Vijay Seshadri

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly's,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—
...

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are
...

I've been excited about him as an individual.
I've met him as a person, emerging from his own shadow.
Indeed it is remarkable.
Indeed it is to be remarked of my friend Savage that
...

That slow person you left behind when, finally,
you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,
where is he while you
walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,
...

The house collapsed and I was crushed under the rubble,
pulverized, but here I am,
walking around as if I were alive — 

the swain,
with an oxeye daisy in my buttonhole,
the bitter voluptuary, never satisfied,
the three-legged dog,
the giant under the tiny parasol at
the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse,
the only Abyssinian in the choir of the
Abyssinian Baptist Church.

(Somebody must have done a self-portrait of me.)

Just amazing. I think I could wrap my arms all the way around
the 24,901-miles-circumferenced Earth.
...

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly's,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—
this is one of my favorite things.
I like it so much I sleep all the time.
Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed
deep in the dreams where they appear.
In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,
before the empress with the melting face, under
the towering plane tree, they just show up.
"It's all right," they seem to say. "It always was."
They are diffident and polite.
(Who knew the dead were so polite?)
They don't want to scare me; their heads don't spin like weather vanes.
They don't want to steal my body
and possess the earth and wreak vengeance.
They're dead, you understand, they don't exist. And, besides,
why would they care? They're subatomic, horizontal. Think about it.
One of them shyly offers me a pencil.
The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster.
Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music,
the right Reverend Al Green is singing,
"I could never see tomorrow.
I was never told about the sorrow."
...

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are

comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?

Consciousness observes and is appeased.
The soul scrambles across the screes.
The soul,

like the square root of minus 1,
is an impossibility that has its uses.
...

I've been excited about him as an individual.
I've met him as a person, emerging from his own shadow.
Indeed it is remarkable.
Indeed it is to be remarked of my friend Savage that
the desolation of hopes not merely deferred
but by impracticability brutalized
little marred his genial spirit.
How such a one, so circumstanced by parentage—
the mother crippled by disappointment; the father by rotgut and Percodan—
as to blight his prospects, and blacken with untimely frost the buds
of those ambitions justly excited
by manifest powers, graces, and propensities,
should nonetheless display
discrimination not inferior to those we deem wise,
sympathy judicious and above reproach,
is cause for a wonder neither cynicism can besmirch nor incredulity subvert.
In and out of juvie, jacking cars at fifteen,
snorting lines of Adderall, his nostrils stained blue,
kicked out, taken back, kicked out,
busted, paroled, busted again,
straining to reach the shiny object fallen through the grate,
tantalizing, just beyond his fingers,
finding and losing God,
thinking as he rakes the leaves of the linden tree
outside the sublet bungalow
that eating, sleeping, dying are what it's all about,
nothing else, maybe a few sunsets,
forget about sex.
...

That slow person you left behind when, finally,
you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,
where is he while you
walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,
organizing with an electric clipboard
your big push to tomorrow?
Oh, I've come across him, yes I have, more than once,
coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian.
Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished
not just in themselves but by the stories
we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises:
the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet
or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother
flailing in the millpond beyond the weir,
dragged down by her woolen skirt.
He doesn't see you as a story, though.
He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,
he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops
and the thunderheads gather,
he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with
the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library.
He asks me to look out for you.
...

We hold it against you that you survived.
People better than you are dead,
but you still punch the clock.
Your body has wizened but has not bled

its substance out on the killing floor
or flatlined in intensive care
or vanished after school
or stepped off the ledge in despair.

Of all those you started with,
only you are still around;
only you have not been listed with
the defeated and the drowned.

So how could you ever win our respect?-
you, who had the sense to duck,
you, with your strength almost intact
and all your good luck.
...

"It's all empty, empty,"
he said to himself.
"The sex and drugs. The violence, especially."
So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,

thinking maybe that would help.
He taught a little kid to build a kite.
He found a cure,
and then he found a cure

for his cure.
He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather
his umbrella, even though
icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
He settled a revolution in Spain.

Nothing worked.
The world happens, the world changes,
the world, it is written here,
in the next line,
is only its own membrane—

and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
your compassion for our kind.
...

