Layabout

2024-11-05T00:34:00.000-08:00

Reading Amit Chaudhuri’s On Being Indian amid a Proliferation of Police Barricades

Following the June 2024 elections in India, making Narendra Modi the head of a coalition government, a writer from New Delhi decides to revisit Amit Chaudhuri’s On Being Indian, set in a time of political tumult in India when the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party returned for a second term in 2019.

A purple kite with yellow polka dots dangles from the branches of a neem tree that grazes the terrace of my home. Its mangled fate has a peculiar heroism—it tells of a battle in the sky with other papery foes, and a bid for glory. It has been a few days since August 15—Independence Day in India—when the free but troubled skies over the capital city, New Delhi, are punctured with kites. Kite-flying, or patangbaazi as it is called in the older parts of the city, is a celebratory tradition with a hazy but charming colonial history. In 1928 freedom fighters protesting against the Simon Commission are believed to have flown kites with the slogan “Go Back Simon” written on them (Sir John Simon was the lead author of a report on India’s constitution created by a commission with no Indian members).

Kites, irrepressible emissaries of liberty, soar over the minarets and temples and spires and glass-and-chrome towers of free India every year on August 15. I find myself staring at the torn kite fluttering from the neem tree. It presents an obvious metaphor—seventy-seven years of independence from British rule since 1947, and India is still a sputtering democracy, its aerodynamics malfunctioning every now and then. The country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who made his eleventh consecutive speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort, spoke of the future as conceivable by the government’s “Viksit Bharat 2047” (Developed India 2047) road map. The idealism is admirable, and the goals, which include turning India into a global investment hub, are perhaps achievable.

Kites, irrepressible emissaries of liberty, soar over the minarets and temples and spires and glass-and-chrome towers of free India every year on August 15.

This is the prime minister’s third term in office. His right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) formed a coalition government following the general elections this year. On June 4, when the election results were still trickling in, I was driving through the wide, tree-lined avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi. It was afternoon, a time when the summer heat can cause dehydration or, worse, grand upsets, manias, hallucinations. Yellow police barricades with the words delhi police had erupted everywhere and seemed to proliferate—ominous counterpoints to the laburnum trees in full bloom.

I’m not sure when I saw it, but I did, and at first I thought it was a mirage, a trick of the overzealous sun. But there it was—an apparition moving its arms and legs in a crude, unsynchronized fashion. More apparitions appeared outside the bungalows in the area, known as Lutyens’ Bungalow Zone, and joined in. A few of these buildings are offices or IT hubs of national political parties. It took a moment or two for me to realize that the gesticulating specters were party workers, dancing and playing the dholak—a hand drum with two drumheads. They were celebrating what was to be a compromised mandate with demanding coalition partners.

The scene—convulsed dancing in the incandescent heat to the rhythmic beats of a dholak—made me uneasy. Was the celebratory mood premature? Who had won, the people or a consortium of politicians? And what of democracy? Was it as enthusiastic about the results as the dancers, some of whom were wearing garlands of orange and yellow marigold? My disquiet was heightened by an essay I had recently read—Amit Chaudhuri’s On Being Indian (2023), a perceptive and gently humorous meditation on the state of Indian democracy. The essay was first delivered as a talk at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi in 2020, amidst the protests against the government’s Citizenship Amendment Act (caa), which was unfair to the country’s Muslim community.

The scene—convulsed dancing in the incandescent heat to the rhythmic beats of a dholak—made me uneasy.

The slim book (almost a pamphlet), with its unpretentious blue cover and classic typography, was published under Indian publisher Westland Books’ new imprint, “Literary Activism,” of which Chaudhuri is series editor. The second page revealed a subhead: The Organic Intellectual, Mystical Poetry, and Lineages of Indian Rationalism. The imprint, the compelling dimensions and design of the printed essay, the author’s preoccupations—all of it gestured toward a vital exploration of what it meant to “be Indian.”

