Last night I was talking with J, with me asking the questions and she providing the answers, on the subject of viruses, their pathways to attack the body and the cunning deployed by us to vaccinate ourselves against these half animate half inanimate entities/ molecules. A theologically irreverent note here to the Fundoo Christo-pithecans, why are they no references to creation of viruses in the Good Book? Or were they Satan’s spawn? Life, consciousness, or whatever one wants to call it, seems to be quite wonderful even in these little almost invisible things – their evolutionary design, and adaptation over many life cycles to perpetuate themselves via other, and perhaps more evolved, things.

Continuing with the above digression, there seems to be a big furor here, in one of the surrounding red/Republican/JesUS counties, about stickers on science textbooks, which want to warn the innocents that the “monkey to man” theory is just another tall tale, and should be taken as such. What the hell is Genesis? The bloody inerrant truth of course, if only the sinners believe, and save themselves from damnation! However I think the evolved folks should let the fundoos go at this – science after all is the “religion” of doubt, and if someone wants to doubt something let them by all means. In this I am reminded of a one liner attributed to Abe Lincoln (that Abe’s party turned into the saloon of recovering Ku Klux Klan-ers is another miracle of late 20th century US politics!): “don’t jump into a ditch to save a pig, you will only get dirty”.

Continuing with the recounting of last night conversation, I was watching J (she is very pleasant on the bookish eyes) for her unsaid reactions/feelings, as I was quizzing her on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa vis-à-vis the “race” situation. I had just finished reading two books about the Apartheid period, and since I am interested in seeing how human attitudes are contaminated by the discriminations we inherit, I was on the lookout for “typical” Afrikaner (which J is) reactions, now that the power equations have changed in her country.

The most telling thing, as it appeared to my not very discriminating mind of course, was the way things lay demarcated in her mind: the black people and the white people. I wonder if she thinks of me as the “brown”/”colored” man, given that folks of Indian origin were considered less than fully human in her childhood? I think there is a significant thing here that needs to be investigated: how tribes discriminate (via skin color, and in the Indian situation via that tribal badge of caste, etc etc) and how many generations it takes to overcome and crack open these boundaries, if this can be done at all.

I shall end this note here, enough of this “running at the mouth”. But before I end, as I began reading the volume of James Dickey’s letters last night, I shall type up a few of the more luminous passages on the poet’s vocation, craft etc I had underlined here. The following, however, is an excerpt of Dickey’s last lecture, shortly before he died, and in which I found courage last night:

When we get started, I want you to fight this thing through. Fight the thing through that we start through your own consciousness and your own dreams and see where it comes out. That’s the excitement and the fun of it. Deep discovery, deep adventure. It’s the most dangerous game and the best. Flaubert says somewhere that “the life of a poet is a hell of a life. It’s a dog’s life. But it’s the only one worth living.” You suffer more, you are frustrated more. All the things that don’t bother other people. But you also live so much more. You live so much more intensely and so much more vitally and with so much more of a sense of meaning, of consequentiality. Of things mattering instead of nothing mattering. That is what is driving our whole civilization into suicide. The fear that we are living an existence in which nothing matters very much or at all…a sense of non-consequence, a sense of nothing, nothing matters… The poet is free of that. He’s free of it. To the poet everything matters, and it matters a lot, and that’s the realm where we work and once you are there you are hooked……I don’t mean to sell the poet so long or to such great length, but I do this principally because the world doesn’t esteem the poet very much. They really don’t understand where we are coming from. They don’t understand the use for us or if there is any use. They don’t really value us very much. We are the masters of a superior sect, not they. Not they. Remember that when you write. You are at the top level and they are down there with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe and the general idols of shylock culture we live in. We are the elitists. I don’t mind saying that at all. Quality is what we strive for. The best standards. My grandmother was born in Germany and she used to quote from Goethe a lot and one of her favorite sayings was, “Whoever strives upwards, him we can save”….we must find some way to write as though our hands were the hands of someone miraculously superior to ourselves. That is what we aim for. So when you begin to say things you didn’t know you knew or you had never had any idea that you had any notion that you knew, then maybe you’re getting somewhere you should be as a poet. Not invariably, but it’s possible under those conditions. It’s possible…

[A] Cities Are Remembered

You meet S, and sniffing an accent - these marks we carry on our breath! - in the air, ask where he is from? He says he grew up in Cape Town and that he has wandered around the world, picking up languages, picking up cities, like a dog inviting fleas, but still Cape Town remains the most beautiful place in the world, the worm coiling and uncoiling in the heart. You nod with recognition; yes the places of birth have a demented beauty about them, which exiles somehow soon forget how to embrace, as if when one stays away long enough, the customary way of holding a woman is lost, as if one forgets how one usually used to walk in and kiss her, just below her ears. Or how she used to kiss him back. Yes, although these mechanics remain, the essence is lost. One raves upon return, many years later, crawling through the gutters looking for it.

