Life Of A Capricorn Poem by Sofiul Azam

The Zodiacs confirm a Capricorn that I'm -
a goat watching his fertility stored in balls
show up in poems if not elsewhere. It calls
me to be a scapegoat not yet cringed in shame
nor bold enough to carry out the proud foolery.
Ah, that Pre-Raphaelite Scapegoat! I sit
at my PC, sometimes nothing comes. Like pottery,
I'll break as lines sharper on my forehead tell it.

I'm not here to organize things for all is bathos.
Yet I prepare lectures, and hang a face shaven
and hiding the unrest is gruesome. Even
Shakespeare knew the true meaning of life is chaos.
Years run like electric trains. The going -
as you feel every inch of its progress - gets
nowhere. Nothingness still worth watching,
even if Sisyphus's boulder always fell at sunsets.

At thirty not yet the unavoidable settlement
in a house with a wife, nor the old-fire's
been a heap of ashes from a funeral pyre;
I'm still an ironed-out shirt sent
by I don't know who, perhaps now one
button or two missing, and my pajama-
waist a little bigger. Nothing more under the sun
hottest in June, nothing like Sweet Home Alabama.

Sometimes I think of myself as a pond
on which ripples never end, the ripples -
lines of my poetry as sweet as Salt Hon's nipples.
My mind's not loose from its tightening bond,
in places wished for and even terrifying
as Gorgon, the other name of which is life.
In such a dry delta, funny that I'm searching
for melancholy the other name of which is wife!

Everything's not yet for the worst, nor the best.
Life in a jammed metropolis too much pushy
about spaces of relief that concerns me
just as it does you all. Yet complacency's our greatest
illusion entangled in desire's barb-wires, furious
to be out in unexpected hours. I still can't tame
the wild horse my heart is, all say Catullus
you can't afford to be, you fool's dish of fame.

Four years ago, I started off after my Masters,
in a rented house here at the Ghosts' Alley.
I'm an unacknowledged legislator - remember Shelly? -
weaving words for the wise as well as jesters.
My work is a dish topped with politics
and other concerns favored by theorists' palate,
mostly by readers overseas when it sticks
close to a sort of belonging that comes too late

for me to appreciate from a distance its designs.
But words are not always worlds we live in,
rather most puzzling as Original Sin
or more concurrent as issues of land-mines.
My nation's dipped in corruption's lethal
waters and I'm drowning. I, too, play my part,
either a way out to the gold-like purification for all
or a stoicism to propagate dross's essence for a start.

Vaishnavaite verse is what I'm now translating
for readers unknown and yet so close.
Different things are different smells I often nose.
In this concrete grove, I wait for something
as Radha did for Krishna - sometimes it comes,
sometimes a glimpse of it on this city's skyline.
Ideas fight more in my head than at Rome's
Colosseum. Does such bleakness ever shine?

I wish I ended up smiling Well, that's fine.


from SAFE UNDER WATER (2014)