole a landscape of tawny rolling hills hunched over the San Francisco Bay, as if trying to drink away summer.

Once the feet find purchase on terra firma, and you step outside into the Mediterranean weather, away from the broiling heat of the East Coast, you understand why in every visit to date (this will be your third) California confronts you with its surreality. The changeless weather perhaps has something to do with it, even though undoubtedly, the agricultural toilers in the Californian valleys do see seasons change with cycles of sowing and reaping. So to a "knowledge worker" like yourself (who barely has time for real knowledge - your particular “knowledge” is, alas, limited to fooling the equally unknowing American "consumer" in the produce aisle with tricksy promotions) this gift of a burred vision – not very different from what the drifters and the squatters, who came over these hills in wagon caravans, must have had of this "gold" coast. So then from this burred vision these notes (to be seasoned with some Milsoz, Stienbeck, T-Cole, et al) to follow...

[2]
Overlooking the Pacific on a day of fog and mist, he watches the gulls play arial tic-tac-toe among the bobbing masts in the harbor. There was a time when his idea of happiness was linked to a mental landscape like this - the air smelling of brine, an evening raga playing in the ear, a knowledge of local rock (McPhee's song of crustal blocks, subduction zones and twisted faults - another kind of California dreaming really) and plant (wisteria, lantana, honeysuckle - some of these names searched for in the poetry of Milosz and Hass), to occupy part of this loneliness - or is this its close cousin - solitude?

He has been drinking sitting alone- gin and tonic laced with the murmuring of Julius - ruminating on memories and thinking about outlines of stories not written (there was once a name he wanted to write about - Varsha) and poems (he did write one California poem that he is not ashamed of). So much of the universe lays open in the palm of one's hand to receive and absorb but then there always lurk the distractions of work, daily busyness, and the drag of psychic hollowness that he feels growing inside with time - very much like Rodin's "Three Shades" with their twisted contours watching over the gates of hell.

Or this is what he tell himself as he closes his notebook, and distractedly walks into the melee that is an Indian wedding, where the shadow of his solitude will lengthen under the disco lights.

August, 2011

After A Year of Marriage

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:56:29 GMT

When her eyes crinkle
like crushed crocuses,
the laughter that follows
is the color of saffron.

I will call her Pratiksha
for her gaze moving
across a room towards me,
still pins my voice to the throat

in want that is waiting.
Doesn’t desire complete itself
when the tongue of a candle
feeds on the body of air?

O, coming to the suburbs
of her body is like walking into
a spring meadow from Troy
after the Trojans have set sail.

So I wake and walk into another
April, under trees haloed in bud,
praising the wonder that is a single
sheet over two lovers in bed.

April 17, 2011

Ghazal: Snow Man in Sakura Park

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:55:00 GMT

The mind in winter retreating into itself knows
How green sap is held in the embrace of snow.

Blue-black (of her memorized eyes) is how the grave
Statues gaze at his passing shadow, shaggy with snow.

In their farewell, nothing left really to tell or show
But his x-rayed heart, inked with shards of snow.

What does the dead general dream in his icicled tomb?
Wind off the river etches memory on his brow of snow.

“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”:
So is the dark one hidden to Radhika by the snow.

After Wallace Steven's "Snow Man"

Passages

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:53:11 GMT

[1] A Passage on Time (Washington DC)

Don’t the ginkos wait all year
For these brief weeks of cool blue
Skies - they call it Indian Summer –
To unfurl their haloes of golden flame?

Sometimes it is easy to lose track
Of time, even as living is about time
Most of the time. Six months, she says,
Since they have started sleeping in the same bed.

No, she corrects herself, it is seven actually.

[2] A Passage on Memory (Hyderabad, India)
“My memory is again in the way of your history.” - Agha Shahid Ali

This country, even as I didn’t know it, remains
The substratum that I must drill into every time
To standup these edifices of words, in a language
Out of whose palm I surreptitiously ate, a starveling.

These words are as close to me as memory,
Yet I haven’t summoned them by name often.
They, like you, stand at an distinct angle to memory,
From whose density you seek escape today

Into a lighter, less crowded air. But these are
Orphic moments that I must sing as I attempt
To ascend on a stair of alphabet towards a moment
Of painless clarity. Perhaps it is true, the spirit needs

Memory in the absence of history, and history in
Making seeks escape in the presence of memory.

Ghazal - a translation

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:50:25 GMT

Your memory’s trains kept arriving through the night.
The wet in my eyes kept smiling through the night.

