Kolkata
Feast of the Sacrifice
I watch the King and his courtiers on television as they peg a ram to the floor and slice its throat, then leave the house for a walk. A gluey layer of blood has settled on the cobblestones, and the air smells of scorched fur and lemons. The silence is punctuated by the odd death-bleat in the distance. The medina is entirely deserted: the prayer sounded a while ago and everyone’s busy eating. Growing accustomed to the city, I start to fool myself. I’m not a tourist – no: I’m a local; at the very least, a dignified semi-local. An hour into my walk, I notice I’m being followed. I look over my shoulder: there’s a boy leaning against a lamppost twenty paces behind me. He couldn’t be older than eleven or twelve. He shadows me for a while, then, appearing to lose patience, quickens his pace to catch up to me. His hand clamps my wrist, abnormally strong. ‘You’re lost,’ he tells me; ‘you should go home.’ Gently, but firmly, as though returning a lost sheep to the fold, he delivers me to my doorstep. He asks for a modest reward. I pay him. He shakes my hand. He has to go: his mother and sisters are waiting for him. At that exact moment, three young men in their twenties appear from around the corner, giggling and singing as they pass a pipe back and forth. The boy eyes them disdainfully. ‘They are not men!’ he exclaims. Then, pointing a finger at the sky, as though to invoke some higher authority: ‘Men must work hard, or stay little forever.’
Fez
Postcard from the Cape
for Declan Ryan and Rachael Allen
Few feet
tread the tired timber floors
of the old Observatory now, a couple
of tourists perhaps, or the odd
data analyst skulking in slippers
down the dark musty corridors.
The security guard is reading The Pleasure Tube,
‘an exhilarating conspiracy aboard a sexy starship’.
There’s no
star-gazing tonight and the clouds
stalk the yellow moon like hungry hyenas.
In 1820, when the Cape had that wet
smell of fever about it, Fearon Fallows
decided his work should devour his life,
and six years after his wife and children had died
he installed his telescope atop Slangkop,
or Snake Hill,
as the Dutch colonists called it.
It’s getting late, and the runaways
from the Valkenberg have grown hungry.
Little to eat today, just like yesterday too …
A few streets away, the Malay muezzin
clears his throat for the prayer call at the mosque
down in Salt River, past invisible lines
no whites
dare to cross. It’s safer indoors,
inside panic mansions with Alsatians
and ARMED RESPONSE signs. David Shook
is in town – one night only! – on his way
to the lush land of Burundi, where the districts
are carved into mountains and the mayors
are ‘king of the hill’. He tips an espresso
into a tall Coke –
‘Haitian coffee,’ he says – and we discuss
how travel can harden the heart, inure it
to pity and pain … When dawn breaks,
I go into the garden and watch Devil’s Peak
glow like a live coal. My myopia grows worse,
all I see is a blaze – but who needs high definition?
If I close my eyes, the whole world feels like home.
Through the Rockies
It’s my third sleepless dawn on the Zephyr
and I’m in Iowa. Outside my window,
a gopher tunnels out of its purgatory
and wobbles across the sugary snow.
Over the aisle, I watch Tanika crush
grains as pink as the sky, then take
a quick hit on her pipe. She’s on the run.
Her six kids are somewhere in Indiana;
the last time she spoke to her mother,
the old woman shouted, ‘No good
comes of breeding with niggers and spics,’
meaning the fathers of Tanika’s children.
‘I wish I was in The Wizard of Oz,’
Tanika mumbles as we slice
through the American vastness.
Everyone here has one foot in life
and the other in the future, or the past –
usually in the past. Jane, who looks and sounds
like Jessica Lange, reminisces about years
spent working in the circus: ‘It was
the ’70s. I was living in England,
and you really needed a union card
to get any work as an actress,’
so she spent five gruelling months
touring the continent on an elephant.
Her raw tongue licks the edge
of her jagged teeth: ‘The dwarves
were the worst: mean, horny things …
‘One night, two of them tried to rape me,
but the bearded lady, my friend,
gave them a hiding they’ll never forget!’
At Reno, Jane and the vets in their caps
begin their week of blackjack and slots.
We slow down before Denver
and during a stop munch our way
through Jane’s special brownies;
Lenny, our conductor, plucks a steel guitar
and yells, ‘Yo-delay, yo-delay, all aboard!’
Later, he hands me the day’s newspaper:
Russia’s invaded Crimea again.
If history comes first as tragedy, second as farce,
then what shall we call this third act
we’re trying so hard to survive in?
