by Dattatreya Das
I shunned study and scorned the Sage
Nor welcomed work but took the wage
Delighting but in tawdry fiction
Reading all night in mere addiction
Till a story from a bygone Age
I can scarce recall - to my rage
Puzzled my mind and prompted conviction
In it alone lay all benediction
Among books I had starved but this was a banquet
Enthralling it was - that “Tale of the Anklet”
Echoing in my mind like elven madrigal
The Sillapadikaram[1] by Ilango Adigal
The Love there pictured, the Loyalty limned
All my thoughts tinctured, till my doubts dimmed
And, upon sweet Matrimony, I resolved to embark
Surrendering my Patrimony, for a leap in the dark
My domestic flute soon usurped by drum and fife
Faithful to Love, yet forsaken by wife
I lost a son, still dearer than Life.
Wronged by the Law, there's still hope of Appeal
The judgement of Love, even Love can't repeal
The Heart's wounds, only the Heart can heal
Fie upon Women! They break what they steal!
And thus raging against Women, I took a mistress
The Grape's daughter, dulling distress
But, that red haired houri[2], I entertained in state
Turned harridan when I couldn't pay my slate
Once again homeless - barred from the
Stopping at home I took up with Gin
Until, by and by, my health was shattered
my morale too - not that it mattered
Now, my fortunes wane each passing year
None remain I held once dear
Who love but feign, that seems clear
Each breath is pain, the end seems near.
And so it is and must always be
Except the bride be KANAGI 
Joined in love that Lover flourishes
Whom not just Love, Fidelity nourishes.
And so try as I might my thoughts still run
on the nuptial nights of KOVALAN
And I curse the fever that keeps me abed
And a wit to weak to recall all it read.
So even the balm of that book is denied to me
The chosen subject of my Poetry
And I court the Muse with as little hope
As of piercing Maya[3], taking the snake for a rope
And with so little scaffolding I begin to build
Lacking straw for bricks, yet thinking to gild
for Kovalan's Love, an English Mausoleum
styled for the echoes of a Tamil Te Deum
Kanagi! O Kanagi!
let us but see
for a moment tho' it be
the gambolling child
barefoot and wild
on her natal hills
or- pray God so wills-
the Groom's party beguiled
by a bride meek and mild
While her kinsfolk sit amazed
to see the beauty they have raised
And Amma[4] is on tenterhooks
lest they ask if she cooks
And Appa[5] mops his brow
this will cost many a cow
And Tambi[6] makes a face
Anna[7] calls him a disgrace
Tambi protests and is pinched
Anna vows he'll be lynched
yet Tambi starts to cry
Who will dry his eye ?
Thus, in her eyes, unshed tears
As, in state, the groom appears
And looking into his face
She finds she cannot see
As is always the case
Facing Destiny
O tender bride! on teenaged groom
grafted when, for growth, there is room
Guard against untimely fruit
Let the hybrid tree take root
O gallant groom! with girlish bride
Practice patience, take thought to hide
the fever'd blood, the swooning fall
Thrill to her touch, being but her doll
And so reassured that it's benign
Stretched, on your body's Earth, she'll repine
And her thoughts will turn on womanly things
the antelope's hooves and the rain it brings
Turning your thoughts in every direction
Except where she's employed on your erection
Think not to instruct, let Eve's daughter
Teach you the working of pestle and mortar!
Your body, now, is her very own
And you- my God ! - how you've grown!
Both in budget and bed, leave Woman in charge
& you're a King! though your endowment isn't large .
And so it behappened and befell
The little couple getting on well
And, little by little, the years slipped past
She the sail and he the mast
Love was all their language
Bodies - but balm and bandage
they'd tender apply
till the ardent reply
reopened each wound
and, senses swirling, they swooned
Thus passing each Night
Light closing with Light
Unbroken their bliss
the breaking Sun
become, I
a bawling son.
Thus sundered each day
Their work seeming play
Going about their tasks
they were, but, wearing masks
Each eve they would shed
Then giggle, then bed.
