Sudeep Sen Poems

Your poem translated itself so many times:
From the incipient thoughts that brewed
in your mind, as your mother tongue fumed
straining to come together, trying

to emerge from shapelessness
to a semblance of shape. Re-piecing
together the shattered mirror, remoulding
and reflecting light from unknown niches,

the poem switched tongue and its skin
as the oblique image stamped its imprint.

But the translation wasn't quite done:
It was fed into a computer
to be processed, polished further,
and parts re-written, then fed again. One

strange beast of an electronic transmission
ate the poem again, the fodder waxed
and its shape reshaped. Then out of my fax
at night, a sheet of glazed emission

emerged, words on an unsuspecting tray:
A real poem defies translation, in every way.
...

Bophuthatswana appears pock-marked,
engulfed by the South African terrain.
Transkei, Ciskei and Lesotho too, are arced
to suffer the same fate:
Tongue-tied, colour-coded, land-locked.
...

Together, we lie
incurably conjoined.
Just as the sky
and the earth are joined

by an indeterminate
horizon, so are we, made
one by an indeterminate
faith.
...

A lone lash
from

my eye-lid
had disengaged

itself,
its vision

now resting
on the page

I'd scribbled on.
It formed

an unintentional
arc,

an odd gesture
of a smile.

But this
I am sure,

was
an accident.
...

One moonlit December night
you came knocking at my door,
I took my time to open.
When I did,
there was just a silk scarf,
frayed, half-stuck in the latch.
...

the kindness of libation, lyric and blood

her endless notes left for me -
little secrets, graces -
trills recorded on blue and purple parchment
to be lipped, tasted, devoured -

only essence remains -
its stickiness, its juice, its memory

seamless juxtaposition -
the brute and the passion,
dry of the bone and wet of the sea,
coarseness of the page and smooth of the nib's iridium

I try and trace a line, a very long line -

the ink blots
as this line's linear edges
dissolve and fray -

the capillary threads
gone mad
twirling in the deep heat of the tropics -

threads unravelling,
each sinew tense with the want of moisture
and the other's flesh

there are no endings here -
only beginnings -
precious incipience -

translucent drops of sweat
perched precariously on her collar-bone
waiting to slide,
roll unannounced into the gulleys
that yearn to soak in the rain -

heart-beat shift
the shape of globules
as they alter their balance and colour,
changing their very point of gravity -

constantly deceiving the other

I stand, wanting -
wanting more of the bone's dry edge,
the infinite blur of desire,
the dream,
the wet, the salt, the ink,
and the underside of her skin.
...

There is something deeply arthritic about water and pain, the way water seeps into unexpected fissures in bones, the way it conducts pain itself - operatically and electrically.

This morning I woke up, as I usually do, in pain. It was a new sort of pain, a pain I had not encountered before, so I didn't know how immediately to respond or manage it. All this while, I had sorted and filed each type of pain into neat bearable files, each with their possible recourse to relief, however temporary.

It had rained all night, and this morning it continued without any relief. The sound of persistent rain once provided calm, but all this water-sound, its chaotic decibel, was annoying my breathing, heart-beat and sight.

Whether my sight was blurring due to water battering my retina's windscreen or whether it was triggered on by the slow accumulation of pain in my heart was difficult to measure or analyse. Only intensity and volume mattered - cubic litres, millilitres - almost any equation with letters and numbers raised to the power of three. Triadic superscripts - there lay some oblique clues, but perhaps only to the initiated or those who wished to be part of its intimacy.

The irony of intimacy is such that the closest in the family seem the furthest away. Their attempt to be interested, in spite of being uninterested, ultimately measures pain and its intensity. Intensity is a peculiar thing, its measurements are both tactile and ephemeral, quantifiable and infinite. It is measurable, its heat and depth fathomable, all of this may even have a semblance of being well.

It is the ephemeral that is painful. Water creates all the confusion - its saltiness, its acridity, its mineralised purity, all complete in ways that chemical equations find hard to support or balance.

Families of electrons, protons and neutrons speed away, whirring in patterned loops, forgetting all the while that the heart of their orbit may actually feel and breathe. But in science, as in the ambitious ruthless route of success, there is no room for unscientific thought - as if science and the arts, coolness and emotionality were mutually incompatible or different from each other.

I am in pain, and I just want to cry, cry and cry - so that each searing cry can etch some fragment of a note which has gone unnoticed, so that each measure of pain is no longer diluted for people who listen because they have to.

I wish to paint a canvas that invents new indices of pain and water, for anybody who wishes to listen and bear, for anyone who wishes to understand it, not because they are meant to or rely on sitting comfortably straitjacketed, but because they are moved by it. We need to be moved, moved by the finer chords of music and paint, so that both electricity and opera can operate as they always did, in tandem.

But heavy heart like heavy water is difficult to dissolve - their melting and boiling points register unusual scales - scales that peal and peel, echo and layer, untying each and every fibre that breath requires in order to survive.
...

Couched on crimson cushions,
 pink bleeds gold

and red spills into one's heart.
 Broad leather keeps time,

calibrating different hours
 in different zones

unaware of the grammar
 that makes sense.

Only random woofs and snores
 of two distant dogs

on a very cold night
 clears fog that is unresolved.

New plants wait for new heat —
 to grow, to mature.

An old cane recliner contains
 poetry for peace — woven

text keeping comfort in place.
 But it is the impatience of want

that keeps equations unsolved.
 Heavy, translucent, vaporous,

split red by mother tongues —
 winter's breath is pink.
...

 for Jane Draycott
As winter secrets
 melt

with the purple
 sun,

what is revealed
 is electric —

notes tune
 unknown scales,

syntax alters
 tongues,

terracotta melts
 white,

banyan ribbons
 into armatures

as branch-roots
 twist, meeting

soil in a circle.
 Circuits

glazed
 under cloth

carry
 alphabets

for a calligrapher's
 nib

italicised
 in invisible ink,

letters never
 posted,

cartographer's
 map, uncharted —

as phrases fold
 so do veils.
...

for Leela Samson
Spaces in the electric air divide themselves
  in circular rhythms, as the slender
grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles
 describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic,
 one that once reverberated continually in
a prescribed courtyard of an ancient temple

in South India. As your eyelids flit and flirt, and
  match the subtle abhinaya in a flutter
of eye-lashes, the pupils create an
 unusual focus, a sight only ciliary muscles
 blessed and cloaked in celestial kaajal
could possibly enact.

The raw brightness of kanjeevaram silk, of
  your breath, and the nobility of antique silver
adorns you and your dance, reminding us of
 the treasure chest that is only
 half-exposed, disclosed just enough, barely —
for art in its purest form never reveals all.

Even after the arc-lights have long faded,
  the audience, now invisible, have stayed over.
Here, I can still see your pirouettes, frozen
 as time-lapse exposures, feel
 the murmuring shadow of an accompanist's
intricate raag in this theatre of darkness,

a darkness where oblique memories of my
  quiet Kalakshetra days filter,
matching your very own of another time,
 where darkness itself is sleeping light,
 light that merges, reshapes, and ignites,
dancing delicately in the half-light.

But it is this sacred darkness that endures,
  melting light with desire, desire that simmers
and sparks the radiance of your
 quiet femininity, as the female dancer
 now illuminates everything visible: clear,
poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.
...