Through the night, the anguished candle kept burning
As pain’s blood kept roiling through the night.

A flute’s sweet melody kept playing
Insistent as memory through the night.

Moonlight of memories kept falling across the heart
As the moon kept shimmering through the night.

A mad lover kept wandering through the lanes.
My voice kept reaching me through the night.

Translated from the Urdu approximately. The ghazal is "Aap kii yaad aatii rahii raat bhar" by Makhdoom Moinuddin. Go here to hear this ghazal sung: www.youtube.com

Ghazal - a translation

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:48:39 GMT

Who is this, who comes into my longing carrying a goblet,
Casting shadows of a moonlight night across my heart?

When the vine of memory drips all night in the heart,
Carrying in their gaze, spring’s morning and evening - who is this?

The breeze’s fragrant caresses kept waking him all night,
Carrying on its lips the essence of someone’ name – who is this?

The scent of a thought and the fragrance of a body,
Which stand at my body’s door with a message – who is this?

In the distance, someone was playing a shehani. And I woke to
Find in my eyes a perfected dream of someone – who is this?

Note: This is my translation from the Urdu of Makhdoom Mohiuddin's "Ye kaun aata hai tanhaiyon mein". I just happened to stumble upon Makhdoom's body of work and (think of a Hyderabadi Faiz Ahmed Faiz or a Nazim Hikmet, with the same aesthetic of revolutionary romanticism - why didn't I know of him!!) last night, as I was searching for movies of Irrfan Khan. Irrfan Kan played Makhdoom in an Indian TV series on Urdu poets called Kahkashan (created by Ali Sardar Jafri) - which I plan to watch in full before my Indian sojourn is over.

India Notes - 2

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:46:37 GMT

[1]
The gaze as a sepia photograph. A tracery of memory in everything the eye sees. That summer evening at the end of an year of sadness, when he escaped to these hills of black basalt with an empty sketchbook and a box of watercolors (nothing came of that experiment – excepts few washes of burnt brick and charcoal; few years later his sister threw away the watercolors), thinking of Arles, with the warm evening wind whistling among the straggly trees reminding him of the sirocco that made mad Vincent sever his ear as a gift. In this return to what is a crowded and much diminished landscape, that evening full of despairing rush at returns to mind.

[2]
He slowly remembers that year as he looks out at a frenetic horizon of dust. That was when he was discovering art at college (where he was supposedly studying engineering), squirreled away in the dark and dusty stacks, form which books were last checked out in the late seventies, thumbing yellowing paper, starting with the Impressionists and going back to the old masters (the density of Breughel’s villages so much like those of his childhood) and going forward to the fractured beauty of Picasso’s bulls and horses.

[3]
A decade or more in between – he has seen those paintings, which his eye hungered for in that library, since then in many great museums. But in the column of loss (there is always one, right next to that of gain), he has to post the missing years since he has seen those few (or should he say two) that kept his spirit alive in those striated, adolescent days. What are they now to him, once most beloved, now at the periphery of time but at the center of this longing? Between them now three countries, a marriage and two divorces, and more money than before to feed the great fires (“Everything is burning”, said the Enlightened one at Gaya).

[4]
As he descends the (now dystopic) ancient temple hill, and walks away from the mounds of rubbish and troops of langurs cavorting with torn newspapers and plastic wrappers, few lines from Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “Farewell” surface:

“At a certain point I lost track of you.
They make a desolation and call it peace.”

Perhaps that line should read: they make a desolation and call it progress.

Date: Dec 3, 2010

India Note - 1

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:10:08 GMT

A metaphor for the future Indian cities: sumptuous traffic jam

"Why aren’t there more flyovers built to bypass the traffic? But for the last 10 kilometers we have traversed four of them."

Reading Alberto Manguel on Homer at Landmark Books in Hyderabad, he thinks if there were a few of these stores a decade ago, perhaps, he would have never left

On the old Bombay highway, what happened to the distant views of the hillocks and the lakes? Then he was too small to go explore. Now everything has vanished under a carpet of concrete

Posters of godmen next to posters of movie stars – two pathways to getting at the same kind of solace

A novel he must find and read just for its resonant title: Thomas Hardy’s “Far From The Madding Crowd”

On the second day after arrival, on a jetlagged morning walk with his father, he hears the song of dueling temples

Subbu’s Bhaja Govindam heard distantly over the early morning calls of iterant vegetable sellers is like real filter coffee – how different than hearing it on headphones in an autumn American morning

There goes a Porsche dealer. But here come Jaguar, BMW, and Harley offering their shiny, and completely impractical, wares. Should they begin with the question: where to drive these toys?