Then, turning serious, the solder
Taking, yet grown no colder
A particle accelerator - their private parts
In Trinity, Creator of primordial hearts
But swift decay rules Love's first born
As with the Creation's earliest spawn
The sparks struck in that Big Bang
Were choirs culled ere they sang
And tho' in Love, each lover persists
In creating a World where naught else exists
It but subsists by progressive degradation
Each rivets in embrace a rippling emanation
Thus, tho' neither stray, the charmed circle is broken
Tho' still they sleep, in dreams they are woken
Changed by each other, still they change
Quitting cott, in pre-Thought to range.
First- looks replace the speaking touch
Then words are uttered- the amputee’s crutch
Till, by and by, their speech refined
Each concept used- contrarily defined.
But, this was not how it was
With our happy pair, dumb because
They employed their tongues but to enhance their raptures
Which e'en Ilango's rhyme rather trails than captures.
While amongst Men today the thoroughest Trappist
The most querulous to speak and quickest to slap wrist
At the simplest Anthem whose Anathemas are hurled
His Vision is most cluttered with Words and the World.
And in our most sceptical speech, by Ironical reversal
our trenches are overrun by the ‘Concrete Universal’
Nature and Art, Justice and Beauty
Seduce Scholastic sentries at their duty.
Ever loath to listen, to lecture keen
Always saying more than Men can mean
Tyrtaeus talks and Tantalus is thwarted
Art is born and Athena's aborted
Our Being-for-Others won't let others be
As with
Both are debased- Coiner and Coinage
Beggared by the Sovereign's rate of seigniorage[9]
Yet, still they go to it- each man and maid
Rather possessed than possessing, yet thriving in trade
Chained to their posts, yet courting mates
Changing nothing, exchanging states.
In every Suburb we see them- in brick embowered
Strangers to Art, with Appliances endowered
Passing their days in meaningless chatter
or, if Meaning intrudes- it becomes a Police matter
Ploughing but that weeds might flourish
The carrion crow, thy seed doth nourish
Veneris a fly trap, the Womb a Prison
Nailed to that Cross, which Saviour has risen?
And the true emblem of our Apollonian Culture
Is not the Bald Eagle, but the Vulture
We devise new tricks and whip on our wit
To dip our wicks between the piss and shit.
Times change and Manners too
Petrol fumes stain the blue
The eye of Heaven blinks and waters
We forget all the Sages taught us.
That Love is ethical which alters one's Ethos
Purifies Passion and teaches one Pathos
As of the Divine Light that seals our eyes
And the Daedalean wing'd who rather falls than flies.
Deaf to the strictures of mere Sittlichkeit
I mourn the glamour, but not the Gemutlichkeit
of a conjugal Love, Love conjured away
So God, once more, in Mud, could play.
We no longer have Revolutions, we have Divorces
In blood his ablutions & nightly her courses
The harvest's ungathered and all husbandry is a chore
Each son is unfathered, each Wife’s a Whore.
Futile this sale of Hymenal torches
What cares the flame for the moth it scorches ?
And our brightest moments are but shadows cast
by the Great Ones of the Past
Neither ring, nor Priest
Nor costly feast
Not uttered Oath
Nor long pledged troth
Will suffice to bind
Two of different mind.
But Minds exist only by exchange
Only those forms persist that estrange
And all who wed, by Romantic Irony
Lamenting, alone, learn Harmony
As, in
Plucking away their pleats, a grave reserve
Untouch'd, untroubl'd, they pass oblivious
to their shadows trysts - so lascivious.
So in Marriage too, but Shadows embrace
The work of Love, Love whirls to erase
Each for the other is ever Virgin
Love the wound and Love the surgeon.
The things of the World are things cheapen'd in use
And Love, in the World, the coarsest term of abuse
What is but possessed finally pollutes and is impure
What is ever repossessed, is both fever and cure
Thus loath to offer what they can, but, afford
Lovers, broken speech'd, are never bored
Why attempt the dragon's word horde ?
Who had wings, never have soared.
Luckier now than Bonnie and
Kovalan and his laughing bride
if one plott'd a raid on lay vocabulary
t'other was deputized by Love's constabulary
How foolish it would be to resist arrest !
Or, so fondly pressed, not bear one's breast
Or to long for aught save longer sentence
Or repeat the Sin, save to relish repentance.
