Bombay Diary

 

  by Gautam Verma

 

 

 

 

First Morning

 

everything wilting in the humidity: hair, towels,       toast, newspapers

headlines today a mix of glibness, hysteria,
     home-spun philosophy

doing the Sunday crossword have to look up the      word apostasy

apo: of, with, from? what does rootstock mean      exactly —

an absolute erosion of my karma (a 100 years of      misery!)

killing flies at the rate of six an hour

 

 

“your pleas today will be met again by the overwhelming refusal to see

 

 

 

 

2nd Night

 

book covers curled in the humidity

wood-swell and the door stuck in the door jamb

and a long discourse on resemblance and dreams
     (& on silly Foucault)

with the resident rat confined both

to the balcony

 

 

“the dreamer and the dreamed overlapped

so completely in whose dream did the terror

begin and who was it sigilated to the sheets

 

 

 

 

4th Morning

 

flash showers a cascade

of horns a man selling

mosambis on the island

below marooned this

past hour on the first

letter of the alphabet

 

 

“you cannot dream your dream and face it

too Orpheus descent would seem to relate

 

 

 

 

6th Afternoon

 

while pruning branches of the banyan tree the man fell and broke his leg he got drunk with money he received and sits with his back to the compound wall berated by women in his family their shrill voices carry up into the balcony

 

 

 

 

7th Afternoon

 

reading Foucault on Magritte: formidable stones

 

spell the airiness of dreams

 

in the caligramatic double:

 

annulled and annealed

 

 

 

 

12th Evening

 

benediction of pigeon droppings

palm green fern green in violet

evening light an oaken staircase

risen into shadows guttered like

a candle looking down the long

chute of memory past the cricket

net’s metal grating as in a dream

the uncanny means your being

there is nowhere to be seen

 

 

“in the shrouded hour a turning

thing unfolding there the abiding

blindness at its back

 

 

 

 

13th Morning

 

reading B.E.’s Altman’s Tongue I describe (to myself) alternately as a “theatre of cruelty” or the “will to death” I have to look up the word anamnesis recalling it as I rise but wanting then to confirm that recollection

 

 

 

 

14th Night

 

a man with a blind person’s cane shuffles in front of the car — will you be giving me a lift he asks — where to — Bhudwar park — I’m sorry I say I don’t know where that is — and drive away what does or does not constitute today an adequate response to the world

 

 

 

 

16th Morning (save a thought for Farnesiana tredici)

 

builders are keen

to bulldoze it tenants

huddle in their tenements

 

far away and out of

reach I scheme in my

sleep a way to save

the unsuspecting plants

their cellar-dank dreams

 

 

 

 

20th Night

 

whatever there is in the light

that draws the moth the moth

may not have it it throws

itself against the glass its

dizzy and demented flight

 

 

 

 

23rd Morning

 

reflected bird flight

in the window behind

(vector, laser, light) cuts

through space as though

flown out of your eye

 

 

 

 

28th Afternoon

 

spelunking lost the word last night and fou

nd it again in the crossword this morning

 

 

 

 

 

Gautam Verma lives and works in Piacenza, Italy, where he has been since completing graduate work at the University of Denver.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Free Verse, 26, BlazeVox, Big Bridge, Word For/Word, Drunken Boat, Diagram and Moria.  His chapbooks include Tombs and In Ladakh from Shearsman and Soundings, an e-chap, from BlazeVox.