I could complain. I've done it before.
I could explain. I could say, for instance, that
I'm sick of being slaughtered in my life's mountain passes,
covering my own long retreat,
the rear guard of my own brutal defeat—
dysentery and frostbite and snipers,
the mules freezing to death,
blizzards whipping the famished fires until they expire,
the pathetic mosquito notes of my horn . . .
But, instead, for once, I'm keeping quiet, and maybe tomorrow
or maybe the day after or maybe the day after that
I'm just going to drive away down the coast
and not come back.
I haven't told anyone, and I won't.
I won't dim with words the radiance of my gesture.
And besides, the ones who care have guessed already.
Looking at them looking at me, I know they know
when they turn their backs I'll go.
The secrets I was planning to floor them with?
They're already packed in my trunk, in straw,
in a reinforced casket.
The bitter but herbal and medicinal truths I concocted
to revive them with?
Tomorrow or the day after or the day after that,
on the volcano beaches fringed with black sand
and heaped with tangled beds of kelp,
by the obsidian tide pools that cradle the ribbed limpet
and the rockbound star,
I'll scatter those truths to the sea breezes,
and float the secrets on the waters that the moon
reels in and plays out,
reels in and plays out,
with a little votive candle burning on their casket,
and then I'll just be there, in the sunset's coppery sheen,
in the dawn pearled by discrete, oblong, intimate clouds
that move without desire or motive.
Look at the clouds. Look how close they are.
...

Near the end of one of the old poems, the son of righteousness,
the source of virtue and civility,
on whose back the kingdom is carried
as on the back of the tortoise the earth is carried,
passes into the next world.
The wood is dark. The wood is dark,
and on the other side of the wood the sea is shallow, warm, endless.
In and around it, there is no threat of life—
so little is the atmosphere charged with possibility that
he might as well be wading through a flooded basement.
He wades for what seems like forever,
and never stops to rest in the shade of the metal raintrees
springing out of the water at fixed intervals.
Time, though endless, is also short,
so he wades on, until he walks out of the sea and into the mountains,
where he burns on the windward slopes and freezes in the valleys.
After unendurable struggles,
he finally arrives at the celestial realm.
The god waits there for him. The god invites him to enter.
But looking through the glowing portal,
he sees on that happy plain not those he thinks wait eagerly for him—
his beloved, his brothers, his companions in war and exile,
all long since dead and gone—
but, sitting pretty and enjoying the gorgeous sunset,
his cousin and bitter enemy, the cause of that war, that exile,
whose arrogance and vicious indolence
plunged the world into grief.
The god informs him that, yes, those he loved have been carried down
the river of fire. Their thirst for justice
offended the cosmic powers, who are jealous of justice.
In their place in the celestial realm, called Alaukika in the ancient texts,
the breaker of faith is now glorified.
He, at least, acted in keeping with his nature.
Who has not felt a little of the despair the son of righteousness now feels,
staring wildly around him?
The god watches, not without compassion and a certain wonder.
This is the final illusion,
the one to which all the others lead.
He has to pierce through it himself, without divine assistance.
He will take a long time about it,
with only his dog to keep him company,
the mongrel dog, celebrated down the millennia,
who has waded with him,
shivered and burned with him,
and never abandoned him to his loneliness.
That dog bears a slight resemblance to my dog,
a skinny, restless, needy, overprotective mutt,
who was rescued from a crack house by Suzanne.
On weekends, and when I can shake free during the week,
I take her to the Long Meadow, in Prospect Park, where dogs
are allowed off the leash in the early morning.
She's gray-muzzled and old now, but you can't tell that by the way she runs.
...

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now—
radioactive to the end of time—
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn't peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.
...

My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately.
I can't walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.
I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees.
The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help.
The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods
are shuttered I don't know why.
"Try,' say the good people who bring me my food,
"to make your secret anguish your secret weapon.
Otherwise, your immortality will be
an exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book."
But I can't get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands.
It takes so long for the human to become a human!
He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,
the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.
Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despair
but the two together like curettes
and peel back the pitch-black integuments
to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time,
sitting on the sketch of a boulder below
his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
...

That furrow in the hill once must have been
a notch in a sheer cliff.
The land is all changed around here,
due to the work of wind and water,
but not so much that we can't think back
to what it must have been:
on the plateau beyond what must have been the cliff,
endless animal herds mollified in the sun,
kneeling and browsing,
and the lazy embankments descending to the watercourse
strewn with a little yellow flower, now extinct,
which must have resembled the celandine.
We talk in the presumptive,
but we know we can declare this much:
They were afraid,
so they climbed down the notch to this place,
more protected by far then than now.
What were they afraid of? Not
the animals but the fact of the animals,
that the animals existed,
that they themselves existed,
that everything existed when it might as well not have —
which was their one and only revelation,
which they would come back to again and again
down the hundred and fifty thousand years
and never get more than an inch farther with it than they were now,
when all they felt was terror.
So they climbed down here and hid.
And, then, they taught themselves to bury their dead.
They felt the pressure of the nothingness around them,
and at this place they began the digging of graves,
with their flaked hand axes.
One so took to the pressure and the feeling of it
he would teach himself to manufacture
surplus dead to feed the graves.
One female taught herself to whisper.
They would someday become
Euripides, Heloise, Saladin,
Swedenborg, Nell Gywnn, Mencius,
Gandhi and Mandela,
the Pankhursts, Captain Beefheart, Dr. Dre,
and one Terry Butler,
who shook Joe Turner's hand
in a bar in Kansas City,
and shook the hand of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
All the while, the fear
lived right beside them,
and the sound effects accompanying it were drums drumming,
so insistent, and so convenient that they
convinced themselves that everything was fine
as long as the drums were drumming,
that only when the drums stopped would they be required to worry.
...

