Three Poems by Sushil Sivaram

Taxi Hears

Dogs have an acute
sense of hearing; Taxi
must feel sick
in war –
18, or 19 muscles move her ears;

the tear of rhythm, racket,
report of what, where:
Afghanistan, Gaza, Kashmir,
Dafur, Chechnya, in bed-
rooms and kitchens

where torn in wind, like flags,
paper cease-
fires rend, a topography
of skin, hair.
Mosaics of cities on fingernails,
carpet bombed,
she hides in cupboards, linen
bunkers –

it is houses littered on breasts
congealed like blood
or starch, or fat –
one broken joint
at a time. She doesn’t see,
only hears recitals
of mind detonate
in mouth and spit
shrapnel –

She must trust the ears too much
rhythm is a passage
after the phrase is voiced,
like echoes of propaganda
from stiff shoulders.

The italicized lines are from the poem “Myth-Talk” by Keki N. Daruwalla from his book Under Orion (1970). He was a police officer.

A Mythology of Errors

Jaco plays ‘Portrait of Tracy’, his fingers melt, quicksilver from sunken strings; I’m sediment. The errors of history, her story – if I forget this city, I will forget her, and a mythology of errors. Staged like mannequins, we parade the haute couture of clichés, a pulp fiction with lipstick and wigs lynched into words with scripts tattooed like dot matrices. I am on this side of everything I do not want to occupy, like poignancy for emptiness. I feel sludge. At the bottom. My frame pulled into a foundation. Ooze. Blood. Dog blood. Bird blood. All blood. We stand and watch the rivers return with the tide. The sediment’s brown, black, white, yellow; its difference sieved – pigments of skin settle like dandruff.
I met her in this city. For the first time. Overlooking a tiled atrium. Still always under construction. The dissection of a chance, a chamber we passed, posed in ignorance. Arrogance. It was the only time I gave in to skin and memory deleted with diurnal ease, blank like naked, all skin, in love with the packet, in love with polythene, she was porcelain and hand painted. If I forget this city, I will forget her. Look at it. – a pi- dog, the city is me – me is city – city me – me city – me then pi-dog like in that poem in a temple town. Another town, another city where the line found love, in railway stations, in ruins – this ruin – sometimes I am dog, sometimes I am city/Woof/Wuf/Wf/Vuf/Vf/Voof in a dog ensemble of howls. The city is her-me-dog. I read to her in the rain, in double exposure from Halran Ellison’s ‘A Boy and his Dog’,/a cultbook among pi-dogs everywhere –/ in which the ‘Boy’ of the title/ sacrifices his love,/ and servers up his girlfriend/ as dogfood to save the life of his/ starving canine master.

The italicized lines are from Arun Kolatkar’s cultpoem “Pi-Dog”. Maybe, Kolatkar liked Jaco Pastorius, maybe he didn’t, but the weight of their lines will perpetually “hover on the edges…” of this page.

,or is somebody else, dressed like him

(the railway station)

He walks. Then.
A late night south bound train
terminates at Churchgate.
The squeal. Metal grates
white, sharp, flakes peel
like pencil shavings.
A thousand bodies in sweat, in rain
like starlings startled in the evenings
making a pointillist sky kinetic –
or like seawater
the bodies return, and leave sand
darker, to dry,
he’s a spot in the sky, in sea.

He pushes his way, he buys tea,
but, the young novice at the tea stall
has taken a vow of silence,
while the PA system mouths alibis,
if it knows when/the next train’s due
it gives no clue.

The tea’s tepid like blood that eddies
around lumps
in his body, a morel
after a storm, pushing
outwards, muddy at meaning,
or a drizzle, amidst polyester
shirts, combs, safety pins, soft-
porn magazines –
he feels sorry for Taxi.

*

(about a dog and the railway station)

A brown pi-dog sprawls
under a neon:
mutual funds,
Colgate,
State Bank of India,
doing penance for the last
three hundred years under
the tree of arrivals and departure,
its muddy paws,
in the way
of indifferent strides
in shoes,
slippers,
bare foot; the dog [no stanza break]
reminds him of Taxi, her status
in dog society – why do some dogs
have it all, and others don’t?

Another train departs –

what’s left is empty space, in-
elegant, concrete and sleepers.

*

(about a dog)

It’s time to feed Taxi.
Walk, walk – wait
for her to sniff,
each leaf more important
than the other, bush-walking
in carrot weed, dusty gray,
yellow lantana.
Taxi, the ritual.
Her body churns between his legs
at night, a hot water bag
in metronome time.

*

(the railway station)

He sits on a bench.
Eats.
The rails
like the parallels
of a prophesy
appear to meet
No longer somebody else
only dressed like him.

The italicized lines are from the poem “The Railway Station” from Arun Kolatkar’s book Jejuri – a forgotten lineage. A thin line yet to be walked, or being walked, by forgetting. He never ever owned a telephone.

—
© Sushil Sivaram

Sushil is originally from India and his poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in New Quest – A Quarterly Journal of Participative Inquiry, The Brown Critique (journals based in India), REAL-Regarding Arts and Letters and Lantern Review.