Or if, of Judgement, the Judge grows coy
and suspends sentence- to annoy
the Defence then vies with the Prosecution
in pleading for summary Execution.
-----II----
Before Language existed, Love birds listening enraptured
to each other, by chattering Apes were captured
mimicking them, who learnt to communicate
not mutual Love but complotting Hate.
For Venus still reckons it deep disgrace
in the Sun's orbit to take second place
And spurns Earthly Spirits that onwards hurry
to freeze or fry on Mercury
To rather quibble than kiss argues loss of reason
But, all lovers being Mad, Venus still holds it treason
And tho' treasonous vermin die on the block
Losing their heads, still they will talk.
Lovers, 'tis notorious, know naught of Rhetoric
nor much use Memory - that Whorish trick
But are, by both, much besieged and beset
And, holding their notes, are dunned for a debt.
Individual Love pacts gave rise to Civilization
Which coming between each couple becomes Syphilization
Nor seduced, nor sheep like, nor caring for who talks
For the sake of the children, each catches the pox.
Far easier to forgive is mere fleshly infidelity
Then among mots and choses to lose one's chastity
A baby is bonny no matter how begot
Painful the pallor of the children of Thought.
Who, by day, his livelihood earns
and, Theseus like, each night returns
Finds his new mannerisms make her cross
Picked up, unwittingly, in battles with the Boss.
And who, from being a face, became a feeling
And, from being a body, became a mode of believing
ceases to please us and digs Beauty's grave
toiling with tweezers, to her mirror a slave
Of both we're well rid - Passion and Piety
When both are suborned agents of Society
Tight bound by the web, there's no bliss beside her
We worship and wed, for the convenience of the spider.
Who made all things, forbore giving them names
We call it Love and perish in its flames
We are words that claim a divine provenance
But what we mean, we have not connaissance.
We fall in Love taken by its glamour
and parlous, attempt to parse, God's grammar
Gestating Meaning, belly horribly swollen
Desire a full stop and deliver a colon.
Who makes nous a noun and rants but to reify
Before his works we bow down, his person we Deify
But who, “establishes Being, by means of the Word,”
However worthy his wares, hawks them unheard.
Paranoid about how perceived, but with no Passion for Perception
Seeing a stranger in the Mirror, we delight at our Deception
Find nothing so marvellous as a meretricious metonymy
And cease to be a metaphor, seized by a mercenary eponymy.
Love is an Ad
for what can't be had
the stock that is at hand
is of more reliable brand
just suck it and see
read the guarantee
each prick is an Uzi
each cunt a jacuzzi
--------III---------
Senseless it is to search for sense
Or of profundity make much pretence
Where themes are chosen to make them chime
And words are woven to make them rhyme.
Pitiable the poet who, Woe's wight,
Purposes to pen, in Doom's despite,
The idylls of an Idol, exquisitely antique
Inhabiting a World, inherited by the Meek.
Does she yet live - the Goddess Kanagi ?
Whom sculptor and Songster so vividly see
Statues and Stanzas we cannot animate
but fuel our fervour and seal our fate.
In stone to seek the form Divine
In words, infuse fumes of Wine
We do what we know, knowing the while
Futile is knowledge, Error fertile.
Thinking we field when all we do is juggle
We struggle to limn, but limn only our struggle
Even if our vision were avowed what would it avail us?
Trading but in tokens, visions too will fail us.
Others have penned lines that penned
themselves on minds, through minds without end
Less heartening rill than hoarsened rasp
We are the Poem that eludes our grasp.
-------IV--------
Soft the Night, the moonlit arbour
Soft the strokes, till a mutual harbour
Koyil[10], keeping cave, ignored the entry
Heaven, invading Earth, suborned the sentry.
Calm the cove and soft the sand
A muted Sea, a melting land
The tide's tongue pleasantly lapping
The tongue's tide incessantly sapping.
A shifting shadow forest, a silvered Sylvan glade
the bolder he grows the more she's afraid
His quiver aquiver- body a bowstring to pluck
The deeper its driven, the more she'll buck!
