One for Eunice

As are we, ready to grow in lieu,
wherever the grafts we brew.
I remember the transplants I knew,
the rooted uprooted, the damned-if-we-do,
the sailor exiled to shore.

I return the name of the storm
to the Eunice remembered in this song:
Eunice de Souza, poet, lover, curmudgeon,
who rendered history to snapshot, theology to form,
in one or two stanzas, a dozen lines, no more,

and invented a voice so sharp, sardonic and wry
three generations of poets took up her cry.
But it was love she extracted from fury.
Bombay’s almond leaf, impossible to bury,
listing, landlocked, sailor.

— JT.

Ephesus

Heraclitus, who derided Pythagoras,
was born and reared in Ephesus –
a colonial epicentre
within the Ionian League.

I went looking for Pythagoras
on Samos forty years ago,
but though I sailed to Kusadasi
and bused to Ephesus,

I didn’t think of Heraclitus.
Almost alone in the ruins,
I filled the theatre with my carry-on.
I didn’t make resolutions, or grow wings.

Different phases, different eras.
I never think of libraries in terms
of conquest. The sea further from the harbour,
and the sun, like the fire it was, overhead

but in reach. Attracting ancient fears,
I didn’t hear the sleep of the seven sleepers.
I hope it’s not selfish if I keep
my revelations to myself.

I sometimes rewrite the occasion.
I always remember the streets, the stone.

— JK.

Tiresias and me

It wasn’t that he could not tell a small lie.
Everyone knew her vice, her vindictiveness.
It wasn’t that he was loyal to the god
and would take his side no matter what.
It was because once he had been a woman.

He didn’t crave power. He’d forsaken desire.
For these reasons, he was beyond falsehood
when asked the question only he could answer.
Who experienced the keener pleasure
during intercourse, a man or a woman?

The god said women experienced pleasure
no man could imagine.
As he spoke, his sister wife imagined
the pleasure he’d given so many women,
celestial, mortal, and those in between.

She remembered the countless babies he’d sired.
She said he was wrong. In her experience,
it was men who received true pleasure
from copulation, before, during, and after.
Together they turned to Tiresias for the answer.

He shut his eyes and remembered his seven years
as a woman, and said, A woman’s pleasure is ten times
sweeter than a man’s. And the goddess knew at once
that he’d lain with her husband, and one of the babies
he had borne was her husband’s own spawn.

Collapsed into her chair, the goddess
struck him blind, a curse she could not reverse.
When he opened his eyes it was to darkness.
Then her brother and husband gave the old man
this: prophecy. It was no gift.

And so he goes, back and forth,
sometimes one and sometimes the other,
seeing and sightless, in the future, in the past,
man and woman, child and parent,
whose chief pleasure lies in haranguing the dead.

How dare you come to me so late, he says,
when you were summoned at daybreak.
Sometimes I make an honest excuse:
there are other supplicants for my time.
For some reason, truth enrages him.

— JT.

Lodestones

Unable to remember the room
because of the city’s expansion,
though the area remains infamous.

Basement whose entrance was a brushstroke,
interior a stage of crimson velour.
Magnets, beacons, lodestones, and Furies.

A youth with a knife wasn’t slashing
a painting. Threatened with shadows,
what else could you be but a hostage?

Debt was never about money, but gall.
The street above made less sense than sfumato.
Why didn’t the bohemians pitch in to save you?

One phone call. An issue of ancient seats
of learning. How many fingers are we showing?
They replied fast instead of you. For you.

We’re concentrating because the city
is expanding. A reputation is built on clichés,
so dress more sharply below an ill-lit street.

— JK.

Excerpted with permission from The City under the City: Poems, Jeet Thayil and John Kinsella, HarperCollins India.