Sridala Swami

After the untimely death
there were priests
five of them sitting on chairs
and not one purifying fire
between them.

Their chants were hard stones
spit out into the air
their feet churned keeping
the words up and moving
like threats

or curses: once pronounced
their import
set in stone.
'This place is cleansed
of death.

'Here are the mustard seeds
you asked for
in proof.
Be content now.
And live as if nothing had happened.'
...

The poet dreams a painting. She owns it or a part of it with two other people she does not know. Which part of it does she own?

In the painting there is a tree, a mountain and something that could be an open mouth but when she looks directly at it, it becomes the colour rust. The mouth should belong to the sky because it spits out possibilities and the tree has a branch hacked down though the mountain remains as steadfast or true as it is possible for the poet's time-bound eyes to comprehend.

Who are these other two people who own the rest of the painting? The poet has heard their voices come down the line like an experiment but there are no slots in her memory for them. They are waves masquerading as particles. When she thinks of them she thinks of rust.
...

Die Dichterin träumt ein Gemälde. Sie besitzt es mit zwei weiteren Personen, die sie nicht kennt. Welchen Teil besitzt sie?

Auf dem Gemälde gibt es einen Baum, einen Berg und etwas, das ein offener Mund sein könnte, aber Farbe ist, Rost, sobald sie hinsieht. Der Mund sollte zum Himmel gehören, der Möglichkeiten wegen, die der ausspuckt, und dem Baum ist ein Ast abgehackt worden, der Berg aber bleibt stand- oder wahrhaft, so weit die zeitverbundenen Augen der Dichterin erkennen können.

Wer sind die beiden, die das übrige Gemälde besitzen? Einmal hat sie ihre Stimmen am anderen Ende der Leitung gehört, versuchter Verbindungsaufbau, doch im Gedächtnis der Dichterin ist kein Speicherplatz für sie. Wellen in der Maske von Teilchen. Denkt sie an sie, denkt sie an Rost.

Übersetzung: Sylvia Geist und Tom Schulz
...

with lines from Paul Celan

expecting to fail? grant us a grave in the air!
over a whirling fan
throw the remaining yards of silk scrape your strings darker!
stand on the stool
put it around her neck we drink it at midday!
did she knot her wedding sari
still drawing its circle in the air: black milk of daybreak
afterwards, only one question
...

mit Zeilen von Paul Celan

in Erwartung zu scheitern schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften
die restlichen Meter Seide
übern Ventilator geworfen streicht dunkler die Geigen
den Hocker bestiegen
um ihren Hals geknotet wir trinken dich mittags
hat sie ihren Hochzeitssari
noch in der Luft: schwarze Milch der Frühe
danach kreist nur eine Frage

Übersetzung Sylvia Geist und Tom Schulz
...

The brain in its jar floats and dreams:
streams of memory, consciousness, preserved.
The two halves, like breasts, grieve
for the softness of skin for the reserved
whisper of touch. All this has already happened

and will never happen again. The brain curls
itself up, hits glass, ricochets and remembers:
foetal, an echo of shape, a pearl
of desire - his body holding the other one
that burnt away and became ember.

There should be a question here. A ‘how' or a ‘why'—
a way to understand linearities. Instead, there are ridges
and convolutions, the repetition of blood beating,
the raising of hair along an arm when a finger follows
vertebrae down the spine.

Brain body umbilicus. Our bodies stretch
within and without to accommodate life. But
without you without you without you
I am only a dissonance, an object adrift, a wretched
longing for the pain of being alive.
...

Das Gehirn schwebt in seinem Glas und träumt:
Konservierte Bewusstseinsströme und Erinnerung.
Die beiden Hälften, wie zwei Brüste, sie trauern
um die Zärtlichkeit der Haut, um den vorbestimmten
Atem des Berührens. All dies ist schon passiert

und wird nicht wieder geschehen. Das Gehirn rollt
sich ein, schlägt gegen Glas, prallt ab, erinnert sich:
Embryohaltung, Echo einer Gestalt, diese Sehnsuchts-
Perle - sein Körper hielt einen anderen
der verbrannt, zu nichts als Asche wurde.

An dieser Stelle muss eine Frage her. Ein „Wie" und ein „Warum" -
ein Weg, zu verstehen, wie Linearität funktioniert. Stattdessen gibt es
Abbruchkanten, Windungen, das Pochen des Bluts,
das wirre Aufrichten der Härchen an einem Arm
wenn der Zeigefinger die Wirbelsäule entlang streift.

Gehirn Körper Nabel. Unsere Leiber biegen sich
in uns und außen, um Leben eine Behausung
zu geben, ohne dich ohne dich ohne dich
Bin ich nur eine Dissonanz, ein treibendes Ding, die elendige
Sehnsuchtsform für den Schmerz, am Leben zu sein.

Übersetzung Sylvia Geist und Tom Schulz
...

With those two heavy hands of his
he'd like to make a bird,
dark-eyed, delicate, quick-breathing.

But the bones turn into boxes.
Geometry breaks
the heart.
So he makes cages.
...

Mit seinen harten Händen hat er
einen Vogel bauen wollen,
schwarzäugig, zartknochig, rasch atmend.

Aus den Knochen werden immer Kästen,
und Geometrie bricht
ihm das Herz.
Also baut er Käfige.

Übersetzung Sylvia Geist und Tom Schulz
...

He writes me letters at the back of the bus. A sacred text on
a grain of rice. Things he does not say to me over the phone.
Old-fashioned, I call him and laugh at the things he says.

When he speaks he stammers. Ink stains the page. What I
have is a sword he has given me willingly.

~

Just for once I want all the power. To keep you waiting on
my words
measure my satisfaction in your loss. Just for once.

