Editor's Note
Working on this issue, I was repeatedly reminded how poems leave us with two kinds of impressions. The large, overall sense of the work, which often comes up in editorial discussions (“unexpected treatment of motherhood in this set”, “good use of ghazal conventions in that one”) and then the smaller, and more immediate response to line and language, which escape easy summarizing. Which is also what I want to talk about in this space. Particularly because in summa iru’s set, the poems find their dramatic energy in how a phrase shifts before one can fully rest in it. In how an idea is inverted, or at least diverted, before it finds itself.
While much has been said about bigger poetic turns, such as the volta of sonnets, I’m referring here not to a shift in intent or orientation as much as to an opening of new, surprising language. Consider, for instance, the beginning: ‘anything helps to even out a wobbling table / but my father’, where, before we can fully absorb the universal statement followed by the odd exception, we’re told he ‘cuts an empty tetra pack’ (okay, sure, except it is,) ‘of rat poison’. The image in the reader’s mind, of happy-appy juice needs to be quickly replaced by this macabre revelation — a pattern this poem employs generously. These small turns, facilitated by line breaks, serve to create a series of revisions as we make our way through the poem. Also, this is perhaps the first time I have encountered a poetic technique represented by an object within the poem. We’re offered a very meta description of how the printed text on the folded tetra pack is ‘waterfalling / onto the other / side just as the other side is othered again & again till I / reach the end of the card / trick’. This othering, this small act of estrangement is as emotionally powerful as it is dexterous. I invite you on these turns (and u-turns!) to experience how some poems are truly about the journey.
— Pervin Saket
The Bombay Literary Magazine
[killing a sacred deer]
anything helps to even out a wobbling table
but my father—
he takes a pair of scissors, cuts an empty tetra pack
of rat poison
into neat business cards and hands me one
to fold like a betel leaf
at my practiced gestures, the
card bends, I catch a 1,3 difluo, an Ars, an ium, a thal—
wordlings
warping around edges, waterfalling
onto the other
side just as the other side is othered again & again till I
reach the end of the card
trick
this I wedge
under the squiggly leg of our table, the table
freezes
like a dancer posing for a photograph in the middle of
a routine—I have done this
before
taking a form and turning it
into a stopper
to balance the wobble in my
world—
the cot in my room lost its squeak a year ago
how else
do you think a world goes silent
[variations on ‘everything has two endings’ by Jane Hirshfield]
often i think of the tattoo on your left hand, at the base of the
thumb with its half-moon
instead of sayin’ “purple hat,”
they all say “hurple pat”
we are reading from Silverstein’s Runny Babbit to each other
in that old country library somewhere between
Boise and Wyoming
did we giggle like two teenagers sharing a dirty joke?
i hear your name every time David Naimon says
‘narrative’ in his podcasts
it was a right hand the colour of a fading summer
leaf, that tattoo
how it points to the knucklebone every time you make a hoop
w/ your thumb and the index—
an almost perfect circle around which all veins flowed*
*flowered
a wreath
see, everything has two endings
[pallbearers]
long stalks of blue, red and bleak yellow flames
e bought
m washed our glass vase, filled it with running
water
u clipped those graceful stalks into short wands,
and speared them
into the vase while i dropped a pearl
of aromatic oil
and there they remained, lit on the kitchen table
wilting lighthouses, still
as a heron on the verge of a strike
we were the fish, always
busy little troutsouls waltzing around, waiting to be struck
to die and be spawned in an instant by the
spectacle, again; again
it is this i give you
a sharp, decaying stillness, decaying into
what
you must find out for yourself
think of them as arrows in a quiver
think of them as the minute hands of a grandfather
clock, leaking
away their scented hours
once a floret fell on the table
i kept it inside a book to keep track of my reading
progress, still have it
the flower with a book as a flowermark
all these metaphors i give you
you will need them for the
compost
are there bees where you live, are there abandoned
wasp nests flicked by the last burst of
pulse, what about
grievances to rake before the winter?
[one way of looking at a horse]
1.
Sometimes, instead of the distance I find myself
looking at, say, the hair on my wrist.
All that vastness surrendered for blades of black
grass. What I gain is a turf to graze.
2.
Like a horse painting on a wall, my gaze. Tamed
by the geometry.
3.
When I release my gaze back into the distance, it takes
a moment for the gaze to get used to the new
preposition: from looking at something to looking into
a lack thereof.
4.
When I say the distance, what I mean is an awareness
of the distance. What I mean is love. How else
will the gaze know it is a part
of what it is seeking?
5.
If I stand between you & the horizon, my gaze a far-
flung stone, am I a wall or a portrait?
6.
If you find yourself at a shore, would you look at the
waves or the vastness?
7.
Only the longing gaze finds the horizon.
8.
Only the longing gaze finds the horizon.
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Sequence of a race horse galloping. Photos taken by Eadweard Muybridge (died 1904), first published in 1887 at Philadelphia. (source: Wikimedia Commons)
Needless to say, the poem “one way of looking at a horse” inspires this choice. We may be capable of perceiving motion, but to understand it, takes some kind of recording that must stand outside the flow of that motion. Photographers take photos, writers write, and banner-image selectors may sometimes step sideways.
There are several wonderful online articles on Eadweard (yes, it’s not ‘Edward’) Muybridge’s remarkable photographic recording, the first ever, of the horse in motion. Advanced the cause of science, etc. But really, also, just bloody cool.
Author | summa iru
summa iru happened when a poet came across Rilke’s Book of Hours. The rest, as they say, is a dog whistle.