It seems that exiles can’t forget the beauty of those old hags, grinning toothlessly under the sun. Bitches! You can’t live with them. You were miserable, or at the very least dissatisfied, rolling with them in the dust, saliva running down your jaws, and now that you have gone away their holy stink keeps attacking you in your dreams.

[B] Greetings Arrive

You cousin sends you a greeting for the harvest festival. She is eleven or twelve. Her sister too had scrawled a line beneath her clean printing. She is seven or so. And she is not afraid of you at all even though you are a bearded mountain. Playing hopscotch, swinging into the sky and squabbling with the placid big sister seem to fill up her days. “Where the hell do I have time to think existential thoughts?” she seems to indicate when she looks at your aging face. “Cheer up big boy!” But she is also growing up. Will she also become a monster, a dragon coiled around a hoard of dully gleaming words, as I have become?

[C] An Evolutionary Pathway Is Traced

Harvest festival. Time of carts loaded with long sugarcane poles plying up and down the rutted roads, all day, all night, from the village to the mill. One sleeps with motion in the limbs. Oxen are fed pulses and the water in which they are cooked in is scooped out and made into a rich soup, nothing like of which can be found any place else. Farmers sit on their haunches under a peepul tree (another of those holy trees) to catch their breath and discuss yields and other farm matters in code (to which you don’t have access) as they run hither and yonder. Grandfather Leather Hands has become a ghost who disappears before the vain rooster challenges the sun to match the reds of his plume. Hayricks go up, twenty or so feet tall skyscrapers where soon cobras will hunt rat snakes will hunt rats. And years later whenever you see golden hair tied up in fists or spread on the ground, a cobra raises its hood and digs its fangs into your bones.

Grandmother Stiff Fingers milks the cows. You put your hand into the froth hovering on the top of the pail grinning at miracles – how grass becomes sweet smelling milk full of fat! Other miracles are the bees in the honey box, which summon you to them with their buzzing, bull frogs in tailcoats with their orchestra to which all stars attend in the ditch behind the house, Farmhand Monkey Feet climbing the coconut trees and nuts thudding to the ground, Crow Thief who steals and eats the soap left for a second near the hand pump, but is forgiven because he caws all day, which means soon there will be more company, and soon enough other apes fall out of the sky, out of dusty red state road transportation buses, which are so busy playing hokey fishing in the canals that they are never on time, and soon enough marbles with tiger eyes sealed in glass appear, the females are practicing with their rag dolls, the marble warriors are served tea in ridiculously small cups, jaggery is alchemy-ized into sweets, Mother Kangaroos, who are sisters and sister in laws, cluck at the Kid Kangaroos leaping at the tins of goodies, and sit in circles plaiting each others hair, gossiping about family tenth removed, Uncle Ladder Legs is at the well drawing water with a coir rope, water in the well is tantalizing close here, the faces swim like fish and shatter when the bucket hits the water, cattle gather at the trough, hands caress Calf Black Nose’s back, and it too dances to jumping rope rhymes, soon every one is hiding behind tumbling stone walls, barn lofts, under the beds, behind sacks of un-husked rice much to the disapproval of spiders, someone is discovered, usually one of the younger victims who refuses to play any more, so the game changes, it becomes water and stone, Cousin Crocodile paces the water, which is the clay courtyard sprayed expertly every morning by Grandma with a potent mixture of cow dung and water, and the monkey horde jumps from cobble stone to cobble stone, sometimes dangling from the branches of the guava tree, teasing the Crocodile with its really small snapping mouth, eventually someone is caught and devoured, and is born again as a crocodile, the crocodile meanwhile climbs up to the stones from the water, learns to stand erect, develops a movable opposing thumb, and becomes a demented writer with the name I.

A violin sings in my ear
Softening the harsh choral German
As it proclaims certainties of
Forgiveness of sins and the impossible
Salvation of man because
Someone else had lived and died
Suffering for us, we who gave
Him ample pain.
And because
Of beauty of this musik
For long moments doubt is
Kept in abeyance, fingers keep
Time with notes, moving over
This aural rosary. “Lord! Lord!
Don’t forsake us”, must have
Been sometimes answered with
Musik instead of the usual blank
Echo of silence.
But mostly
We draw out our misery into
Melissimas. Sun is burning
Frost off spread hay, in which
A flock of robins are foraging
For worms. In winter pickings
Will be slim. I walk under hundred
Year old oaks. The great Book
Is this, the flesh that is Word,
And which lives and sings.
My hands scatter breadcrumbs
And Bach into the east wind.





My Poems