I was on my way to a library a little beyond Lutyens’ Bungalow Zone and within an eclectic neighborhood, Gole Market (gole in Hindi means round). The area has a temple, a church, and a gurdwara, for those seeking varieties of solace and redemption. The market has other delights—old tea houses and newer local bakeries that serve flaky patties, almond and pistachio cookies, chole kulche (a popular indigenous snack), and kulfi, a creamy frozen dessert that has fruit variants—traditionally mango but also fashionable fruit like kiwi—in the summer. To get to the library, one must drive past the New Delhi General Post Office or Gole Dak Khana, an octagonal building at a busy roundabout. The colonial relic, with its stained-glass archways and pendulous ceiling fans, was built in 1931 by British architect Robert Tor Russell. It has over the years remained vigilant to, and somewhat disdainful of, the onslaught of modernity.

The variegated neighborhood was like a microcosm of this chaotic country.

The variegated neighborhood was like a microcosm of this chaotic country. The drive had put me in the mood for a contemplative survey of its recent politics, its democratic vision, its activism. On Being Indian, perhaps because of its slender dimensions, was in my handbag. I decided to defer the reading and research I was meant to embark upon in the library and to revisit Chaudhuri’s essay instead.

* * *

On Being Indian is an erudite interrogation, but its erudition isn’t pedantic. The essay has a luminous tint and texture, offering personal anecdotes than merge into cultural analysis and criticism. At the outset, Chaudhuri attempts to understand the meaning of the term “organic intellectual.” He recalls being in a rented flat in Paris between 2018 and 2019, on a fellowship. He discovers the term through his daughter, who is visiting from London, and working on two final-year theses. “As I attempted to grasp its meaning, I became aware of the vagueness of its provenance. It had been invented by Antonio Gramsci, but it’s not as if Gramsci had written a great deal about it.” As the essay progresses, he investigates the varied meanings of the word “intellectual” and the term “public intellectual,” and grapples with how the “organic intellectual” is different from either of them.

This was also a time of political tumult in India; the BJP returned for a second term in 2019. Chaudhuri delineates the new BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s early measures, in particular, the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act on December 11, 2019. The law provided refuge and Indian citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan but excluded Muslims from these countries. “One might say that the CAA was the first crystallization of xenophobic national policy in a global context in which xenophobia had been on the boil for some time, whether it was the panic over Syrian refugees, Trump’s ‘America First’ policies, or the referendum vote for Brexit, which would be achieved the following year,” he observes.

Anti-CAA protests erupted in several Indian cities. In Delhi, a locality called Shaheen Bagh became the site of a peaceful sit-in. Women, in particular Muslim women, including gnarled but determined grandmothers, stepped out of their homes to read the Constitution of India and recite nazms. The stretch of road upon which they protested turned into a cornucopia of art—posters, photographs, and installations with messages of resistance. A heart-shaped installation, consisting entirely of paper boats inscribed with lines from Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s “Hum Dekhenge” (We shall see) invoked the fragile beauty and, paradoxically, the resilience of the movement.

In Kolkata, Chaudhuri participated in an anti-CAA march from central Kolkata to the Gandhi statue near Chowringhee. He compares the December 2019 march to a previous procession in 2013, which was “thick with the presence of the traditional intellectual type—activists, academics, writers, filmmakers.” The march protesting the CAA was different because “ordinary” people participated in it, although traditional intellectuals were also present. Chaudhuri examines this ordinariness. He notices the onlookers—daily-wage vendors and pedestrians who seem absorbed by the politics unfolding before them: “It was as if they had grasped instinctively, even before the protesters had, that what was happening before them was not political in the usual sense of being party political; a new politics was being made here, albeit under duress.”

On Being Indian is Chaudhuri’s reconnaissance of this new politics; it is his scrutiny of “ordinariness” and its collective charisma; it is a gathering of different registers of meaning. Chaudhuri and his wife also visited the Park Circus protests in Kolkata on January 14, 2020. This was an assembly of predominantly Muslim women, much like the Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi. The area erupted into posters of Gandhi, B. R. Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose. The national flag—the Indian tricolor—proliferated at the site of the movement. Chaudhuri discusses this widespread reclaiming of national symbols by ordinary people—women in burqas who make speeches or cheer the speechmakers or distribute tea and biscuits to other peaceful agitators. He also digresses to dwell on India’s religious inheritance, the songs and poems of its philosophers and thinkers, and to suggest that this legacy has invigorated the protests against xenophobia.

