Editor's Note
I’ve long been fascinated by poetry that performs the function of the witness. It is most evident in work that is preoccupied by larger themes of injustice, war and trauma, but is no less powerful in unravelling the dynamics of complex personal relationships. In his poem ‘Enroute Kodaikanal’, Abhinav offers us two different kinds of witnesses. The mother, who keeps clicking photographs and goes through ‘[t]he whole courtroom / routine’ to gather proof to corroborate the stories of travel to be told to the relatives. And the speaker, who positions himself as the artist-witness, half involved in the scene, and half detached. While the mother’s photographs capture the sunset, the speaker’s words capture the mother in the process of photographing. I found that Abhinav’s way of introducing wry contrast between these actions builds the subtext of the poem, and also plays with the idea of true experience v/s true representation. While the mother’s act of witness is inclusive in her naivety, the speaker is critical of the mother for ‘missing the synthetic point’ even as he records this ‘in a language she doesn’t understand’. I was particularly struck by how Abhinav emphasizes linguistic distance and its politics, using line breaks: ‘a sentence that she doesn’t have / the words for’.
I invite you into this set for more explorations of language as chasm, language as music, and language as bridges.
— Aswin Vijayan
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Enroute Kodaikanal
In the nameless stretch
between two commas,
we peer through the bone-blank dawn
and wait
for the daylight to dissolve into our skin,
for the skyline vein
to wring into a curve
we would tell our relatives about.
It’s my mother’s philosophy—
that a life doesn’t count as lived
without vivid witness and concrete proof.
Alibis and explanations. The whole courtroom
routine.
Memory isn’t testimony enough
so she takes photographs on her phone,
slippery and vague,
her stubby fingers always missing the synthetic point—
the twirls of her hair struggling in the wind,
and an irredeemable cheer in her voice
as if she is trying to make up for something
beyond my reach
in the liquid curl of her eye.
Seizing us up in her selfies
with light in all its awkward slants—
always inching
towards a sentence she doesn’t have
the words for. In odd ways she’d ask why
I map the contours of my life in a language
that doesn’t belong to her,
and I tell her it’s because it doesn’t belong to her—
as if taking revenge for a wound
she was as much given as she was
guilty of. And these things never add up,
life falls too short for checks and balances
that make us whole. The peripherals dissolve
and we breathe the breeze in,
to the point of cough.
Mucus in our throat
and our liquid eyes
contained in a curve
of time’s razor-thin slice.
The sky opens up eventually
like a flesh wound. The sun bleeding
on landscape’s broken neck.
Pine trees slouching like old men
who have lived long enough to forget themselves
The asphalt curling into itself
like a parenthesis and the water whistling,
its simian crease on stones older
than all our names for them.
And I, in a language she doesn’t understand,
the witness and the wound
of my mother’s life.
Hurl
Sometimes the metropolis is its own mythology, its night a litany of gestures and the slatted light picking them apart. Shadowy shutters hunkered in the dark. Stone syllables, silhouettes quivering at the verge of vision in the dimly-lit windows. The golden slit of doorsteps leaking some sacred chant. It’s either about God or about sex and sex is more immediate; concrete—here in the flesh, oozing of a certainty that goes beyond a wager we make for the Gods. My father made wagers for the Gods. Ate out of grass platters, hungered his way through days, cut out his pocket and scattered it all in the dying river. Told me not to reason with it. That logic is its own limitation and if you’re loyal to something long enough, it’ll take you down, and so what? at least it’s something, at least it’s yours. So I walk like a drunkard and turn wherever. Knowing how the maps culminate, how the syntax operates, and how the sidewalk under streetlight splits open like a bone-wound where there is always a mother cradling something to sleep. The street curving in the mink mouth of the oblong night. The landscape a blur of velocities. The skyline humming coarse-throat lullabies for itself. The river is dead. The city will drown. The sun will plunge into its own gullet once it is hungry enough. But truth is mere detail; vectorless violence. One must pick a lie and die for it. Take a stone and make it mean something; what are the possibilities? There is grotesque and there is sublime—both converging at truth which doesn’t count, as long as you make it, as long as it’s something. But I always slip past the point. There is never enough time to do it right so I squander everything all at once. Look at the skin hanging from my elbow and my blood on the sidewalk. This is an argument against intention.
Dissolve
I
In this dream you lie
in the green lake and call it dignity,
call it instinct, call it an act
of punching time in the gut—
its innards scattered in the slimy moonlight,
your bones a melting soup
of algae and phosphate.
Your eyelids closing
like an ill-used parenthesis.
If I lend you a hand, you’ll swallow it.
If I step in the water, you’ll never forgive me.
Instead, I stand in the mud
with blood on my toes and watch you dissolve
in your own throat. The night divested
of its illusions, your mouth a quiver
of afterthought.
Your sighs gnawing at the wind
with gestures you can’t even spell right.
II
I should have been you
but this is the cone of light that situates us.
You are you only as long as I am I,
and you cannot die,
not yet. This dream doesn’t have the edge for it.
Neither the language, nor the light.
The cranium is a cave and we won’t step outside.
The green knot of your veins splitting
like a river on a stony terrain.
The skyline reckless and iridescent.
The cortex a carve clinging
to the palette of its own.
You say if there is a life outside
of the life you wanted, you’d rather just sleep.
That there is a wound in your ribs worth
the haemorrhage of it. And the water lingers,
stagnant and decrepit.
You, a mouth bent
on devouring itself— I, an eye liquid and red
with a fleck in my oculus.
III
You swallow the slant of light
but I keep you awake;
the lake shifts and it’s childhood all over again.
The wet blades of grass swaying
across the plane and the sky a wild static
of sunlight. Moon a white smudge
on the glassy slate.
You tell me about the myth that says
the mind relives it all again
right before it gives in
to a gentler gravity.
And I remind you that this is not your death,
not yet. Sometimes memory
is just memory not a catastrophe.
A wound dulls and another takes its place,
like the sound of a familiar voice calling
your name—time is a curve
that you and I will learn to live with only in time.
And you wait for the water
to swallow you but it spits you out,
and that’s as good a sign as any.
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Fernand Léger. La Ville (The City, 1919).
Oil on canvas, 231.1 x 298.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Cityscape paintings, of course, are a genre in themselves. Since the Idea of the city plays a significant role in Abhinav’s poems, we had also considered Sudhir Patwardhan’s famous seven-panel ‘Mumbai Proverbs‘ composite painting. Then we discovered Patwardhan’s painting had been inspired in part by Léger’s Le Ville. So we returned to our original choice. It seemed fitting that we connect an old classic with a brand new perspective on cities and the transformations they work in us.
Author | ABHINAV
Abhinav is a graduate student from Delhi, India. His poems have appeared/ are forthcoming in The Chestnut Review, trampset, The Deadlands among other publications.