Joy is scoring four Hero fountain pens for a dollar each. There was a time when these were the default writing instruments, filled with Chelpark Royal Blue ink

Many who he grew up with have left for that far country. Few lines from Shahid Ali’s “A Country Without a Post office”: One begins: “These words may never reach you.”/Another ends: “The skin dissolves in dew/ without your touch.”

The last yellow blossoms on the amalta tree. And four cabbage butterflies hovering like white memories from his childhood Novembers, which were spent chasing them through the schoolyard brambles

Date: Dec 1, 2010; Hyderabad India

Parvaz

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:07:47 GMT

Trees are words
and light writes distances. - Adonis

A backward look comes to mind now:
On Anna Salai, in the muggy heat of Madras,

Like Basho, waving farewell to a friend long
after the beloved body disappeared into dusk.

This is what I have been doing every autumn
For a decade as leaves cleave the cooling air.

There are distances of time woven into the creases
Of my face. After years you ask me how I am:

Scan the trees' calligraphy when the winter comes
to know how separation (or flight?) is written in light

Solitude of Ravens

aqss — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:06:27 GMT

Omens of clear dreams
On the highway Orpheus descends
To raise up Eurydice

Feasters of tainted dusk
Waiting for a guide to
The otherworld to appear

Tears about the tree line
Falling towards sleep’s blanket
Which obscures all city lights

The more I look at you
The more I become an augur
On the verge of a tongue's
Desolation and a haunting.

poatry

mona1990 — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 18:08:52 GMT

Rainy Night Music

aqss — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 05:47:16 GMT

Wonderful and haunting soundtrack of the movie "Before the Rain". Spend the 45 minutes required to listed to all of it, and then go find the movie and watch it.

Here are two pieces that I wrote to this music (from the archives circa 2004-05):

[A Mouthful of You]

City streets on the window,
Are reflections of this day:
Passing people, cabs and buses,
Memories of urgent lovemaking
Dissolving into shades of gray.

Ominous flash of sheet lighting,
Twitching branches of birds and trees,
Dull honking of vehicles and desire.
The world, Darling, falls away when my mouth
Fills up with pieces of you just as windows
Are obliterated by the splashing rain.

[Right Now]

We are on the tricky slope
Of talk, as you urge me to
Say what I am feeling right
Now.

Right now, my darling,
We are making love, right

Now, we are feeding our hunger
For certainty against dust, right

Now, my hands are pouring
Camphor into your hair, right

Now, our bodies are conversing in
A language they both know, right

Now, your right eyelash is fluttering against
My right shoulder like a raven’s wing, right

Now, this black cab is driving
Into London’s thin rain, right

Now eternity is flashing by me, and is
Falling on your cheeks as tears, right
Now.

Repetition

aqss — Tue, 11 May 2010 15:05:46 GMT

“The repetition of my days/ that are alike,/ my days that are not alike.” ~ Nazim Hikmet

A day like any other –
Cold for the season, humming

With clouds, strung like accordions
Over the ribs of suspended bridges

Tug boats, like hunting dogs, nosing out
Passages to the open sea for cargoes

Lifting my head to look through the high windows
I sense their absence again occupying that old space

A passing wall of rain over bony nerves,
Memories' backwash over the hour's reef

Acrostic

aqss — Mon, 03 May 2010 22:27:09 GMT

Rain this morning thudding
Against my lacerated sleep seemed to plead:
“Do not be so distant from this desolate
House. Soaked in the humid air,
Ink runs from a dream’s gouache of you, Radhika.
Kiss me awake again this morning, just as
Ash departing into heaven kisses the fire's face”

Brilliant

rajeshtr — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:59:10 GMT

Hi Sashi,

This is brilliant. Sounded perfect until the last stanza (although you'd alluded to its unsuitability ;) ).

In whatever silver of space the body can fit.

Did you mean it this way:

In whatever sliver of space the body can fit.

Rajesh

Boom Rush

aqss — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:06:50 GMT

I just read in North Dakota
There is a mad rush underway

For the black gold hidden
In the prairie’s belly.

Grapes of Wrath writ in real life.
But all the rooms are taken:

Hotel rooms, motel rooms,
Trailers, backseats of cars,

Tents, Wal-Mart parking lots,
With a serpentine waiting list for everything.

So the Joads are forced to cling,
To squat, to brace themselves against

The bone chilling wind and the coal heat
In whatever silver of space the body can fit.