On Being Indian draws from the news of the day, the songs of fifteenth-century mystic poet Kabir, Matthew Arnold’s 1880 essay “The Study of Poetry,” and ideas from the Enlightenment to examine intellectualism, secularism, religiosity, logic, and activism. Chaudhuri offers a compelling example of Kabir’s deployment of logic in his poems to argue, with discreet vehemence, that “rationality, in India, is religious thought’s means of refuting hegemony, and hegemony, until three hundred years ago, in India as elsewhere, was religion.” Here’s a verse:

If going naked
Brought liberation,
The deer of the forest
Would attain it first.

The third term of the Modi government, albeit a coalition, has commenced. On August 9, a postgraduate trainee was raped and murdered at the R. G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata. Protests erupted in several Indian cities. Women, and in particular doctors, stepped out of their homes, yet again, to remonstrate with the government. Candlelight rallies with handwritten slogans, urging an outraged people to “reclaim the night,” spread their impassioned intent on street corners.

Even as I write this, there is fresh news about the murdered intern’s autopsy reports. In the days to come, new slogans demanding justice for the dead, and safety for women navigating treacherous streets and workplaces, will emerge. Iconography, unique to these protests or inherited from previous ones, will articulate a collective anger.

The torn kite hangs with remarkable tenacity from a branch. On Being Indian lies on my desk, a vigorous interrogation, foreshadowing surrealistic days.

Perverse Pleasure

2022-07-12T00:56:00.000-07:00

Madhuja'r jonmodiney lekha kobita  - Anindya Chatterjee    জুলাই মাসে,
কোনও কোনও জন্মদিন আসে।
ঘরের পাশে,ভিড়ের বাসে
স্মৃতির ঘাসে,
জলোচ্ছ্বাসে জন্মদিন আসে।

এমনই এক জুলাইজাতক
কলেজস্ট্রিটের বৃষ্টিস্নাতক
তারই জন্যে শুভেচ্ছারা
ছিটিয়ে জল পাগলপারা

এখন অবশ্য বারিশধারা
শহরছাড়া…
দূরে কোথাও দূরে কোথাও
অন্য মুলুক অন্য পাড়া

তা-ও দেখি মেঘ সৃষ্টিছাড়া
টিপ করে টুপ ফেলল গালে
জন্মদিনের সাতসকালে
জন্ম নিল ইলশেগুড়ি,
জন্ম নিল জলছবিরা,
জুলাইকালে জুলাইকালে

চালের পায়েস গুনছে অতীত
অমুক সালে তমুক সালে

লংশটে,
আষাঢ়মাসেই এসব ঘটে
আরবজলের সাগরতটে
কী আষাঢ়ে গপ্পো বলো
কী আষাঢ়ে গল্প বটে

শুভ জন্মদিন মধুজা         

Perverse Pleasure

2022-07-08T06:38:00.001-07:00

Cynthia Cruz

Phosphorescence

Photographs of photographs and Polaroids
of stacks of books on fragments
and photographs and pamphlets
on letters sent and imminent
collisions. What the body does not know
it wants. And the mind.
In the song I wrote,
I said I wanted to be
like you, but then
I pulled back.
I am afraid most of the time
of my own intensity.
Not its kinesis, its brilliant light
and energy, but that it might
frighten you.
I have tried my whole life
to contain it, hold it
back. Make myself
into the perfect song,
the most contained
poem. But now I am
letting go of all that.
I have taken to photographing
my every moment
in an attempt to locate
the place where I lost myself.
When the body and the mind conflate
or, rather, when the body and language.
That is the moment I have been waiting for.

Perverse Pleasure

2022-07-07T02:47:00.001-07:00

Forty-Four
- Devin Johnston

In a deck chair
under castellated clouds
Campari and tonic
bitterness
and through damp air
the gleam of a distant lake
the property of stillness
or tang of iron-heavy water
turrets and castellations
September days
with a few acquaintances
talking seldom
and then always
in dry tones
of scuffed gravel
horseradish in vinegar
the snort before a sneeze
a piquant phrase
and wake of laughter
ceruleans
on wooded slopes
along the Cuivre
appetite
without fulfillment
no more outrageous hopes
one mountain pale
beyond another

Perverse Pleasure

2022-05-10T06:01:00.001-07:00

June 7. To get a head start
by Joanne Kyger

Yea, but I'm too old
Yea, but I'm growing too old
To wait around this long
______________________

Nobody wants to sit with me
_______________________

Forgive this interlude for a while: I became infinitely
glamorous and careless, like the best memory, of past
loves.
___________________________________________

I often tell women's secrets to men
___________________________________________

It was open, in the clear gray, morning. Babies
cries, and a dog barks, birds shrill from the top
of the trees.
I'm going to run away from all this.
I am going to enter into another dimension.
Oh my little head and hope. I am projected
ahead. I will realize the continuum from the past.
I will not be abusive, I am smitten in glory.
I am full of hopeful rushing. On into
the high out rocking waves.