The boy and the father walked beside the donkey.
The road was gray, and dust rose to its vanishing point;
gray dust choked the leaves of the few
asthmatic cottonwoods along the dry creekbeds.
The sky was hot to the touch.
"Why not ride the donkey, as it's so hot?"
passers-by on the road suggested.
The boy and the father whispered to each other.
(They were more like brothers
than they were like son and father.)
The father got up on the donkey.
Other passers-by, or maybe the same ones
doubling back—the only leisure-time activity
in that part of the world involved
walking up and down the dusty road—
said, "Selfish, selfish old man! Think of your boy,
whose legs can't bear the insult
of this road, let alone the heat's."
They went on a ways the way they were,
because they didn't want what scrutinized them
with such detachment to think they were slaves
to public opinion. Then they traded places.
A mile later, an old woman on a porch, rocking
and shading her eyes from a sun that seemed
not to dwindle but instead hammered
the sky to a thinness irreconcilable
with the laws of nature, shouted out,
"Worthless! Letting your old father walk!"
So the father climbed up behind the boy,
and they both rode the donkey.
This incited an animal lover,
wearing a hat like the ones you see
in the woodblock prints of the Japanese,
to screaming flights of invective
for burdening the donkey with two bodies. So,
abashed, they got down, and they carried the donkey.
The donkey howled and evacuated in terror,
but they carried him anyway, over the undulating road
and across the boulder-studded arroyos.
They came to a town and lived there for a while,
and then moved to a larger town, and then
to the fabled city, suspended
on a plain between two mountain ranges.
They lived in a room in a house in a suburb
known for its featurelessness,
the two of them, with the donkey.
The father couldn't work anymore—
the business with the donkey had broken him forever—
so the son went out alone in the world.
He was the one who buried the donkey,
in the dead of night, when no one was looking.
Later, he buried his father, too,
but this time in daylight, in a decent graveyard.
He didn't care about his place in the world,
but he married a woman who did, and had children
and prospered, in a manner of speaking.
The tally of the generations begins with him
and extends down the centuries
and across the hemispheres
and numbers C.P.A.s and bookies,
coopers and wheelwrights,
neurologists, embezzlers, claims adjusters,
and linemen for the county.
And, though diverse and ignorant
of one another, though pressed like grapes
through the bewildering human genotypes,
each of them has this one thing in common—
each knows, obscurely, unconsciously,
without knowing how he knows, that
only the complicated, ambiguous victories
are worth having, those that take place
under the sun, above
the boulder-studded arroyo,
with the dust, grayer than bone, rising on the road.
...

Long after we stopped remembering, word of him
drifts back from the coast
to let us know he's still hanging on

in someone else's place and time,
living in a shed in their ivy-choked gardens -
his head shaved, his altered face,

the skin in patches under his eyes.
Supposedly though he's still tender and wise;
and having found out it's the same there as here -

the heat breaking out of its sack,
the stars wobbling on their black thrones -
he's made up his mind to never come back.

It's all the same; and on its verge
the borderless ocean scrawls and scrawls
reiterations which repeat

that it's all the same,
and he can fall into it and never change -
resurface, and simply swim away.
...

Bobby Culture ("full of roots and culture")
and Ranking Joe ("Man Make You Widdle
Pon Your Toe") shift down
in the gloaming, snap off
their helmets, kill their engines, park
one thousand cubic centimeters
of steeled precision Japanese art.
Their bands drive up
in fur-trimmed vans, unload and unwrap
the hundred-watt speakers, thousand-watt amps,
mikes and mike stands,
guitars, cymbals, steel cans,
at the Blue Room Lawn on Gun Hill Road
by the Bronx Botanical Gardens.
The sun over Jersey
kicks and drops
into the next of its ready-made slots,
and, like a dark lotion
from a pitcher poured, night fills
the concrete hollows, and the grass
cools in the projects,
the glowing lakes contract
around their artificial islands,
the gardens breathe
easier in the dwindling fever
of today's unbearable summer.
They say the tropics
are moving north,
the skull-cap of ice melting
from both the pole now pointed
toward the sun
and the one pointing away.
But what they say is hardly heard here,
where the cooling brickwork
engine-red Edwardian
railroad flats empty
of their tenants, who gather
in twos and threes, float down
from the stations,
and congregate at the Blue Room Lawn
to celebrate Independence
Day in Jamaica.
The bass line fires up.
From Savanna-La-Mar to Gun Hill Road
the backwash of reggae spirals
to its perch, ripples
and flares its solar wings
along the upended moving limbs
as if a chain were passed through every wrist,
as if a chain were tied from hip to hip.
The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.
...