Magnificent the Mountain and prouder the peak
Laboured her breathing and Resistance weak
Shame 'd be that Sherpa who'd, now, tire or retire
Tho' he can but cling, she climbs higher and higher!
In Hind, Hymen, tho' fondled and fed Rice
In the same nest scorns to stop twice
But amongst varying scenes delights to roam
being much persecuted, pausing at home.
For narrow is the court and numerous the kin
Snoring all about and raising such a din
Oblivious to their own offence, yet how light they sleep !
If any two creep hence, a tryst to keep.
"Fire !" shouts Tata[11], "Rape !" Pati[12] screams
Rousing the rest and dousing their dreams
Till, in a moment, the whole clan is up in arms
And
Of bridal bliss the scolds are jealous
And of contriving chores the elders zealous
With longing looks, yet so little leisure
Each for the other is buried treasure.
Years pass and an unqickened womb
Invites their gall and adds to her gloom
For doubtful's that love that has this defect
to be so compelling a cause yet barren in effect.
Not Love made flesh, nor Flesh the Word
Just two embracing with never a third
Ever as duet their Love song sung
never to thrill to, for never to teach their tongue.
The Clan is rich tho' of frugal habits
His brothers boors - they breed like rabbits
Returning each night, from his forests and fields
He bemoans his plight- to talk to yokels of yields
And thus driven by degrees, Kovalan is drawn
To pleasure's precincts, where swains swear the morn
Commences not yet, till MADHAVI shows her face
And day's work is a debt, cancelled by Dawn's disgrace.
Ah ! What it is to enter that tall and tapered Hall !
To pause upon the threshold and remit the acclaim of all
To know oneself intricate in all lapidary ways
As richly rewarding as rewarded by their gaze.
But, too self conscious to succumb to the player’s practised charms
Unmoving, like an idol dumb, he's not yet quit of qualms
A pearl to be flung after each soprano's sung, and he panics at the expense
Straining each note, struggling to emote, he sickens at the pretence
Until, that is, the Jongleur Queen judges
her mark's getting miffed, he still gives but he grudges
and, in a word, the moment has come
to either give him the bird, or his pocket to plumb
What can't be said can oft be sung
But, Arias that defeat the mortal lung
Engaged Absolutes, may yet be limned
By the flashing eyed and fountain limbed
Now as one dazzled by the lightning of her eyes
Now as one deafened by the thunder of her thighs
Now thought tormented, now in a trance
Never seeing the dancer, he watches the dance
This is the body off which the Cosmos was born
This the flesh from which Consciousness was torn
This the broken winged bird, whose aborted flights
Yet can raise us to inconceivable heights.
Trees dance, but never dance away
Flowers clamour, but are crushed in play
Hills leap and Mountains skip
They're good ole boys, but hardly hip.
All the Earth we inhabit is only this body
Sell all you have and go and buy toddy!
You throw down Himalay, in drink when you stumble.
For dance is dementia and dementia is dance
The devadasi[14] is dazzled by the glare of our glance
Tho' spurned from her leman’s, and chastened with rods
Her feet drum up demons, her hands fling out Gods
Others, in rapture, now call out her name
Madam inquires - he wants more of the same?
As little in charge as an infant at nurse
Dumbly he nods and surrenders his purse.
But tho' all about they murmur "Madhavi !"
That fabled face he, alone, cannot see
Instead is atremble at the throb and the roar
Of an aethereal tide that beats at his shore.
As one enisled who glimpses the
As one hot pursued, quitting the Plain
His spirits surge in splendid Orison
To harmonise with a lifted Horizon.
There are more worlds within us than the Universe can hold
More tales about us than can, even in tale, be told
Yet, self forgetful Sultans, we greet with acclaim
Any strolling Minstrel with a rumour of our fame.
What baseness is it in us to quit the well seamed ore?
And covet a clipped coinage rather than new mint more?
To delight less in the Act than its paltry description
And forget the Physic, clutching the prescription.
And thus it happened to Kovalan
dazzled by a candle, he discarded the Sun
Shrugging off scandal, quitting Kanagi
Dance being for him what Verse is for me.