Perverse Pleasure

2022-05-04T00:13:00.001-07:00

Map

Naomi Shihab Nye

Once

by mistake

she tore a map

in half.

She taped it back,

but crookedly.

Now all the roads

ended in water.

There were mountains

right next to her hometown.

Wouldn't that be nice

if it were true?

I'd tear a map

and be right next

to you.

Perverse Pleasure

2022-04-26T20:51:00.001-07:00

Love Song

by Denise Levertov

Your beauty, which I lost sight of once
for a long time, is long,
not symmetrical, and wears
the earth colors that make me see it.

A long beauty, what is that?
A song
that can be sung over and over,
long notes or long bones.

Love is a landscape the long mountains
define but don't
shut off from the
unseeable distance.

In fall, in fall,
your trees stretch
their long arms in sleeves
of earth-red and

sky-yellow, a little
lop-sided. I take
long walks among them. The grapes
that need frost to ripen them

are amber and grow deep in the
hedge, half-concealed,
the way your beauty grows in long tendrils
half in darkness.

Perverse Pleasure

2022-03-21T23:27:00.001-07:00

Diane di Prima

Song for Spring Equinox

It is the first day of spring, the children are singing
(they are supposed to be sleeping) the clock is ticking
the cats are waiting for supper, one of them pregnant
kittens to herald the spring, nothing is blooming
nothing seems to bloom much around farms, just hayfields and corn
farms are too pragmatic, I look at ads
for hydrangea bushes, which I hate they remind me of brooklyn

for chinese wisteria vines, which I can't picture
but they sound exotic and mysterious
a kind of blue purple, I decide I'll get some

will I be disappointed, will they be yellow?
will I hate the Shetland pony we are buying
will we run out of wholewheat flour this week
before a new supply drives up from the city?

oh, it is very like being a pioneer,
but then everything is in this country, and in the country
especially. it was like being a pioneer on 5th street, too
and houston street, and amsterdam avenue
and in brooklyn, under the streetlights growing up
rollerskating at dusk with stickball games in the street
was the most pioneery of all,

it is slightly boring,
it tastes a lot of the times crossword puzzle
and ordering things thru the mail, which never come
or turn out wrong, or come the wrong color (wisteria)

I can't blame Alan for planning to go to India
to free his kundalini, so that his ears peel
or something dreadful happens to his physique
we are built for the exotic, we americans, this landscape leaves us
as open as a piece of chocolate cream pie

Perverse Pleasure

2022-02-08T07:02:00.001-08:00

Impermanence
By Alex Dimitrov
Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018)

The first ending. And knowing it would end
I wanted another. Lover, summer,
pen with which to write it all down.
The first disappointment. Which is not
remembered but lives in the body.
And how familiar it became. To take
the same walk home or lean over ledges,
to say my own name when meeting someone.
Again and again for the last time:
the taste of salt in the afternoon.
Flowers for no one—alive and sold on the street.
What did I think was promised in being?
The way a stranger can finish you off.
Once only. And never the same
after that. After knowledge.
How people are being detained
and shot with our money.
All of which cannot prepare us for death
of which I am a student
and which is this country's business:
the permanence of others.
Even our cruelty toward one another.
Will end. And I know
that looking at the night sky
is me looking at the past. At light
that's long escaped and travels alone
but won't always.

Perverse Pleasure

2022-01-21T05:56:00.001-08:00

Green Night
By Edward Hirsch
Issue no. 182 (Fall 2007)

(Summer, 1982)

We walked down the path to breakfast.
The morning swung open like an iron gate.

We sat in Adirondack chairs and argued
for hours about the self—it wasn't personal—

and the nature of nature, the broken
Word, the verse of God in fragments.