That evening, as we draw near to Chicago,
the passengers turn in unison
to face the horizon; I watch a burst
of dew crystallize in the crisp, purple air,
each droplet shining like a diamond
till it fades away in the distance.
‘How pretty,’ I think. The next day, Lenny
will tell me this could only mean one thing:
someone was flushing the toilet.
Brief Encounters of the Hopeless Kind
I was running across Chicago’s Union Station
and up and down South Canal Street,
looking for a girl with a dog. ‘Hey, you!’
a man by his taxi shouted, spotting
the wild look in my eyes. ‘You high or what?’
Well, kind of, I thought, but by then
I was clean out of breath and, lacking paper
and pen, or a calm, sober mind, mumbling
a name it was proving too hard to remember.
‘Winnie’, or ‘Whitney,’ I’d wanted to say –
‘you shake me screw-loose!’ But all I had done
at the gate where we parted, after four days
of fast, sleepless travel, was hand her
a card with my name, and an address
no longer my own. She’d set her course:
to hike the frozen spine of the Appalachians.
No dreams of shelters from chaos for her,
just Foxy, her dog, and the open trail …
I kept running down the street
till my lungs gave out, nursing the lingering
liquorice of that last, hurried kiss,
and the feel of her tiny frame, and the smell
of her dreads, held in place by a chopstick.
Later, hypnotized by the low flow of the Hudson,
I thought of her as my half-empty Greyhound
rattled through farmlands in New Hampshire,
bought from the Natives, it’s said, for a roll of cloth.
Like the granite in the distance, my mind petrified,
while the image of Winnie, or Wendy,
snug in the woods in her sleeping bag,
&n
bsp; recalled Francesca’s lines to the Florentine:
‘Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,’
love will see no reason, love will dig your grave.
Snapping back in my seat, I jumped up
and recalled the train station’s refrain:
SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. I wished I had.
In the Shadow of Monadnock
for Tomaž Šalamun
The bronze Union soldier
stands guard on the green.
Behind him, the Town Hall
where his forefathers voted
to ‘live free or die’ is for sale.
The Republic slides to insolvency
and the few YES WE CAN
stickers still in the windows
are beginning to bleach. Spring
loosens its hold on the rivers; the rich
smell of rot wafts out from the leaves.
Something moves in the shadowy pines
that sway in the strong winds and creak
like rusty doors in a horror film.
A fast hammering can be heard:
those woodpeckers know
which tree is next to die. I sit
on the sagging porch of Jo’s red colonial
and watch the last ribbons of paint
peel away from the shingles;
there are five bedrooms inside,
but only one is kept warm. No TV
or radio, either: the news upsets Walter.
Jo’s girls left long ago, off to plough
the hard field of the City; the milk cow
that saw them to adulthood died last year.
New money is spreading like moss,
while the locals are losing their homes.
‘It was easier once: you were born,
you worked the land, and then
the land worked you back into it.’
Now the grocery bags grow thinner
and thinner. Jo means to stick it out.
Birds whose names elude us shatter the silence
in a good way, maybe the best. I inhale the crisp
New England air and exhale a panegyric.
Jo smiles, tells me quite a few folk up here
are suffering from asthma. They can thank
Pennsylvania for that, she says: it’s the dust
carried north from the coal mines on the breeze.
‘There’s hatred, envy and greed afoot in our world,’
wrote an old Saxon poet, ‘and this is where you must live:
among thieves and killers.’ Back in the square,
I stare into the dead coins of the soldier’s eyes
and almost hear the trumpets. There’s nowhere to run.
In the Catskills
for Zinzi
We were trapped in a town called Liberty.
Our cabin lay on top of a hill, where the snow
kept us caged for entire weeks at a time.
Down the dirt road, past a couple of bends,
lay the hamlet of Neversink, which of course
had been drowned by a reservoir. It was hard
to think of anything human around us as serious;
all man had built reeked of failure and rust.
We lived amidst the ruined remnants
of a Yankee frontier town – slumbering mills,
silent railroads, idle factories, gutted houses,
a few drowsy strip malls … It was the nonsensical
heart of Angry America, where descendants
of Unionists proudly flew Dixie flags
to spite the dark man in the White House.
The one half-decent bite to eat was at Stu’s:
a blue Kullman diner formerly on 49th and 11th
that got pushed out by franchises, then
exiled upstate on a flatbed, never to return.
When the mulch plant shut down, the sons
and daughters of Liberty debated at length
the great prospects before them: casinos
or fracking; but the rich second home-owners
fought the oilmen and won, so casinos it was.
