Chicken mnemonics
The old man
squats
through unhung chimney
Bellows out a copper cloud
it chokes up the stench
From the neighbor’s farm
In it
they cull
chickens with’AK47s
chickens that don’t die no easily
belong to some farm nearby
whose fields these rooster farms grow
Nobody knows
It belong to no one in particular
So saying
The old man chuckles
rubs his eyes
A tic in the old bugger’s left eye
That grew soon after he saw
That a piece of chicken could stand
It had two arms
two legs
a drooping head
and uncannily resembled
his neighbor’s
neighbor
A chicken that rose up to challenge
Ascertaining goal
In a frugal bowl
Ascertaining life
Saying nobody,
Nobody
in particular lives
Nobody
in particular dies
Even if I were to shed this harvest
This crop of golden desire
I would still weigh as much
An ant
With my industrious sting
And a throaty desire
To fecundate this red mound
So saying he laughed and
died a chicken’s death
Only
to metamorphose
To the mnemonics
Of incomprehensible yellow
A yellow With throat cut. Slit.
From where
Red dust poured
trickled earth
hid behind
some tall dark grass
From there
A mouth emerged
With chicken Claws
punched
the crimson air
Made a hole
and tossed
its carnal remains
into
Thaw the Salt
In Lesbos …
The sounds of dinghies hum the sea
A little low over the water,
these dinghies skim
A Phantom scything through the sea
birds they follow
Low tipping over the water
in hushed voices whisper their song
And the wind curdles
Empty sockets glisten in sea air
While they sit there
Pasted to the other’s Still form
When they arrive somehow
Clothes hanging from skin,
Mingled with the briny stench of the sea
Something gives away
Its the salt- the telltale
Admixture of white ash and sudden flee
Permanently settled in brows and bones
fleas in dozens crawl out of sockets
Each a story
with their under bellies impaled in stubble fields
Salt of their land pile up in the
heavy cracks and fissures of breathing
As they walk along in a hurry to forget and
replenish the forgetting
Weathered urns each of them
as the salt wings its way from sockets and bones
Simmering the tips of tongues
Each breath gives away the aura of mutation
To thaw the salt
Break the urn.
Breath hour
Let’s board the 9:15
Aquamarine, Maré
This head needs
the bathhouse
a spot to position
its delicate self
with its lunacy
still riddled with the cleft lip
let us throttle the spouts
this noise is growing
in the stalk
and does a nasty job of
peeling
with its mouth agape
in
what seems like
the Geranium
inside
Maré I struggle
To find the teeth to these feet
.
We’ve been balancing
this act of
inching & positioning 2/2
in the ladder too damn long
let us pinch our way
like gazelles do,
let us feast on coarse hay,
the easy digestibles
look how the gazelle appears
alongside the
Wildebeest, Maré
Let us eat both
let us pip out the horse first
the one we started chewing
eight forests ago
and let us eat them stalks too
the litany of barb
caught in the
muscular breath
(incoherent automatism)
squashing the Geranium
let us burp after the Geranium
.
Are these the badlands, Maré
where the heart was eroded
with a sprig of rock salt
or pepper or
was it blueberry
…..the neat supper?
Even the meaty wind
can’t sway the ladder too long
the stitches in this lunacy break
to quell their rage or
Whatever
Oh for Heaven’s sake Maré please sway
let us pinch
our place
and
drift away to the aqua breath
the flower still cries among the weeds
and I hear
the hyacinth has started bleeding in the nights too
your mane sprouts from the left middle
in what looks like vile anatomy
look the bad grammar is catching up too
.
Your Aquamarine breath, Maré
to quell the promise of the dark sea horse
that fathered the child in its womb
and maybe faltered who knows?
And bats, they are always
Downside up from where I am inching
the nail in order of this ladder
Up-up-up
.
Lets stage a coup, Maré
the elements need
the father hands to thread
what is left of this geranium peel
your mane sprouts from the left carotid now, Maré
and the story, what about the story?
Who would set fire?
to the clown
And his singing bark
They have deveined his woods Maré
And he can’t go fishing
.
How fitting Maré
The desolation row
now intact
let us bank on the
leather grass from China
let it break our fall
or better still, our tongues
.
Let us swivel past
The aquamarine Maré
Let us bottle this up
Let us use it to worm the fish
Let us go fishing Maré
this hour is pulse
I want you blue...
I want you blue,
Blue against
the dying ember
of your vague eyes
against the sun
Beneath
the empty contours,
the scorched landscape
entraps the weary wind
And the blue shrivels
the fish skin
into a weak moan.
I want you blue,
Blue like fish teeth
in daggers
that dangle like
sapphire blades
in the dust of the sun
the winter blue
that turns itself
into an accolade
of wilting rain.
Belching its sorrow
Oscillating between
moist and vapor
who even in death
and all the drying
looks sinister.
I want you blue,
Blue that summons
the ol’wife
who drags her feet
all day long among
lonely copper pans
and heaves herself
to the moveable feast
the beast of the dragon,
waits,
pushing down
to its throat
grief fermented
and the muggy air
lifts the hand
to carve the ferment
the only part edible!
I want you blue,
Blue like the
arid landscape
around the ol’wife’s
bosom
drying against
the heavy air of the sun
they will serve platters
of this stench
they will salt and pickle
this in bottles of womb
there is no other way
to entrap it,
No other way.
The fish returns
to its sea saliva
the dawn heavy
with cicadas creak
and this dense of saliva
still murmurs
the late song.
I want you blue,
Blue like the air
molting now
Cutting itself to
morsels
to fit the platter
Like wings of
the blue butterfly
That have grown
swallowing
its sorrow backwards
the mad whisperer
senses how raw
flesh shrivels
into
the blue of the sun
and in its dance
with the butterfly
feasts on
unhatched sorrow
even though
it longs to eat
the moist earth
its teeth are
vapour
that falls unguarded
cinder after cinder
and the ashes grow
like weary weeds
to tie the gaping
mouth of the earth.
I want you blue,
Blue like
the cosmic protein
That wriggles its way out
Into a scintilla of veins
that grow like new fear
and moss
the empty dwelling
of this skinned
fish stomach
aching
in the fish line
who seeks refuge
from the moonlight
and whips this blue
out of the ferment
That is the blue I want of you.
Varsha Dutta works as a neuropsychologist and clinical researcher and shuffles her time between Mumbai and San Francisco. Poetry to her is that call of nothingness to that perfect unsound, a kind of curling back into that primordial unsound, without meaning, but being, just being. Through her work she keeps making a montage of this human landscape that she stealthily wanders and keeps going back to the poetic fling of disorientation to feel the moving metaphor, both rancid and reticent since it never arrives at anything; this is where form cannot be defined, it is always waylaid by the vicissitudes of life’s constant desire to despair and moan, contemplate, heal and love. Her poetry has appeared in the Indian Review and she keeps writing for scientific journals.
