Seshadri - 3 Sections: Poems

Graywolf Press Copyright 2013 by Vijay Seshadri This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-55597-662-0
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-345-2 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937002 Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed is not big and is not small. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-55597-662-0
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-345-2 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937002 Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed is not big and is not small.

Big and small are comparative categories, and to what could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed be compared? Consciousness observes and is appeased. The soul scrambles across the screes. The soul, like the square root of minus 1, is an impossibility that has its uses.

Remember that family who lived in a boat run aground and capsized by the creamy dunes where the plovers nest? Sea, sun, storm, and firmament kept their minds occupied. David Copperfield came and went, and their sympathy for him was such that they pitied him almost as much as he pitied himself. But their story is not like the easy one where you return to me and lift my scarred eyes to the sun and stroke my withered hand and marry me, distorted as I am.

He was destined to dismantle their lives, David Copperfield, with his treacherous friend and insipid wives, his well-thought-out position on the Corn Laws and the constitution. They were stillness and he was all motion. They lived in a boat upside down on the strand, but he was of the kind who couldnt understand that land was not just land or ocean ocean.

Even though Im an immigrant, the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me. He unhooks the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club.

Some activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a panhandler there, a gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette, Jupiter in its crescent phase, huge, a vista of a waterfall, with a rainbow in the spray, a few desultory orgies, a billboard of the snub-nosed electric car of the future the inside is exactly the same as the outside, down to the m.c. in the yellow spats. So why the angel with the flaming sword bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats, and the men with the binoculars, elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps, peering into the desert? There is a border, but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises and plunges into the unimaginable seventh dimension before erupting in a field of Dakota corn. On the F train to Manhattan yesterday, I sat across from a family threesome Guatemalan by the look of them delicate and archaic and Mayan and obviously undocumented to the bone. They didnt seem anxious. The mother was laughing and squabbling with the daughter over a knockoff smart phone on which they were playing a video game together.

The boy, maybe three, disdained their ruckus. I recognized the scowl on his face, the retrospective, maskless rage of inception. He looked just like my son when my son came out of his mother after thirty hours of laborthe head squashed, the lips swollen, the skin empurpled and hideous with blood and afterbirth. Out of the inflamed tunnel and into the cold room of harsh sounds. He looked right at me with his bleared eyes. He had a voice like Richard Burtons.

He had an impressive command of the major English texts. I will do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth , he said. The child , he said, is father of the man.

I woke up on the stainless-steel autopsy table. My chest was weighted down. Bodily fluids stained my paper hospital gown.

My life readings were stable, though. They were, in fact, decisive one round number and one simple line. A cop gave the coroner a form to sign, but he lingered undecided over me, murmuring to himself, That must have been a dream, or was it a vision? I felt along my length his long riverine incision. Outside it was Chicago city of world-class museums, handsome architecture, marvelous elevated trains rising from the plains by the impossibly flat lake.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

If I wrote that story now radioactive to the end of time people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldnt peel the gloves fast enough from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame. Your poor hands. Your poor eyes to see me weeping in my room or boring the tall blonde to death. Once I accused the innocent. Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty. I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.

And one October afternoon, under a locust tree whose blackened pods were falling and making illuminating patterns on the pathway, I was seized by joy, and someone saw me there, and that was the worst of all, lacerating and unforgettable.

First I had three apocalyptic visions, each more terrible than the last. The graves open, and the sea rises to kill us all. Then the doorbell rang, and I went downstairs and signed for two packages one just an envelope, but the other long and bulky, difficult to manage both for my neighbor Gus. Youre never not at home, the FedEx guy said appreciatively. Its true.

I dont shave, or even wash. I keep the air-conditioners roaring. Though its summer, one of the beautiful red-and-conifer-green Bayside Fuel Oil trucks that bed down in the depot by the canal was refreshing the subsurface tanks with black draughts wrung from the rock, blood of the rock sucked up from the crevices. The driver looked unconcerned. Leaning slightly on each other, Frank and Louise stepped over his hose and walked by slowly, on the way to their cardiologist.

The omni-directional mike and the video camera, both tiny, hidden in the bonsai cypress are picking up my sunrise self-help talk show, in the makeshift kitchen studio, in a bathrobe and bunny slippers.