We trotted back and forth to readings.
The trees were the greenest I had ever seen.

We cut bread from a large brown loaf
at a long wooden table in the mountains.

A farmer hayed the meadows
and the afternoon flared around us.

Pass the smoky flask. Pass the cigarettes:
twenty smouldering friends in a package.

We swam in the muddy pond at dusk.
The sky was a purple I had never seen.

Someone was always hungover,
Scheming with rhymes, hanging out.

Nothing could quench our thirst for each other.
At the bonfire, we flamed with words.

The houses were named after trees.
I slept with someone at the top of a maple.

It was a green night to be a poet in those days.
We didn't care if the country didn't care about us.

Image: Pinterest

Perverse Pleasure

2022-01-18T07:07:00.001-08:00

Diffused love
by Suchi Govindarajan
:::::::::

To grow up without cold seasons is
to find an obsession dusted with snow
For too long, my sun kept drawing shadows
But in my dreams, I would see tree trunks
branching into fragile hands
my bare prayer held up against the white

I imagined the weighted blanket of it
how it might quieten my heart's chaos
make my longings more calm and austere

In days when sunspots flecked my lashes
and the sand felt blister-rough as though it
would fuse into glass and catch the glare,
I dreamt of becoming a migrant bird
compelled to find routes away from the sun
I would follow every winter wind and current
And as calendars faded to blue-ink endings,
I would fly to lands full of diffused light

Like the Earth, I too would complete my orbit
pulled by a strange and foreign love.

Perverse Pleasure

2022-01-18T06:23:00.001-08:00

The Root of Mother is Moth
By Terese Svoboda
Issue no. 106 (Spring 1988)

At dusklight she slips
into acetate underclothing,
all rustling.
Has she slept
all day? Or is that housedress
draped over the hassock warm? From her motion,
one of submission, her pale arms
upraised, the slip sliding,
talc issues invisibly.

Mother is faceless so far up in the dark.
Just her torso glows,
and the color around her takes on the design
of a falling leaf, grey-yellow plaid.

From the mirror, she draws what little light
there is inside her, and sighs.
But she is really very young
and will think so later.

Now nothing can claim her.
I am quiet, all chrysalis,
hidden in her closet.

Perverse Pleasure

2021-12-09T06:03:00.001-08:00

"Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair"
by Reginald Shepherd

In the painting by Guido Reni of Saint Sebastian
in the Palazzo Rosso, which reproduction makes available
to those who travel only on the page, the saint to be
(he's not yet assumed by artifice, encumbered

with perfections) endures continual martyrdom
with a visual sigh, gazing almost directly upward
as if to ask What now my love, or hum a chorus of
Is that all there is, the body always some song

or another. The eye tramping the simulacrum
of a surface hands have touched can't help but note
how lush the uncorrupted flesh appears: the curve, for one
example, of the waist (narrowest circuit of the boy),

just beneath the instance of an arrow's entrance, or
the shadow just above the tangled loincloth that is surely
pubic hair. One grasps that sainthood is an attribute of youth,
the wondrous fair, as in old ballads; they always end.

The boy in the Eagle Discount Supermarket,
for another, an apparition in a backwards baseball cap
appraising cuts of meat in artificial light,
deciding what he can afford

to buy, how much each cut costs. I love the ground
on where be stands. His face? Unverifiable.

Image from the Internet

Perverse Pleasure

2021-12-08T23:11:00.001-08:00

Bunny Slope
by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

When I'm writing a poem,
there's less and less of it.

As I approach the mountains,
they vanish behind a gentle hill,
behind the bunny slope.

And once I'm standing with them
face to face,
they take away my speech.

The very best poem
finishes half way

Image from the Internet

Perverse Pleasure

2021-12-03T11:51:00.001-08:00

On Being Coy
by Kimiko Hahn
Issue no. 186 (Fall 2008)

Many fish in those murky ocean caves
of Mexico, Brazil, Croatia, Oman

have no eyes.
Though in the streams outside—

clear as a frat bar in '75—

other males zip around and nip the females

to test chemical signals
and harass

with so much sex

that the females often cease to exist.
Better off

with a slower, blind suitor

I say—then think of Marvell's "rough strife"—
which I adore.

