FRANKS CASKET

Avocado trees on the moon. 'Ice cream,
thorn twigs, Billy Blue Gum.' This
is true but it means nothing. It is not exactly
a confessional. I can only tell it to you this way.
Firstly, my father's wound was also my wound, dirt
outside Vedanta Hall, blood in the dirt
below the gutter pipe, blood like washing
in my banian fold. I am not saying
that blood was the important thing. My father
was singing then. From the tall narrow barred window,
the gravel driveway choked in the heat, the rise
and fall of traffic. My father's wound is jelly
to the touch. I touch it now.

*

A broken tree hangs on the floor. Tarzan says,
'Tarzan save Vivek's father's wound.' 'The shadow
before State House, he will ride his bike no more.'
Once, I looked up from paper
and saw the clouds move. It was terrible, that clouds
could move. The clouds moving reminded me
of my father's wound. I don't care if you like this,

*

I am going to take my time. My father came back
from a hernia operation, there had been a mistake,
the stitches had to be removed. I could not wash
my father's wound. Every day I had seen him shaving
in the bathroom, whistling Balamurali songs.

*

I admit, I am writing a poem about my father's wound
and I'm talking to you, there's no reason
to pretend. Is it shameful? 'If you're going
to write a poem about me,' my father says,
'don't forget to mention my daily yoga.'

*

There is a large glass door looking onto the pool.
My father cleared that place up. Surrealism matters
only if it's real. I listened to Michael,
Mr. Mister, and Genesis. With Kyrie, I saw
a massive bird block the sky while I blasted
that song, from the car stereo to the playground,
and the driver sat quietly. Did I mention
we had a driver? He drove me around
when my father had his wound
and could not move. This does not absolve me.

*

I betrayed my father's wound. I see it
half-formed, my mother washing him, his long
painful yelps. That was scary, to hear those animal sounds
coming from a man like him. My mother went
in there instead of me. Splashing.
What I remember: a red oval among the ripples.

Notes Toward a Brilliant Poem about Food

I wrote a brilliant poem about food the other day. I'll show it to you
right now if you have time. It had every different kind of food
in it, anything you could think of eating-marshmallows and chocolate,
mopani worms, bondas, eels, ten billion different kinds of sushi. What I do
in the poem is just list all of these different kinds of food, one
after the other, not necessarily in alphabetical order, and
it's like you can taste them, in fact,
you can taste them, why else would they be there? I'm talking food,
every different kind of it that you could possibly imagine.

So I wrote this poem, but of course I couldn't finish it, could I?
How predictable. There are so many different things one could eat
and you can't even get round to eating all of them. You could
easily put a few things in that you've never eaten in, but that would still
not amount to much. This is reality, mind you, this has nothing to do
with Borges. What are the chances? The only viable solution I could think of was, to leave most of the kinds of food out except for maybe marshmallows, mopani worms and a couple of other things.

That created problems for me, I don't have to tell you. I mean,
if you can't name what can you do, really? You can stand in the kitchen, the last battleground, surrounded by all the allure of its man-eating implements, knives serrated or smooth, the oven big enough for a head, you could drown
yourself in the sink if you tried enough. Or, you could stand on the counter
and shout at the top of your voice to the world below,
'Oaah to those who never knew the names of birds and trees!
Oaah to those who cared not for names!
Oaah to all those lesser who fed at the altar of everywhere,
may we die happy in what we refuse!'

That sort of thing helps you to feel better
sometimes. We humans are crazy, why
do we do it? In any case, what I have
is a poem about food with hardly any food.
It doesn't deserve to be called a poem, really, unless
it's not about what it is about.

Translation

The black circle of a well viewed from far above. The oblong cut
of a shadow on the ground when we walk in it. The heat
that flows from colour. Narcotic of the news. A fine day
for a world war; the satellites predict end of rain. 'And yet,' he says,
frowning through the thick knotty paste of his eyebrows, 'I miss something.'
I want to make a tree that is so wholly of this world
it does not resemble what has been seen or touched before.
Firelight. 'I barely make sense to myself,' he says. 'White man
cross fjord on horseback with BBC.' 'White man wear
djellaba.' Water leaves circle on paper. Some things expand outward.
Translation: the act of a stranger reading. What do you hear here?
Programmed cell death. A rat with a primate ear.