-------V-------
Love then was young, 'twas rare to see its Crypt
And tho' a Universal tongue, few had learnt its Script
For tho' all know how to Love, one must learn to love Love
And learning that Love, be done with Love, Luv.
----------VI-----------
Now, like a lack-wit lepidopterist, blunting his eyes
On tedious tomes tabulating the tints of butterflies
Passionate pilgrim, he pays dearly to see
In a dancing girl's gestures, the Grace of Kanagi.
The Toddy tree[15] shelters some who seek but for shade
The Stews, some, who scorn the wares there displayed
But by no dint of denial is the supposition scotched
these ones are drunkards, those others debauched.
And tho' drawn, but, by dance and a cultured coterie
All view him askance as Venus' votary
While pestered with Pity and unsolicited advice
His wife holds to Smriti[16] and swears it all lies.
Tho' he comes not to court, he finds himself courted
With crocodile tears, Madam retails what is reported
Assures him that Madhavi, shouldering the burden of blame,
Regrets only this- she has no cause for shame.
Drunkards and dancers are alike but in this
They yeast when they yearn, they lie when they kiss
Alcoholics and Artists ever long for that Lover
The Soul slaking spouse, they'd leave in an hour.
And thus it was with Madhavi
Who dancing held the Earth in fee
Yet, sitting still, is nothing brave
Then God's, now Gold's slave.
'Tis a Sin to love him, she well knows she is base
And he warms to her- the whore knows her place!
And undone by that egotism that triumphs in Wine
He roots at her feet, thinking- 'tis pearls before swine.
--------------VI--------------
To make love without Love is to lie with a Lie.
To feel estranged in one's body and shamed to feel shy
To know smoother rapture and swifter revival
For it's ever a departure and never arrival.
For Truth is arduous, Truth is hard
Ever a battle with never a bard
Cry "Love !" and lunge at all who are lungible
Love is illiquid, its forgery fungible.
See the Media's might push the great big Lie
The Whore Demos, with needle-raddled thigh
We can chasten the demotic & clarify the diction
We can ban the narcotic, we can't beat the addiction.
Be it the belle from Hell
Or the bimbo from Limbo
We score till we are sore!
And then score some more.
This now is our creed, our creed International
On this we're agreed, in this all are Rational
Sloe eyed or slant eyed, we maximise Utility
Ad man or Had man, we inherit Futility.
----------VII-----------
Of Nature, Art begs the gift of Life
But Nature's Law is guttering Strife
So all Art is unattested till, the corpse of a Truth,
Like Hector despoiled, it awakens echoes of Ruth.
Life circling Art, like Hyenas carrion
Affects the Aesthete, each howl a clarion
Call to the Philistine, ever slow to cotton
to come & dine on the perfectly rotten.
An irresistible call in our post-Einstienian age
Where each new savant seeks the last to upstage
And the World is a knot tied in umpteen dimensions
And Man is a verb with varying declensions.
A point moves- a line.
A line moves- a plane.
A line read, resolved,
a mere point again.
A plane moves- an
object. Objects move in Time.
Ineluctable modality
of Music and of Rhyme.
Embedded wherein,
world line becomes wave function
Entombed therein, we
tremble at extreme unction
Hounded, unhaltingly,
yet spying new hideaways
Moving in Time, Minds,
alone, move sideways.
Through those cruel
reveries our parents called viciousness.
Tho' the circle was
vicious, we achieved Consciousness
Zigzagging between
impossible Pasts, implausible Futures
We'd crash again and
again, all smiles now sutures.
A stinking pyre is our
brain, in our blood Oceans drown
How many wagon trains
have we not ridden down ?
Yet, reeking of
rapine, we stumble on another
And, seizing, are
surprised, their sister is a brother.
This wave woven world,
this moved, marble, Mind
Mirroring each other,
to each other are blind
What is that Love
others have found?
Who binds billows,
themselves unbound?
We are of Chaos the
Caliph, the Cosmos our bar & bodega
Erased with the
Golem's Alif[17], inscribed in Tielhard's Omega
Form shattered
Mirrors which Messiah has arisen?
Tho’ Love is
parole, Love built the prison.
