FIRST DRAFT
It’s just old fashioned, they say,
to use pen and paper for first drafts
but I still need
the early shiver of ink
in a white February wind —
the blue slope and curve
of letter
bursting into stream
the smudge of blind alley
the retraced step, the groove
of old caravan routes, the slow thaw
of glacier, the chasm that cannot be forded
by image.
And I need reprieve, perhaps a whole season,
before I arrive at that first inevitable chill
when a page I dreamt piecemeal
in some many-voiced moon-shadowed thicket
flickers back at me
in Everyman’s handwriting
filaments of smell and sight
cleanly amputated —
Times New Roman, font size fourteen.
CLASS PHOTOGRAPH
It’s always the girl in the middle row
in school photographs of Class Two —
the one with two plaits, gaze as vacant
as a chorus, the one whose name
is on the tip of your tongue,
as you leaf through old albums
on weekend afternoons, a name that never quite
manages to emerge from that muddle
of almost and not quite, until
one day someone casually mentions
she died ten years ago
and then the click
of epiphany —
blue water-bottle
school-bus regular
monopoliser of seesaws
Ami Modi, more vivid and centre-stage
in the mind’s proscenium
than ever before
and you believe the details
must mean something, add up
to some vital clue
and you almost know what
but the knowledge remains poised
on the tip of the tongue
awaiting another nudge,
another infinitesimal lurch
into the bigger picture.
I LIVE ON THE ROAD
I live on a road,
a long magic road,
full of beautiful people.
The women cultivate long mocha legs
and the men sculpt their torsos
right down to the designer curlicue
of hair under each arm.
The lure is the same:
to confront self with Self
in this ancient city of mirrors
that can bloat you
into a centrespread,
dismantle you
into eyes, hair, teeth, butt,
shrink you
into a commercial break,
explode you
into 70 mm immortality.
But life on this road is about waiting
about austerities at the gym
and the beauty parlour,
about prayer outside the shrines
of red-eyed producers,
about PG digs waiting to balloon
into penthouses,
auto rickshaws into Ferraris,
Mice into chauffeurs.
Blessed by an epidemic
of desperate hope,
at any moment,
my road
might beanstalk
to heaven.
THE SAME QUESTION
Again and again the same questions, my love,
those that confront us
and vex nations,
or so they claim —
how to disarm
when we still hear
the rattle of sabre,
the hiss of tyre
from the time I rode my red cycle
all those summers ago
in my grandmother’s back-garden
over darting currents of millipede,
watching them,
juicy, bulging, with purpose,
flatten in moments
into a few hectic streaks of slime,
how to disarm,
how to choose
mothwing over metal,
underbelly over claw,
how to reveal raw white nerve fibre
even while the drowsing mind still clutches
at carapace and fang,
how to believe
this gift of inner wrist
is going to make it just a little easier
for a whale to sing again in a distant ocean
or a grasshopper to dream
n some sunwarmed lull of savannah.
NIGHT SHIFT
The oldest fears are the last to go
like the pre-dawn dread
of a process as impersonal
and tribal as birth
or dream
when someone masked and familiar —
the absence in the cupboard –
reappears for that ancient night-shift routine:
to pry something intimate
wet and still unprepared
from an aeon of self-assemblage
something that should have known
that entrails must always aspire
to be asphalt
that the unambiguity of day
was never meant to be trusted –
its promise of mountain wind and blue summer sea —
then the servile cringe
he desperate bargains of the diehard trader
squawk
squiggle of nerve and gut
erasure of struggle
before the civilities
of sun
and cereal
and the imperceptible click of the cupboard door.
Contributor:
ARUNDHATI SUBRAMANIAM. Bombay-based poet. Her first book of poems, On Cleaning Bookshelves, was published in 2001. She writes on performing arts and literature for various national publications, edits a poetry website, and heads Chauraha, an interactive interdisciplinary arts forum at Bombay’s National Centre for the Performing Arts.
