Four Poems: Tips For Living In An Expanding Universe, Ceremony, Memorial Time and One such man

ABOUT THE POEMS Lyric and linguistic intelligence combine with an impish wit in the poems of EV Ramakrishnan. The lyric speaker fashions a unity from diverse strands of experience, whether contemplating the universe of the future in ‘Tips For Living In An Expanding Universe’ or listing the eccentricities of a man out of joint with the world in ‘One Such Man’. A recurring observation is that human beings are falling away from language, whether shedding it like a skin in memorial silence (‘Memorial Time’) or losing it through sheer speed of technological progress (‘Expanding Universe’). Behind this world zipping with discordant new energies, there lies a more considered one of tradition, deliberation, and spectacle, the metaphor for which is the samurai sword of ‘Ceremony’. Describing it, the speaker almost seems to wield it; it seems the anchor of an expanding universe.

Tips For Living In An Expanding Universe

Imagine far is near, the language

you hear in the streets is creolized

by machines that have a mind of their own.

Laburnum trees bloom all at once

in the city. They have signed a pact

with the world: they retain rights

to slowness, memories as deep as minerals

and a local dialect soaked in monsoon

wind. But know that you are stuck in

a speeding escalator that moves only

outward. Set out much earlier to reach

the place of work on time. Send an email

to your wife in the next room, can we

meet at the weekend. Once in a while check

in the city museum, it helps to know the sect

you belong to. You need a satellite phone to locate

your parents. All you know is they are

drifting into a zone of civil war. Watch out

for alerts, travel advisories every morning

to know where you are, or rather, where you will

never be. Your home town has now moved

further away and the chance of meeting

someone with your mother tongue is remote.

What you see hurtling like a harpoon

into the horizon’s back confirms what you

always feared: you have outpaced yourself.

You are neither a native nor an immigrant.

Listen to weather telecasts. They will accompany

you like prayers. You are not in this poem,

since it returns to language without you.

You are stranded  in the blueness of distance

that fences the world with barbed images.

Ceremony

A Samurai sword is conceived

in love. Nothing is left to chance:

sand from the coastal belt of Kyushu

and Honshu, ore from the mountains

of Shinto God and silver mines. The wake

at the furnace lasts for months.

Smoke curls up like snake trees.

The smithy is more a womb

than a studio in the gathering dark.

The clay-coated metal hisses at the glowing

charcoal. The bellet of steel is heated,

hammered, split and folded over

and over. The grainy surface is

a palimpsest, coded and rewelded.

As the blade is plunged, edge down

into a tank of water, it points forward

to the colour of the moon in March

or August. The cutting edge quickens

the pace of light, implicates space in a flash

of vertigo. This is the way the sun seeps into

the  cellulose wall of the leaf.

The way algae forms in the sea

or a piece of canvas hallucinates

a slow-moving boat-song against night-sky.

The blade is as plain as a tract on grammar.

Till it enters the human cycle

of hate and spectacle. Ready for ceremony.

Memorial Time

The mirror wall is etched

with letters.

You touch them as if you are carving names

in human flesh.

Memorial poles stand between

the living and the departed.

The bells commemorate

silence.

The boatman at the ferry knows

those with fewer words

will never

return.

I abandoned

a third of my words

at every ferry-crossing

to reach here.

Behind the mirror of water, there

is a realm of glass for those who are gone

from language, but none for those

whose language is gone.

One such man

We had one such man in our village

who hardly slept.

He knew how snakes

spoke to stones, how birds predicted

the coming famine or an unnatural death,

how men and women shed their bodies

behind the moon, how snails kept diaries

how some trees were palmists while others

read maps planning to move. Cats, he knew,

were literate and exchanged the contents of letters

addressed to neighbours.

The sealed cover

of the night lay on his lap, tampered,

discredited. He rolled along the village paths,

spun out of time’s axle, talking to himself.

Like a reporter whose newspaper had long

ceased publication.