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When at nights you feel
On another’s tongue
Slanderous asafoetida
Lime’s quick murderous knife
Sliding in among
Wild strawberry orgies
Arabesques of garlic
Curvaceous around
The sentinel cloves
You wonder about desire
How it can be found
Delicate as rose water
Or frank as coriander
Rising from your lover’s
Breath, mustard fumey
What lingers after
You consume each other
Is this memory of spices
Dancing salt waltzes
And mint fritillaries
Waving to parsley fronds
Which is why the milky
Delicacy of Bangla mishit
Mystical Varanasi rabri
Mysore pak melting piously
In your tolerant maws
Jalebi’s intricate twists
Like signatures support
Only a lesser cause
Affection, but not love
If you’re truly hungry
You must melt the world
Into paprika agonies
Tympanum of turmeric
Masking rosemary swirls
And cumin confetti
Falling in the basil dusk
As you wander through
Legendary cinnamon groves
Even the jumpy machinations
Of ginger must taste to you
Sweet, if you have feasted on love.
© 2004, Rukmini Bhaya Nair
From: Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems
Publisher: Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2004
A goddess chews on myth
As other women might on paan
Red juices stain her mouth.
Bored by her own powers
Immense and spectral, Kali broods
About Shiva, she is perverse.
She will not plead with him
Nor reveal Ganesha’s birth
She will not ask him home.
Shiva loves her, but absences
And apsaras are natural to him
No god is hampered by his sins.
Kali desires a mortal, whose day
Begins with her, ends at nightfall
In her arms, a man who will die
Without her, whose love is fallible
But secure, she wants to be held
Like a warm creature, not a fable.
Loneliness drives this goddess mad
She is vagrant, her limbs askew
She begs a mate, her hair unmade.
Fickle as Shiva, memory deserts her
Chandi or Durga or Parvati, which
Is she, which of her selves weeps here?
Even Ganesha, for whom she feels
Only tenderness, excludes her, even he
Seems impatient with her flaws.
Where should such a goddess turn?
Kali, mistress of the temporal worlds
Wants bliss defined in human terms.
Staid Ganesha knows this wildness
Must be curbed, Shiva, peripatetic
Agrees, and across the wilderness
Both gift Kali a companion eagle, hurt
By no arrow, fed on nothing, it returns
Each night to its eyrie in her heart.
© 2004, Rukmini Bhaya Nair
From: Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems
Publisher: Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2004
Whitman isn’t in
He will not be in
This year or the next
He’s gone out
Far out where the two
Americas meet like kissing whales
Beyond the net
Of the universities
Whitman celebrates his absence
Old grampus
Without a postmodern
Stitch on him he reads himself
Sitting naked
On leaves of grass
Sounding his barbaric yawp
Forever thirty-seven
And in perfect health chewing
The heads off dandelions and theorists
Which right-thinking critic
Would not like to put to sleep
This unconcerned ecologically hazardous
Phallogocentric brute
Once and for all in that
Endlessly rocking cradle of his?
But damn Whitman!
There’s no putting him out
He says his sex contains all bodies, souls
This his self-description:
Stern, acrid, large, undissuadable
And help! Also draining the pent-up rivers
Of himself
Into women and demanding
Perfection from his love-spendings
Whitman alters
What he grandly calls
The base of all metaphysics
His gods
Are stones and sinews
Or an occult Brahma encountered
Interminably
Far back on that reckless
Passage to India descending radiating
His incantatory texts
And striding back and forth between
Vaunt’d Ionia and Sanskrit and the Vedas
Affected by a chronic logorrhoea
It’s clear the fellow abhors silence, babbling
All the time of puzzles to be solv’d and blanks to be fill’d
Blissfully ignorant
That erasure is essential
Words treacherous and that doubt wafts in every human soul
Ah how I’d like
To introduce Walt to wordplay
Brackets and all the joys of paranomasia
How he’d love it too!
Whit(e)man caring not a whit
Careening down passion’s witless slopes
Waltzing with Whitman
Could be such fun but he flatly
Refuses to rise to all my intellectual baits
He says he will not be
Darken’d and daz’d by books any more
He will steer for deep waters only and the farthest
Shore
And, sorry, poor dullards
Noodling in the groves of academe
Whitman will not
Be in this year or the next
It’s the uncharted courses he’s out to explore!
© 2004, Rukmini Bhaya Nair
From: Yellow Hibiscus: New and Selected Poems
Publisher: Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2004