Rukmini Bhaya Nair Poems

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1.
Feasts (A Song For Spice Girls Everywhere)

When at nights you feel
On another's tongue
Slanderous asafoetida
...

2.
Margins, Ma(I)nstream

A woman is a thing apart.
She is bracketed off, a
Comma, semi-colon, at most
A lower-case letter, lost.
...

3.
A Politically Incorrect Ode To Whitman

Whitman isn't in
He will not be in
This year or the next
...

4.
Gargi's Silence

Where in the barefoot world you wander
Will go with you Gargi's untamed
Silence. Among the sea anemones'
Agile points of light, blue flamed
...

5.
Kali

A goddess chews on myth
As other women might on paan
Red juices stain her mouth.
...

6.
A POLITICALLY INCORRECT ODE TO WHITMAN

Whitman isn't in
He will not be in
This year or the next

He's gone out
Far out where the two
Americas meet like kissing whales

Beyond the net
Of the universities
Whitman celebrates his absence

Old grampus
Without a postmodern
Stitch on him he reads himself

Sitting naked
On leaves of grass
Sounding his barbaric yawp

Forever thirty-seven
And in perfect health chewing
The heads off dandelions and theorists

Which right-thinking critic
Would not like to put to sleep
This unconcerned ecologically hazardous

Phallogocentric brute
Once and for all in that
Endlessly rocking cradle of his?

But damn Whitman!
There's no putting him out
He says his sex contains all bodies, souls

This his self-description:
Stern, acrid, large, undissuadable
And help! Also draining the pent-up rivers

Of himself
Into women and demanding
Perfection from his love-spendings

Whitman alters
What he grandly calls
The base of all metaphysics

His gods
Are stones and sinews
Or an occult Brahma encountered

Interminably
Far back on that reckless
Passage to India descending radiating

His incantatory texts
And striding back and forth between
Vaunt'd Ionia and Sanskrit and the Vedas

Affected by a chronic logorrhoea
It's clear the fellow abhors silence, babbling
All the time of puzzles to be solv'd and blanks to be fill'd

Blissfully ignorant
That erasure is essential
Words treacherous and that doubt wafts in every human soul

Ah how I'd like
To introduce Walt to wordplay
Brackets and all the joys of paranomasia

How he'd love it too!
Whit(e)man caring not a whit
Careening down passion's witless slopes

Waltzing with Whitman
Could be such fun but he flatly
Refuses to rise to all my intellectual baits

He says he will not be
Darken'd and daz'd by books any more
He will steer for deep waters only and the farthest

Shore
And, sorry, poor dullards
Noodling in the groves of academe

Whitman will not
Be in this year or the next
It's the uncharted courses he's out to explore!
...

7.
FEASTS

(A Song for Spice Girls Everywhere)


When at nights you feel
On another's tongue
Slanderous asafoetida

Lime's quick murderous knife
Sliding in among
Wild strawberry orgies

Arabesques of garlic
Curvaceous around
The sentinel cloves

You wonder about desire
How it can be found
Delicate as rose water

Or frank as coriander
Rising from your lover's
Breath, mustard fumey

What lingers after
You consume each other
Is this memory of spices

Dancing salt waltzes
And mint fritillaries
Waving to parsley fronds

Which is why the milky
Delicacy of Bangla mishti
Mystical Varanasi rabri

Mysore pak melting piously
In your tolerant maws
Jalebi's intricate twists

Like signatures support
Only a lesser cause
Affection, but not love

If you're truly hungry
You must melt the world
Into paprika agonies

Tympanum of turmeric
Masking rosemary swirls
And cumin confetti

Falling in the basil dusk
As you wander through
Legendary cinnamon groves

Even the jumpy machinations
Of ginger must taste to you
Sweet, if you have feasted on love.
...

8.
FIVE UNEASY PIECES

I. Advice

Let the wind blow through
Let the light in, you say

But this I cannot do.

My poems are heavy, dark shawls
Huddled in them, every season,

I'm obscure as a sibyl.

The hailstone syllables

Clatter

And melt.


II. Reprisal

I, who have never known
Violence, see at nights
This - the moon-thugs
Finishing off a woman.

Mostly she is eyes
Minus the other marks
That make up a face. And
Her sari, winding red, tears
Audibly.

All my childhood, I slept
With a knife tucked under
Two pillows, for safety.
And that crescent still glistens

Maleficent.