‘Liberty, son,’ an old schoolteacher told me,
‘is where the past comes to die.’ Ain’t it funny to think,
my beloved, that this was where our future began?
III
* * *
History is my only country.
ANTAL SZERB
The Other Achilles
‘My mother says I have a choice’
The world can do without my name.
Give me a happy backwoods: servants,
a palace, fleets, taxes, maybe a pet too;
a life well lived as any. Pride, I fear,
is pointless. There are no kings, or pawns,
only squares, and a limited number of moves.
Tell me, mother: how long is everlasting?
Not long enough. Let Troy and Greece
fight on without me; no doubt they will. I,
on the other hand, once buried, will fertilize
the green that grows around their ruins, and
like ivy choke their stones, until they crumble:
crumbling, turn to sand.
Atticus
Unlike many
of the sad schemers Rome birthed in his time,
Titus Pomponius Atticus is best remembered
for how he died, and not for what he tried
and failed to conquer …
Indeed,
the Gods never abandoned him, as they did
Cicero, Caesar, Brutus and Anthony – yet
to say he played both sides and lived
a long and contented life
at the expense of others
would be terribly unjust; in times of need,
friend and foe alike found food and drink
under his canopy, and though he shook
many a hand,
none were ever greased.
Seventy-seven and still untouched by scandal,
an ulcer took hold of him, and took him hard.
After three months spent in bed, old Titus,
stoic as ever, placed a hand
over his loins
and whispered: ‘enough’. That was when
he decided to die, to starve himself
until his life slipped from his lips.
When his fast was in its second day,
the fever,
as though frightened by the man’s stubbornness,
left him suddenly. Begged by wife and friends
to relent, Titus submerged himself in silence,
and for three days bore his hunger
with the utmost dignity,
until death took him on the fifth. Many wept
at the sight of his litter leaving his home
on its way to the Appian. Little else is known
of Titus, who set still less store by his words,
and history,
as if to reward him, has ensured none are remembered –
allowing, by that, no shadow to fall on his memory,
as often befalls a great many of those we hear about,
who gossip without a stray thought for posterity.
Patience
The old Roman emperors knew a thing or two about exile. On discovering a poet who had taken too many liberties, or a relative grown uncomfortably popular, they selected an island, ideally somewhere sunny: Africa, perhaps, or a rocky outpost off the coast of Sicily; then, having chosen a location that was suitably isolated, they dispatched their prisoner there. At first, life wasn’t so bad for the new exile. Letters from friends came and went, and slaves catered to their every need. The climate was pleasant; the villa spacious; their allowance ample; and their stay, they were assured, only temporary. The exile was allowed to roam freely within the village. Occasionally, they even made friends. As the years went by, a routine of small pleasures would help to mitigate the exile’s nostalgia,
making their longing almost bearable. Languishing in indolence, however, the exile would grow to look upon his changeless fate as worse than death itself. Finally, when the Emperor saw that sufficient time had elapsed, the soldiers were dispatched: small handfuls of men-at-arms who, washing ashore on the island under cover of darkness, would bring the long vacation to its promised end.
The Crisis of the Third Century
They were dying, the Romans, and they knew it:
fewer sandals took to their roads, and wars
were getting pricier, bloodier; less satisfying, too.
Once fear got hold of the Romans,
it never released them. Their solution was walls,
higher walls: the blind ecstasy of mortar and brick.
The more spirited ones threw lavish parties,
orgies – their spirits sinking as each of their guests
abandoned sinful pleasures for the sanctity of the Cross.
Some blamed it all on the polluting barbarians,
and edicts were passed to outlaw the mixing of races.
Of all their flawed remedies, it would be their last.
The Pagan’s Lament
‘The Christians burned down my father’s school
and across the sea, by the mouth of the Nile,
they butchered a colleague of his in her classroom.
I’m told she was beautiful: curly locks, full lips
and a mind as bodacious. Unlike my old father,
I keep my opinions to myself; my husband
fervently believes in a God who some
describe as jealous, a murderer, even. My husband’s
friends frighten me: last night they slaughtered
a man for insisting an angel might also
be called a nymph – one of the finer points
of their canonical law … Today I heard my husband
say a rational woman was a sign of decadence,
of end times. I see dark days ahead for my kind.’
Put Not Your Trust in Princes
After four decades of early mornings and late nights,
Ferdowsi had completed his epic, the Shahnameh,
and thus he decided to visit Sultan Mahmoud,
who’d once promised him a gold piece per couplet;