I am sitting at the window reading
my eyes slide down the page and everything changes.
You reach your hand past my breast and grab my heart.
Squeeze. It smells of rust & weeds at low tide
your hand a slo-mo pulse. I discover there are no such things
as heart strings.

When you tell me you dream of falling
I find ways to remove everything that could break your fall.
It's not your fall
I want to break. Just for once
I want to talk to you and give nothing away.

~

He dreams my hands
are cut off at the wrist
and wakes up crying.

I flex my fingers
make a fist
take his hands and hold them
as a lover might.

His wrists have lines that might be scars.
I place my hand against his, palm to palm
as children and dancers do.

The measure of love is not loss but residue. Vasana.
Leave if you must but leave me a groove
in the mind
down which memory can run
like a cultivated habit.
...

In the end we have dystopias:
visions that arose with the steadiness
of smoke in a still room
but grew too large for cohesion,
preferring dissipation
to the sightless certainty of columns.

We watched. That is all we did:
watched faces as they came in and out of focus;
watched as the angle of our vision widened
to include even what we would never see
in our lifetimes. This is how we begin.

Somewhere in the middle
we lost our way:
we thought of mazes and labyrinths
and brains folded around themselves.
Patterns teased and seduced us.
We believed we had all the time in the world.
...

For Veena Mitthuraman

A face not so much
an image as an after-image
the dark patch where
the sun had been before
you looked away.
The centre turning
its inside face out.

No, a long hum

Never sure afterwards
if you stood there
if you survived
if what emerged
out of the water was spectral
or what went into it.
...

—After Eric Fischl

Back striped black, suit striped white
the wall—just striped; the net—just curved.
Crouched where the light comes from
you see that there is no protection
in the downward curves of the net;
it is only a shroud over one half of the frame.
No comfort in the dark lines on her back
that could be wings; though they dip at the spine
like children's drawings of crows
in a deep blue sky, the lines will not lend
her wings.He stands at the precise point where wall
meets wall, at the intersection of another
'V' that's going nowhere. Caught between
net and woman, objects weighing down the frame,
it appears that freedom would lie behind him,
in the empty spaces at his back. But look again—
the stripes on the wall spear him in place;
like X-rays, they pierce his insides.
Those might even be his bones
showing through, those white lines on
his suit.His hands are clenched and white. He is looking
this way. Caught, unable to look away,
you slide like light off the window ledge
from where you were peeping. As you fall
you recall her hands bent at the elbows,
convenient handholds you did not take.
As the air rushes past, all is blue, white, blur.
A cocoon of sound. You remember
on the net in the room, caught, a little orange and yellow
that could have been flowers
or butterflies.
...

Passport photographs are libellous.

I demand that you send
when you are asked for a likeness
a picture of your voice instead.

Go into a recording studio
and wait for a light to go green before
you speak your name clearly into a microphone.They will print for you a waveform image
of your voice. In its lines, asymmnetricaJ but steady,
I will detect the timbre of your voice

and know you by these lines that rise and fall—
abstract as thumb impressions or spectrographs—
all shape and pattern, darkness and light.One day, because we need to make
portraits of our voices
if we want our pictures to speak to us

you and I might find ourselves
in that studio, having our voice-impressions taken.
And because no one else need identify usby these pictures, you will speak my name
and I yours. We will lay these photographs
(where our voices are intent and serious)

one beside the other and marvel
at how beautiful our names look
when spoken by another.
...

It's easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer:
the one who will come without appointment
remembering circles and maps of temperance.

Down the avenue of swift and invisible nudes,
a thin, brittle demon the shade of an autumn leaf
is seeking imperfections.

Our prophets always speak too soon-
you know you want to own a picture of a man
carrying a drum made of human scalps.

Give me a little more time here-
A democracy of strangeness is
a reminder that the work of art presents not an expression

of identity but a problem
‘I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theatre.'
Now-
I'd like a word or two from you.
...

Obasa min Dahlin' used his head to stop a bullet. The people in the press room used their eyes. If they blinked with their eyes closed they sometimes saw a deeper red. Their wideangled phones caught everything—they were so powerful.

They were so powerful they could tune rumour into fact. [One of those instances when the word ‘powerful' and the word ‘sensitive' are nearly synonymous.]

Dahlin' was a free bird in a free world because he has wings. I have never had wings. I have never felt the air solidify around me because I never travel at such speeds.

What I have is roots. What he had is caves. What they have is fences. [You could call this a primer.]I have seen fences that shed the clothes they were given so that they could keep their neutrality in plain sight. In a borderless world I like the reassurance of fences I can see through. I often wonder at what speeds a person would need to travel to make it through those gaps all fences have. If you travel really fast—at bullet-speed, say—is the fence still porous or is it solid?
...

Obasa min Dahlin' used his head to stop a bullet. The people in the press room used their eyes. If they blinked with their eyes closed they sometimes saw a deeper red. Their wideangled phones caught everything—they were so powerful.

They were so powerful they could tune rumour into fact. [One of those instances when the word ‘powerful' and the word ‘sensitive' are nearly synonymous.]

Dahlin' was a free bird in a free world because he has wings. I have never had wings. I have never felt the air solidify around me because I never travel at such speeds.

What I have is roots. What he had is caves. What they have is fences. [You could call this a primer.]I have seen fences that shed the clothes they were given so that they could keep their neutrality in plain sight. In a borderless world I like the reassurance of fences I can see through. I often wonder at what speeds a person would need to travel to make it through those gaps all fences have. If you travel really fast—at bullet-speed, say—is the fence still porous or is it solid?
...

For Veena Muthuraman

A face not so much
an image as an after-image
the dark patch where
the sun had been before
you looked away.

No, a long hum

Never sure afterwards
if you stood there
if you survived
if what emerged
out of the water was spectral
or what went into it.
...