III. Blocking Off the Light

They have built a room next door
Where last week was only veranda

So when the watchman's cane at four a.m.
Smashes up my sleep, and morning rises

Ghostly, from the other end of the world

I try to imagine, as is only natural
The shuttered beginnings of life

Before the emergence into woman's sex
Filling up what used to be open space

Now an airless veranda, hung about
With purdahs, blocking off the light

Being blocked off from the light.


IV. Margins, ma(i)nstream

A woman is a thing apart.
She is bracketed off, a
Comma, semi-colon, at most
A lower-case letter, lost.

In the literate circus
She is just a striptease
Artist, but when she speaks
Her poems bite, ferocious.

Rhyme and shape, primitive
Beasts, come tamed to her
Endangered species, they
Recognise her desperation.

She wants, she badly wants
Not a fresh lover, strongman
Or clown, but a new language
In which to hold her own.


V. Sentence

Witheringly,
Glances uncover
What they shouldn't.
The five lyrics,
Thirty-five verses,
And one-three-five
Previous lines
Witness
A crime passionel!
Neatness strangling art
In my case,
Which is genitive,
And (as in Hindi)
Oblique.

Another tragic flaw
Is garrulousness.
Premodifiers (e.g.
Determiners) and
Convoluted post-
Positions take
(But naturally!)
The place of sex,
Revealing not just
The world's essential
Thinginess (on which
All words depend), but
Reflexively displaying -
Myself.
...

9.
GARGI'S SILENCE

Where in the barefoot world you wander
Will go with you Gargi's untamed
Silence. Among the sea anemones'
Agile points of light, blue flamed

In mushroom woods, when wheelbarrows
Tip their load, and the mustard plains
Burn yellow in the recesses, listen
To the universe crackle, curl, change

Because Gargi has found the last, unnamed
Star, and on Yagnavalkya's ascetic skull
Her questions fall like soot, black rain
Stir in his groin, make him young again.

Zebra red spurts the tawn savannah grass
And lion swishes his tail, great maned
What is the warp and weft of the world
What lies in the taut weaver's frame?

Who turns the crankshaft in my brain?
Answer, Yagnavalkya! How many oceans deep
Is desire? When you touch me, am I sane?
Can a bee taste honey? Why does it sting?

In mean streets, in the slushy yards of pain
Gargi whispers in Yagnavalkya's ticklish ear
Your metaphysics is shaky! We're not chained
To Brahman. He is a prisoner of our senses.

That dry saltpetre hill, that baboon whooping
What's Brahman to them? Yet they'll remain
When we've packed up our arguments and gone
Tell me, Yagnavalkya, will you instruct me then?

Stop, Gargi! Stop! If you ask so much, for so much
Your head will fall off - or mine. I'm not ashamed
To admit my wisdom has limits. See that goat boy
Passing? The first lesson is one in restraint.

Don't mess with him, Gargi. In the soundless lanes
Of the sky, milk white Akasha, you will hear voices
Yours, his, mine, his and then - the last unclaimed
Akshara. Whose word is it, Gargi, Brahman's - or ours?

Then Gargi Vachanakari, smiling to herself, held her peace.



Gargi, pupil of the sage Yagnavalkya, is one of the few women with intellectual yearnings who
appear in the Upanishads, where she is threatened with dire consequences by her guru for asking
too many questions.
...

10.
KALI

A goddess chews on myth
As other women might on paan
Red juices stain her mouth.

Bored by her own powers
Immense and spectral, Kali broods
About Shiva, she is perverse.

She will not plead with him
Nor reveal Ganesha's birth
She will not ask him home.

Shiva loves her, but absences
And apsaras are natural to him
No god is hampered by his sins.

Kali desires a mortal, whose day
Begins with her, ends at nightfall
In her arms, a man who will die

Without her, whose love is fallible
But secure, she wants to be held
Like a warm creature, not a fable.

Loneliness drives this goddess mad
She is vagrant, her limbs askew
She begs a mate, her hair unmade.

Fickle as Shiva, memory deserts her
Chandi or Durga or Parvati, which
Is she, which of her selves weeps here?

Even Ganesha, for whom she feels
Only tenderness, excludes her, even he
Seems impatient with her flaws.

Where should such a goddess turn?
Kali, mistress of the temporal worlds
Wants bliss defined in human terms.

Staid Ganesha knows this wildness
Must be curbed, Shiva, peripatetic
Agrees, and across the wilderness

Both gift Kali a companion eagle, hurt
By no arrow, fed on nothing, it returns
Each night to its eyrie in her heart.
...

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