---------------VIII---------------
Time passes and Kovalan settles down
to playing the Prince when, in sooth, he is the clown
Paying for his pleasures with Mortgages raised
First on his cattle, then the meadows they grazed.
His brothers scold, but with each other vie
To snap up his notes & his silver to buy
Kanagi's kinsfolk, getting wind of the fact,
Urge her return, while her dowry is intact.
But, brave tho' betrayed, Kanagi does not flinch
Economises in secret so not he feels the pinch
Gives alms with aplomb, nor seems to dread it
When the tradesman knocks- which strengthens his Credit.
All this done without Hysteria or Histrionics
Sorrow's sincerest student, seeming one of Eudemonics
And tho' Love was the bitterest cup now placed before her
For Love's sake she drained it- so he could, more blithely, ignore her
Courage is never in big things, Courage always in small
Adventurers are cowards, all in Adrenalin's thrall
Men lay claim to courage and into Chaos are hurled
For Courage is a Woman. Shakti[18] sustains the World.
-----------IX----------
This is the Philologist's maxim - whether Vedic or Mexican
To simplify the World View- complicate the Lexicon.
A process that's progressed till anything felt or thought
Can be expressed by the brands that are bought.
The new Social Semiotics, most galling to me
Denied self expression by my penury
As fugitive as my Vision and as briskly cornered
My poems and cheques are alike unhonoured
And so I return, once again, to that far off Time
When signs where not things, nor Speech oral mime
The domain of the uttered not the oligopolist's dominion
the range of the utterance not diminished to Oblivion
--------X--------
Love was her World and Love every word
Tho' that World shatter, not Kanagi is surd
It yet coheres with an incalculable topology
Scaffolded by a self-solvent ontology.
His appearance is unaltered yet how much he is changed!
If with doubt she'd been dowered, she'd doubt herself deranged
Knowing herself widowed without knowing how or why
She's an unresisting Suttee, in the pyre of his eye.
Marriage is a yoking - a Yoga never over
till aloft like the swan above Mansarovar[19]
Fidelity triumphs tho' the flesh be faithless once
For Crematorium smoke is the wing of Parmahans.
Prakriti and Purusa[20], from mutual embrace, exiled
Being differently deluded, are both alike beguiled
Man enters the Symbolic order, thinking it Transcendence
Woman masses on the border - disputing its
For Life must go on - tho' Language subsumes it
& Communication kept up, tho' Silence consumes it
Penelope weaves through each wave in the Odyssey
A faithful wife is, to the faithful, Theodicy.
----------------XI---------------
Swearing in earnest to what he had said but in fun
How times have changed for Kovalan !
Proving again what drabs well know
Fortune's ebb is Passion's flow.
Now taunted for his former lofty style
now turned away without guilt or guile
Now harrowed by her harlot lore
Now embraced as he was before
Sure of nothing, suspecting much
in Tantalus torment for her touch
He little knows if he sleeps or wakes
And now of gall, now manna, partakes.
The more piteous his petition the more peremptory her answer
Dance is the Deity of the dust that is the dancer
Whose image she incarnates - bootless to ask how
As, wedded to the Rocks, Siren keeps her vow.
While Ash is left to stir and embers to warm
Who'd winnow the flesh to worship Form?
Tho' ever decaying, 'tis deathless - Matter
Form's a flower that, sniffed, doth shatter.
"Madhavi!" he cries and again "Madhavi!"
Tho' bitter was the bloom, better the brief life of the bee
Than arduous ascents in Art's gilded hours
And Eternity amidst self-fertilizing flowers.
Rather choosing to part
than be held by her Art
tho' not spurned from her door
he goes there no more.
Wandering the wastes and the wilds
thoughts - now a God's, now a child's
Swell, like bubbles, and burst
her name - now blessed, now cursed.
The absence that aches in his eyes
Nature's green Physic defies
Nor the wind nor the waves can please him
Choreographing colours, they tease him.
Nor the brisk squirrel, the motionless kite
's drama distracts tho' it mirrors his plight
Fruits of the Earth nourish the knights of the Air
Who'd take flight, first feasts on the fair.
