Four Poems: The Time-Eater, On Borders, The Memory Maker and Nightless Night

ABOUT THE POEM The poems of Anupama Raju enact a world of metamorphoses and secrets, and their movement is continually toward a blurring and breaking down of walls and boundaries, whether physical or conceptual ones. In poems like ‘The Memory Maker’, every line throbs with the forces of shape-shifting; as soon as one transformation has been absorbed, we are catapulted into the space of another. One of her poems here is called ‘The Time-Eater’, and its most memorable image, coiled into the final pair of lines, is that of the human being and time feeding off one another before the stronger side wins the battle. But Raju’s taut, aphoristic style shows us how a poem, too, might be thought to be a kind of time-eater, working nimbly with syntax, rhythm and space to deliver effects that are experienced in small shots of time.‘Nightless Night’ and ‘The Memory Maker’ are from ‘Une Ville Un Lieu Une Personne’, a poetry-photography collaboration between Raju and the French photographer Pascal Bernard.

The Time-Eater

He eats time because his bones will need memories

when they are stripped of flesh.

He eats time because whenever he opens his mouth

yesterday’s profanity turns into today’s poetry.

He eats time because his body is a clock

waiting to fill someone’s tomorrow.

He eats time because his days shrivel into ants

gathering around dead conversations.

He eats time because his nights grow into snakes

slinking through aging loves.

He eats time because he needs to breathe:

Against the past, before time eats him.

On borders

Borders are like smiles:

Deceptive, transient lines,

sliding into lies.

Like the grains of sand

in distant deserts: flying

with winds. Homeless.

Like the songs of love

they once sang to each other:

Memories of pain.

Borders are like dreams.

Creeping into dark bed folds.

Real, not real enough.

Glass windows or walls

Never see them until late.

Fragility lies.

Like spluttering streetlights

that live and die instantly.

Undependable.

Or like marriages,

devotion, dedication:

Conditions apply.

But not like shadows:

Alive at noon, dead at night.

They don’t disappear.

The memory maker

When she died

her body grew into walls.

Walls into feet.

Feet into rooms.

Rooms into eyes.

Eyes into roof.

Roof into hands.

Hands into pillars.

Pillars into head.

Head into cobwebs.

Cobwebs into hair.

Hair into air.

Air into dust.

And he turns

dust into memory.

Nightless night

Last night had no eyes, no ears,

no heart, no stomach, no skin, no bones

no dark, no light, no spirit, no silence.

Last night had no warmth, no cold,

no pain, no lust, no gain.

But last night there was

a dream, a denouement, a door.

In the morning you were outside.