Ravi Shankar Poems

One is never alone. Saltwater taffy colored
beach blanket spread on a dirt outcropping
pocked with movement. Pell-mell tunneling,

black specks the specter of beard hairs swarm,
disappear, emerge, twitch, reverse course
to forage along my shin, painting pathways

with invisible pheromones that others take
up in ceaseless streams. Ordered disarray,
wingless expansionists form a colony mind,

no sense of self outside the nest, expending
summer to prepare for winter, droning on
through midday heat. I watch, repose, alone.
...

So you remember Superman,
Not Shaktimaan, veal not enthu
cutlets in Ramarajan pants
turning up half hour early
to help the host host his party?

So you've scarfed cheesy gorditas
at Taco Bell, but no greasy
papads at a roadside dhaaba?
Never watched Barrister Vinod
or serials on Doordarshan?

So you've never used IST,
or Indian Stretchable Time,
as genuinely plausible
excuse for your perpetual
lateness or said za as a kid -

three one za three, three two za six -
to help in practicing learning
your multiplication tables.
Don't fret. Been wrung dry by tightwads?
Then you know well kanjus, possessed

with fear of losing a rupee
to such crazy degree they'd suck
ghee from a just alighted flea.
And if your mobile lost charge,
you'd burn for an STD booth!

Remember the Vedas are Late
Bronze Age scriptures ancient enough
to turn gayatrification
into slang verb for embellish,
Mahabharat, euphemism

for an epic confrontation
with a sad power pakora
bladu bore of a co-worker
wagging her thumb shame shame puppy
shame over a missing cool drink,

like Thums Up, Limca or Mango
Maaza, from the call center fridge.
A tale to mockingly relate
to your chaddi buddies, your boys
from childhood. Your bros. Your bum chums.

Or say the alphabet with me.
Say A-B-C-D-E-F-G-
H-I-J, for American
Born Confused Desi Escaped From
Gujarat Hiding In Jersey.

You don't have to be Indian
to be Indian, just possess
a sense of Hindu rate of growth:
the economy spluttering
along at 3.5%

while the population explodes
at nearly 25%
during much of the latter half
of the 20th century.
Forget the Raj. The crisps-loving

Brits. The tish-pash starlets
From Tollywood or Indiepop.
The sofa sadhu sipping chai,
toking bhang smoke from a chillum
still trills janaganamana.
...

There's nowhere else I'd rather not be than here,
But here I am nonetheless, dispossessed,
Though not quite, because I never owned
What's been taken from me, never have belonged
In and to a place, a people, a common history.
Even as a child when I was slurred in school -
Towel head, dot boy, camel jockey -
None of the abuse was precise: only Sikhs
Wear turbans, widows and young girls bindus,
Not one species of camel is indigenous to India . . .
If, as Simone Weil writes, to be rooted
Is the most important and least recognized need
Of the human soul, behold: I am an epiphyte.
I conjure sustenance from thin air and the smell
Of both camphor and meatloaf equally repel me.
I've worn a lungi pulled between my legs,
Done designer drugs while subwoofers throbbed,
Sipped masala chai steaming from a tin cup,
Driven a Dodge across the Verrazano in rush hour,
And always to some degree felt extraneous,
Like a meteorite happened upon bingo night.
This alien feeling, honed in aloneness to an edge,
Uses me to carve an appropriate mask each morning.
I'm still unsure what effect it has on my soul.
...

(Transliterated from the Sanskrit)

Nalineedalagatha Jalamatitharalam
Tadwajjeevitamathishaya Chapalam
Viddhi Vyadhayabhimanagrastam
Lokam Shaokahtam Cha Samastham

- Sri Bhagavadpada Shankara
The water-drop trembles upon a lotus petal.
Pureed early peas dribble down my chin.
I squall. Someone reads to me, if I am
Lucky. Green turns to brown, my bare feet

Benumbed by checkerboard tile. Turns back
To green. I trade waddling for two wheels,
Using the sidewalk as starlings use the sky.
Soon my sandwiches are sealed in plastic

And I scribble sentences in spiral notebooks:
Jane picked, picks, will pick an apple from
The tree. When evening calls, my body listens
In spurts. Here an inch, there a curve, there

Nothing at all. I discover deodorant, discard
Tube socks, smooth my limbs or upper lips.
The world outside becomes a mirror inside
My mind. Soon I trade two wheels for four,

Speed to the shore with windows down, beer
Chilling in the trunk, my hand on someone's
Thigh. Waves crash, recede, splinter into foam.
The sun slinks from the sky. All the cheering

Stops. Suddenly I find myself collating
Or married and hating what I do each day.
I spend my paychecks on color televisions
With surround sound, drink two scotches

For lunch, sleep with that stranger down
The block to compensate, I tell myself,
To inject some thrill into this farm animal
Of a life. When the kids appear, my brow

Has the permanent etching of a cenotaph,
Parenting scars. Love habituates, the kids
Bluster about independence, the will wears
Into reflex and the vacations are not enough.

In time retired, house vacated, I stir to strap
A camera around my neck as accompaniment
To the ubiquitous sweat-shirt, securing
A constant peregrination berth, spouting

From Jet d'eau to Fontana di Trevi, yet life
Remains as unstable as passage across sea.
Possibly my heart fails or kidneys mutiny
Or I am flapjacked by a French malfaiteur

In a humpback Citroen. Kids may bring
Carnations through rollaway cloth curtains
Smelling of disinfectant. Perhaps then,
With sustenance and spilth cathetered,

I will see my life, family, fellow citizens,
This planet Earth suspended in an amplitude
Of stars, as a single water-drop loosed from
A lotus petal, spreading drowsy circles in a lake.
...

