TALKING POETRY

Priya Sarukkai Chabria - (mp3)

Priya Sarukkai Chabria (www.priyawriting.com) is the editor of Talking Poetry. She is a poet and novelist. Novel, The Other Garden (1995, Rupa & Co. ), new novel Or Else...to be published by Zubaan in 2006. Dialogue and Other Poems (2005, Indian Academy of Literature). Her work is published or forthcoming in Adelphiana, Alphabet City, Atlas, L.A.B., Quarterly, South Asian Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Voices from the East and archived at various sites

PLant Life Stories

The morning's sunlit chill
runs with long wind and leaf shadows
through the house. We sit
together eating
the pomegranates of Demeter's cursed
season. We expect no miracles except
this scarlet grain, each as plump
as a memory. He says: There's no anger
between us. We are both surprised. Mouth red
and dripping I look outside:

Spring clusters
on the old mango tree.

The Special Forces Man

Who was he, that man, who
I shared three breakfasts with in a guesthouse in Bombay who
said he'd left the Special Forces
a while ago -- as I plastered marmalade on toast?

Who was he, that man who,
at 9 o clock each day, passed – with cornflakes and milk – a wry generosity;
who knew parting was his trusted friend, and hoped talk stirred
over tepid cups of tea could stir

my memory beyond the drifting sand of years? Clues sieve
like water through my hands without deception, without a trace.

He'd worked in the Middle East, he began, as I corrected:
West Asia! He conceded, dipping golden hair over this divide
and we became confederates. Sawing omelettes on greasy plates
I questioned him on death, close shaves, loneliness
and music. Against Bach's cathedral structures that I vaulted
he defended, without irony, Sheherazade , the opus to that spinner
of tales, specially its dying notes. . .
Who was that man who opened

like a desert blinking with mirages, to my avarice that squeezed
out of me between sips of orange concentrate? I gathered mouthfuls
about danger's hushed slow-motion dance; and of a spinning parcel bomb
that didn't explode yet spins in him in fear's frozen time; the burnt aftertaste

of a trek to find the missing dead; six days out and strafed he was, the last
alone, with no water, and feet blistering. He never was specific; but neat
in navy business suits and lithe, side-stepping the gritty facts.
(Were his eyes gray or blue? Blue, blue his eyes in a face forgotten.)

With spare gestures he pared apples and definitions:
Courage is when one knows; yet goes ahead. And knowing, shared his secret
of that zone of safety within himself into which he retreated.
This too he poured --as I refilled his cup, and waited.

He knew I was a poet obsessed with time and death;
he knew I probed him to tell it all,
but how and when and where remained a mystery
till tonight's news: ‘Ground Forces' in the barren Panjsher valley.

The drift of memory stills and parts.
Like a spring rise washes of a man I never loved:
He comes alive, taut and tall, a gun
in hand, a killer in fatigues.

Who was he, that man, and
where is he now? Why
does my heart swirl
like a desert storm?

Hospital

Discharge Counter

Mariamma, a charred stick in a turmeric sari, leant on the counter and said:

I said: Listen, I'm not leaving tonight. And squatted.
My man has a catheter in him,
he can't sleep on the floor.
The doctors said he should be raised – on a bed.
No one I know in this city owns beds.
Tomorrow at dawn I'll take him straight to our village.
‘We'll give you no food,' said the hospital staff.
No matter, I said, we'll live on water.

That was one year ago.
One year my man lay staring at the thatch.
One year I worked like two men on the land.
One month ago we returned for the free operation.
Today it's done. No catheter no more.

For one month my surviving child I've left with my mother.
Warm gruel I feed him, soft as feathers. And water,
too, warmed. How has he been, I wonder?

Four hours I've been waiting for your discharge note.
Two buses we change to get near my village,
then catch a rickshaw. Evening is coming.
Listen, I'm saying: Hurry up!

Invocation: Spirit Of Water

Make me dew that touches all
without distinction.

Like snow-flakes let my perfect structures
yield to the melt of being.

As an underground river flowing during drought,
make me draw from secret sources.

Sweet and salt, estuarine,
let differences mingle in my blood.

Tidal courage, I call upon you to return after the ebb:
Spirit of water, give me hope.

Print on me oceans covered with sky;
when fiery fissures open, remind me of life.

Fill my marrow with glacial ice that cuts
rock to nourish springs.

Add one more wish to this:
Make me a mountain lake,

calm and deep,
that reflects light.

Flight: In Silver, Red and Black

2.
I dream of sliding
through tinkling leaves
of a dark, transparent forest
to a lake of lotuses
that wave petals of black glass.
I ask myself:
is this terrain you -- that I glide through?
Or am I this strange, expectant space?
Or is it us, combined, meeting in desire's damp
before we've met on stable land?
Dreams gift secrets in incessant forms
that open, then sink
beneath necessity's ink.
Lotuses fill with rain
till they drown.

4.
after the Empress Eifuku

To be in a poem of old, to say:
the moon rose too quickly,
dawn is cruel, morning
found us undressing as we dressed ourselves,
I wear your fragrance still…
To be in a poem of today that goes:
call me on my cell; wait,
I'm held up; wear the purple G-string;
or, to slip into tepid slang -- can't
get enough of you, baby.
These drifting thoughts
that unzip body and soul.

The Lady with the Little Dog

- f or George Szirtes

As light funnels from the sky to the earth,
I circle a college ground, watching
boys kick footballs into the fading:
Small moons play dark suns to a drowning day.

She's always there; pale, large, menopausal, with the soft
voice of doctors trained to soothe, an E&T specialist skilled
at hearing the muffled longings of the inarticulate.
Her evening walk is a gentle sway made wayward by her dog,

an ancient Pomeranian, fat and furry,
that mounts the division of species
in its need to copulate. It desired me, shagging
with front paws clamped to my calf. Absently,

she tugged the leash, talking of the autumn, as I wondered:
How does dog semen smell, and how long do we pretend
nothing odd is on -- as another day falls in mundane splendor?
The evening passed; abruptly

days charred into night as veils burnt and lifted
once for all the miasma of a world confounded
by commands from hidden men who called
to heaven --to kill the earth's inarticulate.

Once for all, a world that was leashed and fed reared
on its hind legs.

She hailed me as our paths crossed, the light descending
in greater glory as days quicken towards winter, splurging
green, purple, pink over furry clouds, and the spaces in-between.
The sky's excess spoke for us as we measured in even tones

our distress at crimes supported by the neighboring state.
One by one we counted each attack, we recounted the hijack
and acknowledged the fact that terrorist camps breed
across a dividing line, a squiggle of black on bequeathed maps.

Each time we paused,
to let our grievances steep and stain us darker
than the dark staining overhead.
In this quiet she murmured:

They should all be killed, each one.
This, while stroking the softest fur beneath the dog's jaws
as it rolled its eyes and licked the sky,
whimpering pleasure. I went mute

with sweet longing, my tongue tasting heaven,
yet I was shocked by my desire for bloody paws.
Ahead the ground lay empty of young men and balls
kicked up to mimic the sun.

Overhead stars appeared, irrepressible,
through the night.