The fault with the skull

The fault with the skull

Such

 is the fault

with the skull

it breaks apart

with the slightest touch,

spurting

blood, intellect, emotion,

leaving you

dazed.

Lack of care

makes bed

with the dead

end.

There

are not always

 chances

to make

amends.

***

On reading the classics

Trying to translate Herta Muller’s
The Land of Green Plums
in which the bags of Lola’s suitors

spill with the tongues and levers
that they stole from the slaughter houses,
you are reminded of your grappling

with the reality of the sensory perceptions
of Chancelade in Le Clezio’s Terra Amata.
Even to read about cruelty

is like going through it.
That is one reason you suspended Llosa’s
The War of the End of the World

Half-way through, as you have given up
watching movies on holocaust after the ones
like The Schindler’s List or Life is Beautiful.

To cope with the reading of the classics,
you have strayed, in a sense, from your way,
desperate to hang on to any piece, say

William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers
with its four-line stanzas ending with the refrain:
“Timor Mortis Conturbat Me”

while the priest in the village blesses you all: keep away,
untimely death as he performs obsequies
sprinkling the holy water from the Ganga on all present

on the death of the youngest in the family.
You detest death no less than
you detest life that seems to sparkle

sometimes bright, sometimes alluring
like the mountains Nanda Devi, Kanchanjunga
which you hoped to scale but dropped the idea

(as if you could have scaled them at all),
like if it was necessary
to read to write.

* * *

There is a hearth in my mind

Poems are of no use though,
they have kept lighting
the lone lamp each time
the wind extinguishes it.

There are times when
that stump of lamp, unlit,
keeps taunting me like
a discarded lighthouse.

While storm tosses
the paper boats
vainly I console them
not to worry.

One day I shall bring fire,
I tell myself, cheating the wind
and light the hearth
sitting cold in my mind.

* * *

Antonio in search of Shylock to give him His due pound of flesh

At a time
when the glaciers are melting
more than before

and the Tsunami is no more
just the matter of the Pacific,
you say, “My pound of…”

Why don’t you be kind
and slay
me?

That’ll fetch you
not one
but one hundred pounds,

with bones and blood,
skin
inclusive.

Where are you now?
I am moving
with all my mass,

your pound
of flesh
inclusive,

now fast
on the crest
of the Tsunami waves

now slow
on the hollow
ice to make myself light

of my guilt
not to have
paid back

your dues.
It’s not just
a miracle that

while the rest
perished,
you and I

have survived.
We are that
flotsam and jetsam

thrown into the attic
of the collective
unconscious

so that
we can be
used as archetypes

so that
they can be
human beings

and carry on
business
in our garb.

* * *

Nail

I almost nailed it
as I caught it riffling
through my mind.

Who was it
or what was it after?
I could not lay my finger

on it the last time
it showed up.
Each time I have dived

into its possible motifs
I have surfaced instead
with jewels in oysters—

witnesses to the mutability,
something akin to a ghost
that turns into a half-burnt

log once it is dawn
in my grandma’s tales,
and myself

a feeble sound of a nail
being driven to the wood
of a dead tradition

* * *