Bark of the birch, aria of the oriole, grit of the sand-grain,
In the first stanza I shall attempt to confiscate your essence
And each time, you will slip through the noose of language,
Having no owner. Your brief appearance, though, is enough
For the covetous page, conferring the illusion of presence.

Even the breaths heaving in my chest do not belong to me,
These wires of muscles tapping the hand's opposable thumb
Upon the spacebar, and the precise machinery of two pupils
Taking it in are not mine, though convenient to think so.
In the second stanza, I shall feel like an outsider in my body.

Emptied of the need to own, I become the pit of a plum.
We color our language, Wallace Stevens wrote to Elsie Moll,
And Truth, being white, becomes blotched in transmission.
In the third, final stanza, I will understand what he meant
For a moment, before the old words come flooding back.
...

Marrow-sprung, eucharistic fount, black
pudding beaten in a bucket, kept
from coagulating, final taboo sopped

in a tampon or gargling from a slit
carotid artery, left to darken in air
like sunset stored in citrated vials

for transfusion, thimblefuls of grape
juice, wedding ring on a leach finger,
brackish foodstuff for the undead,

not wrung from turnips, no denser
than porter, it flows filtered forward,
pumps from valves until it clumps.
...

Say I'm just a plainclothes Indian,
not from a tribe but from a high caste,
just driving home past Chelsea on 34th,
trying to find the West Side Highway.
Windows down, thrumming cross-town,
when I see the rearview flashing lights.

Sober as a compass, headed up north,
no mullah or drug mule yet still I'm brown.
Got the Sand Nigger Blues.

"Just a glass of wine with dinner, Officer,
and yes I own this car. See my name's
on the registration. No, I'm not coming
from that far. I live in Connecticut
and was just headed home. Employed?
Yes I teach for a living. I'm a professor.
A poetry professor. No I don't have
a firearm or any outstanding warrants."

Sober as a compass, headed up north,
no mullah or drug mule yet still I'm brown.
Got the Sand Nigger Blues.

From the rear of a barred van the city
passes by in streaks. Cuffed in a human
chain, rights unread, and oxford laces
pulled from my shoes. I'm the lightest
one of three dozen or more, all huddled
together tonight on this concrete floor.

Sober as a compass, headed up north,
no mullah or drug mule yet still I'm brown.
Got the Sand Nigger Blues.
...

for Doug Andersen

Waiting for the Norwegian poet to read
her poems, you delineated the differences
between you and her by pointing to Jesus.

Her version, you said, was radiating outwards,
wave and astral particle, revelatory energy
and blinding light, inherently metaphysical.

Your version, however, was dusty and dog-
tired, having walked too long too far in feet
that ached, in draggled robes, in desperate

need of a hot bath, bread, a goblet of wine,
something to take his mind of those carping
apostles, those omnipresent Roman soldiers.

Sitting here, alone, looking out at the play
of sun and shadow on crenellated ferns,
I'm conjuring a third Christ, neither weary

nor luminous, but one who lives nowhere
save within me, indwelling life illimitable
that I will remain estranged from so long

as I insist on insisting, on putting my own
pleasure, which is all I know deeply or well,
first. A Christ who wears my body's garment.

Raise the stone, there thou shalt find me;
cleave the wood and there I am. Let not
him who seeks cease until he finds. When

he finds, he shall be astonished. Astonished,
he shall reach the Kingdom. Having reached
the Kingdom, he shall (shall he? shall I?) rest.
...

Half-past on the 9:07 local to New Haven, the Bronx
tenements pent in vaguely post-apocalyptic paragraphs
rushing past too fast to cohere into prose, leaving loops
of graffiti, marred and boarded windows, a hoops game
glowing yellowish in the mercury vapor of street lights,
a Pontiac Bonneville, tireless, jacked up on cinder blocks.

Time waving like a hand from a train I wanted to be on.

Riding a train embodies democracy. Not like cramped,
dank seats of a bus or on the highway where cars mark
the demographic by make and model, here everything
is equalized, time and space included. The post-punk
pierced girl, ears plugged with music, sits next to a man,
silk cravat loosened, fixated on his snuff box, providing
the grand illusion of temporal continuity, the centuries
stacked one on top of the other, a set of encyclopedias.

Time waving like a hand from a train I wanted to be on.

Slouched in the seat, westbound, my forehead pressed
to the scratched up window, rapidly being carried away
from the city, something important recedes, something
else coheres, but I can't seem to conjure a single word
as to what these might be, why I'm filled with such vast,
implacable sadness. I just want to get home, go to sleep.

Time waving like a hand from a train I wanted to be on.
...

Gregarious in hunger, a flock of twenty
turn circles like whorls of barbed wire,
no spot below flown over uncanvassed.

The closer to death the closer they come,
waiting on wings with keen impatient
perseverance, dark blades lying in wake

until age or wound has turned canter
into carcass or near enough for them
to swoop scrupulous in benediction,

land hissing, hopping, tearing, gorging.
no portion, save bone, too durable
to digest. What matters cannot remain.
...