Sudesh Mishra Poems

An idle clasp, a relaxed swing, his arms
Snatch and heft the axe over his shoulder
Till, meeting the eye of itself, it turns
...

Cumulus breaks across a ketchup sky.
I'm my own disjecta membra. Leaving
Was a mode of leave-taking from toppling
...

The Statesman on Nicolae Ceausescu.
Another brute, another revolution.
Always we favour the grenade solution.
A tour of the Sun Temple won't stop a coup
...

Inclement weather. We're rowing between two rocks
For a third which is palpable yet unreachable.
We had foreknowledge of this before setting off
From a port with a name too fluttery to pin down.
...

An idle clasp, a relaxed swing, his arms
Snatch and heft the axe over his shoulder
Till, meeting the eye of itself, it turns
Ounceless as a wraith. Then it's a boulder
Outsprinting eye, mind, his very muscles
In a downward run that smashes through sky
And estranging hill, and glazed apostles
Canonised for wresting brutes from the sty.
"What lacks root?" says the rippled sycamore
As the fanged axe splits it down the middle,
Splays it out like a moth. In the uproar
Of sparrows and chips, he cracks the riddle:
"A stranger estranged by his own strangeness."
Yet writ on your palm my wood's graininess.

II

Ancient wood: cumbrous, hewable, cured hock.
Massive arboreal tome, how I love you—
Your alligator's bark, your wrestler's torque,
Your bailiff's gravitas and breath of zoo.
Let them love the hot in you, the telos,
And hoard their bones against your bones, let them
Appraise a house, a hull, a Trojan Horse
In praise of you, but let my love affirm
What's always forever to no purpose—
Like zephyrs vetching through a mortuary,
Like Greek myths related to Odysseus,
Like bonesmith's art in a boneless country.
My love's of your ancient venerable stock:
It goes right through the head to ring the block.

III

Woodflakes are flaking off like tuna flakes.
Axe droppings. Hot leftovers and leavings.
Chipped sunlight, terracotta. Exhumings.
You crouch amid ruins, remains. Your hand rakes
Up an art that shirks endings for random
Gleanings. Now here's an ivory toothpick,
Late Ashanti. There, sheeny as garlic,
Some Renaissance tidbit, a severed thumb
By Cellini. Further, writ in magma,
Polynesian petrogyphs. To your left
Flotsam from a wreck. To your right tuna
Flakes flaking.
But all at once you're bereft.
Leonidas is berthing. The light's in gold.
Sixteen dead spartans in the tuna hold.
...

Cumulus breaks across a ketchup sky.
I'm my own disjecta membra. Leaving
Was a mode of leave-taking from toppling
Columns of counterfeit selves. The genuine I
Is forever in someone's tourist brochure.
Wholeness is mobility, thought Orpheus
In his dismemberment. The rancorous
Cries of exiles will make Lethe remember
The anguish of those who never forget.
We must all drown in another's epithet.
...

The Statesman on Nicolae Ceausescu.
Another brute, another revolution.
Always we favour the grenade solution.
A tour of the Sun Temple won't stop a coup
In some piddling Calypso Republic.
All our monuments are monstrosities.
The blood of serfs sustains our royal trees.
So what if each plinth is in precise cubic
Feet? I have learnt to measure human art
Through the eyes of slaves in a carrion cart.
...

Inclement weather. We're rowing between two rocks
For a third which is palpable yet unreachable.
We had foreknowledge of this before setting off
From a port with a name too fluttery to pin down.
Before us, the channel sticks out a tongue,
Raw, wildly gangrenous, and vows to steer us
Safely beyond the cape of pulsing knives.
It's a wasted pledge since our one belief
Is the substance of a doubt, solid, unprisable
As the shell stigmata badging the gunwale,
Signifying the passage of being not time.
So, framed by two rocks, we aim the prow
Towards a third that neither wanes nor grows,
Certain that our reach will exceed our grasp.
...