ABOUT THE POEM In ‘Thomas Jefferson in Kathmandu,’ Ravi Shankar attempts an audacious poetic cross-hatching in one of the most challenging poetic forms in English: the terza rima. Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, is recalled by the American lyric speaker among the jostling crowds of Kathmandu, and echoes of his words and memories of his image are braided into scenes of labour, democracy and devotion in a country “on the other side of the world” from Jefferson’s own arena.
Shankar’s sense of pace and rhythm are infectious: as much as the mind wants to dwell on the details of the poem’s argument to extract its meaning, so the eye and ear want to speed forward to hold the poem’s sound on an even keel. As the poem draws towards its ringing close, the speaker, via Jefferson and Kathmandu, holds up his own little “book of wisdom” for this world: the poem.
Thomas Jefferson in Kathmandu
by Ravi Shankar
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government,
those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations,
perverted it into
– Thomas Jefferson, Preamble to a Bill for the More General Diffusion
of Knowledge (1778)
Packed in Thamel into a beat-up tempo, that minivan which serves as public transportation in Nepal,
I’m thumbing your visage on a nickel near the tan
faces of seekers and trekkers, the various people
of foreign descent who throng the dusty road
in saffron shirts and rudraksha malas, the steeple
up ahead really a stupa where we stop to unload
passengers and accept others. Here, I think of you
TJ, in the faux-Gilbert Stuart portrait that stood
smelling of agar from petri dishes plus an old gym shoe
odour that never seemed to dissipate from the halls
of my high school named for you where I went through
facial hair, trigonometry, punk rock, soccer balls,
SATs, angst, in short the whole gamut of adolescent
failure and triumph. Now, standing in front of stalls
selling Himalayan masks, frozen in poses of pent
up animal rage and wood-carved rictuses of wrath,
I remember how many long hours I once had spent
under your unnoticed gaze, working on some math
problem or pining over the redhead I was smitten
with, carrying my dog-eared copy of Sylvia Plath,
dreaming myself a writer before I had even written
a stanza worth rereading. It would be much later
at the University you built where I’d be bitten
by the bug properly, a sensation made ever greater
in the walks I would take traversing your serpentine
walls, alone, at home in my own mind the way a crater
gives shape to a surface by suggesting what’s unseen,
what might have been once, still what is yet to come.
I traced the rim of my own unknowing, still so green
but ambitious, questioning everything, trying to shun
nothing, striking together stones to try to make a fire
that would burn brighter and deeper than a twinning sun.
Here now is Chitipathi the skeletal lord of the Funeral Pyre
and Mahakala, the great black one, personal tutelary
of Kubla Khan, with flared nostrils, bared fangs and ire
to spare. And here you are on your plantation, Mulberry
Row, where slaves worked as smiths, joiners, weavers,
carpenters and hostlers, each of whom has a story
untold on unmarked graves or in your writings. Grievers
mourned your death on Independence Day but of them,
what? Here I am in Alderman Library working levers
of the elevator moving in half-floors slow as phlegm
seeping down a basin drain. Here you are in Paris wearing
yarn stockings, velveteen breaches, the exquisite hem
of your waistcoat like wild honeysuckle baring
subtle blossoms. Here are all the dark bodies going
into ground after a lifetime of labour and you staring
from Mount Rushmore, me from under the flowing
rim of the Annapurna mountains. Here are the Bill
of Rights, where Sally Hemmings does her light sewing.
I’m on the other side of the world and still
can’t see clearly what has succeeded and what failed
in the grand American experiment. I eat my fill,
no prayer bowl to beg from, yet have been jailed
and bailed out, slurred, even refused service at a diner
250 years after you were born. I know I’m not nailed
to a cross, but why is it that I feel so much finer
and more contented in a country ruled by Maoists
and Marxists than I do in the democratic, designer
shining city on the hill where all the Taoists,
Hindus, and Buddhists I’m meeting want to move
to regardless, to start new lives in the USA? How is it
possible that the Newari dancers’ ancient groove
feels more timely than twerking, that I’d rather eat
dosas and dal than haute cuisine? No need to prove
an answer to those questions as they’re mine to read
and puzzle out, but grown from a seed planted
at your plantation into a towering crop I now need
heed. Democracy is a fine ideal yet to be supplanted,
but does it coexist with capitalism? Today I was told
a Nepalese proverb which might be loosely translated
as “cumin in an elephant’s mouth,” meaning how all gold
shines valueless next to our own nothingness, how the priceless
figs we hunger for are impossible to be bought or sold.
I’ve secreted the nickel now into the folds of a torn dress
a woman with child uses to collect rupees. She is our
mother from another life and you and I are no less,
no more than brothers. If even in this late hour,
honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom,
then its epilogue must be compassion. Not power.