See—a little coyness can work
to cloud the current.

Those black lizard boots instead of mules—
that Manhattan tourist spot.

He's twenty-five. I'm forty.
He demands one thing—well, two: my feet.

See what I mean?
Little has changed in the carpe diem—
or the simmering transparent stream.

Perverse Pleasure

2021-12-02T04:22:00.001-08:00

Domestic Life — Gregory Orr

11 January 2015

from: The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems

1. TODAY
Open yourself up: today
that's no different than opening
a refrigerator door: large chunks
of meat, eggs
scattered on the metal racks,
and cowering in the back:
a tiny, frightened woman.
You are huge and clumsy;
you fumble for her, breaking
all the eggs, and she eludes you,
and you don't feel a thing
except cold inside.

2. SOMETHING
Something is burning inside you
like a rose made from cellophane,
like something white burning
in a snowfield: no flames,
all you can see is the shadow
of smoke on the snow.

3. BEFORE DAWN
Your wife left before you woke.
She scratched a note on your back;
you try to read it with mirrors.
You decide to talk to the cat,
but when you open your mouth
honey-colored wasps fly out.

The blood in the lightbulbs
burns less brightly.

4. THE WATERFALL
Failing to hold on to things,
a man can become
a waterfall.
His friends stare,
silent and aghast,
as he disappears
over the cliff, carrying
off his books, his wife,
all his furniture.

5. FALL CLEANING
This morning, the almost weightless bodies
of insects drift down
from the ceiling. It's seasonal;
you have to expect that sort of thing
when you live in a burrow under the earth.
Yesterday a package arrived
in the mail; it contained bird beaks
in assorted colors and sizes.
Some are small like yellow thorns,
but others are larger;
I slip those over my fingers,
clack them together and dance
around the room in my gray bathrobe.
The insects revive. I am their god.
They dance after me up the tunnel
and out into the autumn woods.

Perverse Pleasure

2021-12-02T04:20:00.001-08:00

From Life
by Shane McCrae

I came from life from living I arrived

Nowhere in the midst of God in the midst of God

God is a city in which no one has ever lived

We live in houses like the houses we once had

Some in their first some in their last

I live in the house I lived in with my wife

The first year we were married a small white

House at the edge of campus it's as if

We never graduated never left

Except she isn't here and none of our

Friends but the friends who died so long ago

They aren't our friends anymore

I do what old friends do

And love them anyway we eat together at the Waf-

fle House on Saturdays and wait all week to die

How many weeks now I don't know

Except it can't be more than three

Thousand I guess about three thousand sixty years or so

Or how long do young people live

Seems like it's longer every day three thousand or

She would be here with me I have

Thought hard about it and I'm sure

But sometimes I feel like I've thought about

Her life for longer than she could have lived it

And mean to ask an angel why we can see

Everything but Earth from Heaven

But I don't ask I don't think I could stand to not

Be answered but I don't think I could stand the answer

Perverse Pleasure

2021-11-29T22:12:00.001-08:00

Poem
by Alice Notley
Issue no. 56 (Spring 1973)

The havoc-caused
soul occurs not
recovers yet the
treatment bought
with submission
fiddles and
caricatures contains nothing but
heal intoxication
(courage is in-
toxication) wide
& embedded
stalactite and
fall of snow... so

He winds a sheet around me
which must be sarong & song
He asks can I protect myself
I say I'm aware of my self-
inviolability he says
he means can I grease a car
for everyone must run a race
in the body's own running place

Running's itself's pure pleasure
I begin to overtake myself
and suddenly I was first
at the end of the race
along with everyone else

For we are all in college to learn to Marry:

  the winding dragon of night
  and horses of day and humming-
  birds motes of light and the
  dragon of the night:

  in black dress will be the lady
  in a silver vest or it's black
  against which looms the lighter
  black tree loom.