We learn to Love when we begin to die
Besiege a "Thou", bare holding the "I"
Our desires and deeds have this common textuality
Our Death colophon to our "History of Sexuality."[21]
Kovalan returns to his Love, for his Love was unreturned
Seeing in Kanagi what his Saqi had spurned
And recognises at home, broadcast by refraction
The Mirage Tavern and its every attraction.
Penitent for the Past, yet numb to feel
Wounded by the Vast, he'll never heal
She sorrows twice whose tears are hidden
Never cleansed, her mind a midden.
Embarrassed by echoes, their speech is small
Fearing to fetter, they scarce embrace at all
What words are there to silence words?
How cage the song, yet free the birds?
Homelands can become Hellscapes the householder flees
Venus, as much as Mars, can boast her Refugees
In coarse travelling garb, quitting the well loved scene
Their eyes track the dust, not the paddy field's green.
The little they carry scarce explains their stoop
Arid eyed they walk, yet their lashes droop
Tho’ a faded myth, they muster "a fresh start"
For only myths matter in matters of the Heart.
The restless roads, the unstopping Seas
The unsettling rumour of the breeze
Whip on the weary, the loath to leave
And who were leery are forced to Believe.
Sweeping on Lovers, Love takes its course
The
Beginning where waters mingle- both salt and sweet
They end on lonely mountains- with lacerated feet.
Exchanging sea shore tumult for the torpid plain
Quitting Puhar[22], they sight the Pandya's demesne
Glimpsing golden gopurams[23] that gladden the eye
And, through morning's mist, the maze of
-------XII-------
A City is a Mountain, a Mountain a ladder
Whose single summiteer is no wiser but sadder
Than the middling who freeze fearing to ascend
And damming those lower, their Honour defend.
While those bedevilled by drives - Thymotic or Thanatotic
Are the swiftest to surrender to Sensoriums - Robotic
And favouring fiercer friction, most fear ignition
& indistinguishable doom, in the "Struggle for Recognition."
Now walking the streets with Wealth synonymous
Kanagi & Kovalan, garb'd like workers, anonymous
See the Mechanic's muscle is a mark of disability
And Grisette's gay cloche, the cap of Invisibility.
Fearful & unenfranchised, threading through the throng
Tho' never pausing to listen, they are pursued by this song
"Setting worth on
our only ware, in tears we thought to trade
"In Surfeit's
City, Sorrow so rare, Our Fortune, alas!, we made."
Passing the Goldsmith's quarter, Kanagi has a thought
She still has one ornament, the finest a jeweller wrought
And so, removing her anklet, its sale she doth urge
for its once sprightly song, is now leaden footed dirge.
Kovalan tosses back the trinket, for its tinkling melodious
Revives memories of Madhavi and much that is odious
And, with its bells dinning in his ear, steps up his stride
Like a homicidal husband fleeing the ghost of his bride.
Plunging through the streets without purpose or plan
They, finally, collapse - having walked all they can
At last, admitting defeat, seeing his wife so wan
So, at least they can eat, he takes the anklet to pawn.
Meinongian objects[24] that belong not in Being
Being but uttered alter modes of seeing
And, like Borgesian Hrönir[25], spontaneously appear
Pretenders we pledge to, till their title stands clear.
In the Palace, an anklet, merely misplaced,
has created a theft to be pitilessly traced
The pawnbrokers and jewellers have all been alerted
The Law's been unleashed & Justice averted.
Now, for an imaginary crime, Kovalan is lashed
As Kanagi's felicity was ferociously smashed
Interpolations undermine a common textuality
Kovalan expires in an adulterated Reality.
Separated from Shiv, Uma becomes Shakti[26]
That lives but to die & burns but in Bhakti
Raging for Ruth, Kanagi's Shakti is employed
In destroying the World as her World was destroyed.
Kanagi, become Kali, of blood has her fill[27]
The City burns like Canetti's Ant Hill
As Shibi's[28] Royal flesh reprieved the life of a dove
Maya fulminates
----------------0----------------
Envoi: Prince! Reward me for this my ditty
It's blokes like me secure your City
What need you fear from Kanagi?
Fill my jug and let me be.
© Dattatreya Das