Jay Kasturi

Jay Kasturi Poems

I have a memory of a lighthouse in rain;
the ocean below in cold spray,
the waves among the rocks
and the sky lost in gray.
...

She said she never had any say,
not in the sun,
not under the clouds.
Birth is the beginning,
...

The philosopher lived by the lightness
of his thoughts
and died under the weight
of his theory.
...

My last life, ten slices
of longitudes east, is one part memory
as inarticulate as childhood's innocence
and the rest reconstructed
...

Times when art is a contrivance,
science a numeric construct,
all thinking, effects chasing causes
and dreaming an excess before sleep,
...

We are here for the craft
of sealing every empty corner
with a word or two; even if all had been
learnt from the sun and the moon,
...

My blue share is confined these days
to hospital rooms,
my darkness to the scent of aging hardwood
in funeral homes,
...

More I trusted my passion then
than my meditation now.
The years strive and shape
the chaos into a sober line,
...

What do I remember of my home,
the constancy of seclusion
like the north star
in a crowded sky, a parenthesis
...

It is unbearable to know that
everything I learnt I will forget,
that everything I write down
will slip from my mind, one day.
...

All poetry is exaggeration,
as youth is, saying things
with uncommon words.
Words stain what we hear,
...

The stars surface above the hills as if from a darkening
Polaroid negative,
The last bird has reached home – purple glow, in Bengal,
it is the cow-dust time.
...

Route 23, Butler, New Jersey,5: 30 P.M.,
traffic barely moving,
ahead, a redhead in a Jetta,
in end-of-the-day abandon,
...

14.

Between the taxicab’s window rolling down an inch
and the beggar’s hand darting in
is fraction of a second,
an infinity of misery.
...

Dropping a fistful of earth
on your cold body in a pit,
changes nothing.
Fistful after fistful,
...

I shall hold on to my piece of the bone,
knuckle bone, they say;
you hold on to yours.
Interlocking symbols
...

Thus she was taken away from me,
snatched in ultimate violation,
under a white cotton sheet.
Taken away the years, the moon,
...

Two horns follow an oboe’s gait
in single-minded trance,
not minding the clarinet's caution
and the piccolo's feigned passion
...

19.

Omne animal triste post coitum-
resigned recapitulation, yet some like the spider
in estrus-planned compulsion
will eat her duty-bound mate.
...

20.

Does the one-legged trance of a crane
long for two-legged bliss,
does one hand clapping, in beating the wind,
mourn for its companion?
...

Jay Kasturi Biography

I live in Sparta, a small town in the hilly northwest corner of New Jersey. I came to the US in 1970 and took my graduate degree in Computer Science. Although science was somehow always the area of my academic concentration, poetry was, to me, from the very beginning, somewhat of a passion, a meditation, the only way to project what I find lies too deep for any other form of expression. I began writing poetry in my native language at the age of 13 and slowly made the transition to English at 17. In the beginning, I followed the traditional form of poetry, the usual pattern of rhyme, the semblance of a meter and a single and tightly-bound theme. Later, I began to feel that it is somewhat constraining, limiting what I wanted to write and limiting what poetry meant to me. To me, poetry is something like an iceberg, what is seen is what is on the page. The meaning or its general and specific import themselves may be partly in the poet's mind, partly in the reader's grasp of it and yet there may be another part that is for ever hidden. Thus the words, the images and the symbols and the allusions used in a poem assume a life of their own, opening the poem up to multiple interpretations that may change even further with the passage of time. Apart from a few poems in the university literary magazine during my undergraduate studies, I stayed away from publishing my poems. I write poems because the words seem to come to me, sometimes unsought, and I have a basic need to write. It has become a sort of healing for me, a way of rising above the daily din, a most rewarding release.)

The Best Poem Of Jay Kasturi

Maine In Spring

I have a memory of a lighthouse in rain;
the ocean below in cold spray,
the waves among the rocks
and the sky lost in gray.
Not a lobster trap’s marker, not a sail’s cuneiform hint,
not a gull scoring an alliterative scrawl,
just the rain’s affirming constancy.
Between the wipers on the windshield,
Hood’s November written in April’s rain.
That was twenty long years ago,
Maine in spring, in winter’s wake,
a poster, tack-torn at the corner
and fading into all that is lost.

(1999)

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