One steps
on a rusty nail, disbelieves
in lockjaw one thinks forever without a thought

telephone poles & railroad tracks
the same and the same and the
same silver clack telephone wires the
luminous lines of the world
on which I walk

bare feet in fog
foggy-footed spider See
the spider toe-dance on its
tender tendril legs across
my hand shimmering mote
with room comfort room service
silver artifice & uprightness
an arrow's a lily a lily's an arrow

blank blank yellow & red blank

...I weep I read novels
Someday I'll count all your freckles
bagatelles of transient experience
A different one always dies
whose name seems forgotten a sacred
thread blows away
my rags of righteousness

are all your heroism your social charm your
wit your victories on land
on sea?
Style he says is the ultimate morality
of mind
Stick cinnamon is 84 cents

O Turmeric
of use in mustard chow-chow piccalilli
sauces where the color the COLOR
yellow is thought desireable!
for that is life, to blaze with color.

One ignores the gossip
rounds the turn
dances & ducks & jabs
& Bites the Blade. Pleasant days.
There's a tone-free bullet
Someone cycles away

something strums
not tree not airplane
not seen
I stop
not entirely to pieces

I flow
in litter of sunflower seeds.

"The whole path of a material particle
between any limits of time must achieve some
perfection worthy
of the providence of God"
Everything I have has an earwig in it

which will make light of sacred things,
a genuine form being seen

a light and things

some kisses being exchanged
amid the whirl of the maddening dance.

Joy now is high-wire joy.

Perverse Pleasure

2021-06-06T10:54:00.001-07:00

The Great Confinement

By Sandy Solomon

Year of sighs, year of planning ahead—
how to acquire food or meet friends
for afternoon talks in the outdoor air.
Of planning nothing. Whole days washed clean
in the round of known rooms, known chores.

I followed forecasts to calculate when
to walk down the alley, around the block,
the same dogs barking, recycling bins
bursting with cardboard. I envied people stuck
in the country amid trees, beside a lake
that took in sky. And people, I presume,
envied us, with our covered front porch
and back garden, its sloping tangle of leaves.
We'd thrown ourselves down wherever the music
stopped, in a place we planned to stay a season
at most, until a hidden hand could hit the volume.

Year of stories—of books, recorded voices
through the night, faces on screens: familiars
holding cocktail glasses, jam jars
into view to toast . . . what precisely?
happy hours? Of meetings, of classes: click
to speak, click to mute, click to leave.

Year of household tasks. Mold that grew
because we used the kitchen so hard:
the endless sponge-down—meal after meal,
day after day. Dust that gathered
like thoughts of Somewhere Else, Another Time,
Other People. When I set two plates for dinner,
I could imagine my mother on her daily walk—
careful, stiff-hipped, alone—to the mailbox,
silence at each elbow, around her throat.
When I searched for new ways to cook kale
or tried baking bread, as oven warmth
and savory smells revised the room in stews
or casseroles, I could imagine mothers
trying to stretch their kids' milk between
food-bank trips. Year of feeling lucky.

Year of forgetting in the days' drift. Then
abruptly remembering: sadness sensed
in a jolt, the way when I opened the kitchen bin—
just emptied, just cleaned, it seemed—
a rotten smell hit me, knocked me back.

Year of sighs, year of sighs, names
of the ones gone away, their faces appearing.
For months, as afternoon light grew long,
I thought, Must call Mom. Even after.

I thought of Hélène—years ago,
when we stood, she and I, before
a painting she'd made, its colors shifting
as the oil she'd rigged behind the canvas
face shifted inside its frame,
and I thought, I like your art, your stories:
her story's end in plastic tubes,
white edges, machine thrums
and bleeps, room mostly bleached
of color against the blue hospital
gowns that hovered then disappeared,
Hélène, inside her great struggle,
the suffocating, persistent,
solitary smell of alcohol.

Year of distance upon distance. I thought
of candles in the Hall of Mirrors when, one night,
I'd walked its length after a concert—light
echoing as lights regressed from sconce
to mirror to mirror and back in Versailles, the flames'
flicker—presence, movement—enclosed in infinite
space, each candle point insisting, here,
here, smaller and smaller, left and right,
as I passed through, passed among them.
What is the point? Here is the point. What
is the point? Here. Thrilling, a privileged sight
as I moved down the Hall, as down the year,
toward the night air, the dear dead
ones receding, drifting further back,
in reflected, refracted, lovely multitudes,
and then, at the end, no point, no point at all.

Kolkata Dreaming

2020-09-08T09:13:00.001-07:00

Missing my annual trip through Kumortuli bylanes, missing home

2020-09-08T09:12:00.001-07:00

Perverse Pleasure

2020-06-24T18:32:00.001-07:00

"How long will the pain last?" a broken hearted mourner asked me.