How much space does a body need?
The heart sometimes feels like this:

Filled with syllables’ black ink but unable
To find a stanza’s room to inhabit.

Man O' War

aqss — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:07:50 GMT

Perhaps it was the French
Warship steaming by the city,

Seen from a height, imperious next
To the coal barges, shark-gray in color

Under a cold blue sky, which
Dredged up in memory today

The stoic coldness in Adrienne’s eyes
As they steamed through that farewell.

A Wedding Sequence

aqss — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:05:15 GMT

for A

[1] Gulmohars in Gudalajara

In the square where revolutionary heroes
Converse with saints about godlessness,
These trees of memory emerge from
The morning fog, like ships with flags
At half-mast entering a safe harbor.

Everything I was then has been forgotten
In streets that have since changed
Their names, their faces. I haven't seen
These trees in years now, like those whom
I left in farewell by the Bay of Bengal.

If I grow silent when you put a blossom
In your hair, in jest for a photograph,
Know these flowers, shaped like torn
Hearts, remind me of those I have lost
To gain you in this far country.

[2] Memory’s Flyway

The vision is of water. Off heaven’s coast
I am afloat in the Pacific, not sinking as I
Would have once, farther beyond into the dark
Which hides beyond the glitter of coral fish.
Off Arcos, when I force my visor into the brine

I see the line of bubbles streaming from
The glimmering body below, syllabic like a haiku.
The mind empties itself in the tropical heat.
Lunch, and hike to an ice-cold waterfall follow.
So another good day passes with little speech.

The ferry coasts against the pier, and then sputters
To life as the anchor lifts and its engines belch. The route
Back, as dusk falls, is along the flyways of humpbacks –
Much like how memory swims back to memory.
I had to lose sight of gulmohars blooming in

Guadalajara’s squares to remember them again,
As I sit up with Caravaggio's saints in vigil.
As our books nuzzle against one another, tawny
Evening rests its spine on the cooling sand.
I am at rest, I think, at the edge of your continent.

[3] Past Presents

...itself in flashes. Tender extremities
Of spring perhaps bring it life. That hill above
Vernazza at dawn, that cold shell of a room
With thrum of waves crashing into the Ligurian
Cliffs, feet touching feet under a grandmother's quilt.

Then that afternoon rising up in the funicular
To the tiny square of Capri - again a brilliance
Of blue all the way to looming Vesuvius.
Montale on the mind, overlaid on the crouching
Cart driver statured into silence by Pompeiian lava.

I have struggled to reconcile even farther memories
With these presents, hiding behind this jagged
Tone of hurt. Your perplexity as simple as the starfish's
Trash when I took it out of the Pacific shoals at dusk,
Below the lighthouse, after our quick morning quarrel.

There is a coast I realize I have stumbled upon,
Where memory wanders through the seaside vistas,
Sieving the past to speckle the present. It is
Your nuzzled body curved against a seeking blindness
Of mine, as our lived past surges and retreats

Like a drowsy sea at sleep's coast, Radhika.

Thresholds

aqss — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:11:46 GMT

Greenery at the risk of
Blossoming as the winter-bound
Earth thaws its bones out in the rain.

All these years seem to pool at such
Thresholds. Everything is in flux
Including the faithful heart.

It continues to billow between
Light and darkness - even if these days
there appears to be more light in there.

March 7th 2010, Houston

After A Discussion On Vocabulary

aqss — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:10:27 GMT

Waking up to bird song in the morning,
With a memory of names lost to not
Attending enough to this world that
Is contained in itself, and happens to
Contain him always. Once he was given
Vocabulary to point to creatures
Of leaf and wing, to take them in
Through language, and so accommodate
Himself in a house that is landscape.

So to be rendered homeless again,
Or even worse to be exiled is to have lost
The language to name the signs that sing:
Violet crocuses – first letters of spring,
Star magnolias teething white, the blood
Of Judas trees awakening, and the wake
Of Canada geese honking north to home.

Fom “Conversation with a Tax Inspector about Poetry” - Vladimir Mayakovsky

aqss — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:58:46 GMT

Citizen tax collector,
honestly, the poet
spends a fortune on words…
Suppose
only half a dozen
unheard-of rhymes were left,
in, say, Venezuela.
And so
I’m drawn
to North and South.
I rush around
entangled in advances and loans.

Citizen!
Consider my traveling expenses:
Poetry –
all of it –
is a journey to the unknown.

(Trans. from Russian by Max Hayward, George Reavey)