"All the rest of your Life." I have to answer truthfully.

We never quite forget.

No matter how many years pass, we remember.

The loss of a loved one is like a major operation.

Part of us is removed, and we have a scar for the rest of our lives.

As years go by, we manage.

There are things to do, people to care for,

tasks that call for full attention.

But the pain is still there,

not far below the surface.

We see a face that looks familiar,

hear a voice that echoes,

see a photograph in someone's album,

see a landscape that once we saw together,

and it seems as though a knife were in the wound again.

But not so painfully.. And mixed with joy, too.

Because remembering a happy time is not all sorrow,

it brings back happiness with it.

How long will the pain last?

All the rest of your life.

But the things to remember is that not only the pain will last, but the blessed memories as well.

Tears are proof of life. The more love, the more tears.

If this be true, Then how could we ever ask that the pain cease altogether.

For then the memory of love would go with it.

The pain of grief is the price we pay for love.

– Martha White

Perverse Pleasure

2020-06-09T05:35:00.000-07:00

Cruising 99

BY GARRETT HONGO

for Lawson Fusao Inada and Alan Chong La

A Porphyry of Elements

Starting in a long swale between the Sierras

and the Coast Range,

Starting from ancient tidepools of a Pleistocene sea,

Starting from exposed granite bedrock,

From sandstone and shale, glaciated, river-worn,

and scuffed by wind,

Tired of the extremes of temperature,

the weather's wantonness,

Starting from the survey of a condor's eye

Cutting circles in the sky over Tehachapi and Tejon,

Starting from lava flow and snow on Shasta,

a head of white hair,

a garland of tongue-shaped obsidian,

Starting from the death of the last grizzly,

The final conversion of Tulare County

to the internal-combustion engine,

Staring from California oak and acorn,

scrubgrass, rivermist,

and lupine in the foothills,

From days driving through the outfield clover

of Modesto in a borrowed Buick,

From nights drinking pitchers of dark

in the Neon Moon Bar & Grill,

From mornings grabbing a lunchpail, work gloves,

and a pisspot hat,

From Digger pine and Douglas fir and aspen around Placerville,

From snowmelt streams slithering into the San Joaquin,

From the deltas and levees and floods of the Sacramento,

From fall runs of shad, steelhead, and salmon,

From a gathering of sand, rock, gypsum, clay,

limestone, water, and tar,

From a need or desire to throw your money away

in The Big City,

From a melting of history and space in the crucible

of an oil-stained hand—

Starting from all these, this porphyry of elements,

this aggregate of experiences

Fused like feldspar and quartz to the azure stone

of memory and vision,

Starting from all of these and an affectionate eye

for straight, unending lines,

We hit this old road of Highway Ninety-Nine!

Perverse Pleasure

2020-03-15T09:26:00.001-07:00

May 1, 2017 The New Yorker Issue
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/saturday-night-as-an-adult

Saturday Night as an Adult
By Anne Carson

We really want them to like us. We want it to go well. We overdress. They are narrow people, art people, offhand, linens. It is early summer, first hot weekend. We meet on the street, jumble about with kisses and are we late? They had been late, we'd half-decided to leave, now oh well. That place across the street, ever tried it? Think we went there once, looks closed, says open, well. People coming out. O.K. Inside is dark, cool, oaken. Turns out they know the owner. He beams, ushers, we sit. And realize at once two things, first, the noise is unbearable, two, neither of us knows the other well enough to say bag it. Our hearts crumble. We order food by pointing and break into two yell factions, one each side of the table. He and she both look exhausted, from (I suppose) doing art all day and then the new baby. We eat intently, as if eating were conversation. We keep passing the bread. My fish comes unboned, I weep pretending allergies. Finally someone pays the bill and we escape to the street. For some reason I was expecting snow outside. There is none. We decide not to go for ice cream and part, a little more broken. Saturday night as an adult, so this is it. We thought we'd be Nick and Nora, not their blurred friends in greatcoats. We cover our ears inside our souls. But you can't stop it that way.

Taraxacum (Dandelions)

2020-03-15T09:18:00.001-07:00

Photo by: PHILIPPE HUGUEN/GETTY