I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems
Page 21
On this boat I’ll take no luggage at all.
Alone I’ll go,
made new again, to the new.
FROM Bithika (1935)
The Indifferent One
When I called you to the arbour,
fragrance still lingered in the mango grove.
Don’t know why your thoughts were elsewhere,
why your door was closed.
One day fruit-clusters filled the branches;
you ignored my full cupped hands.
Your eyes were blind to fulfilment.
In Baishakh, in harsh pitiless storms
gold-hued fruit fall tumbling down.
‘My gifts,’ I said, ‘which lie in the dust, –
may they find their heaven in your hands!’
Your mind, alas, was still unresolved!
Unlit was your evening
and by your dark door I played my lute.
My mind, in unison with star-light,
on the resonating strings danced.
Not a flutter in your heart!
A yearning bird in a sleepless nest
sent vain calls to some lost mate.
The hour passed, the moment slipped.
You kept to your room, in indifference dipped,
though the moon was still in the sky.
Who can thought-read? My silly heart
had wanted to pour itself in words.
I had reckoned on some surplus remaining, –
a memory lingering, drenched in tears.
Perhaps there was a beat in the anklets.
At dawn’s feet the pallid moon
slipped down from night’s necklace.
Was the lute’s lament some company for you?
Did it raise waves below sleep’s brink?
Was there some pleasure, even if in dreaming?
[Santiniketan, July 1934 (9 Srabon 1341)]
FROM Patraput (1936)
No. 5
Evening arrived, her hair let down,
having just had her bath in the sunset-ocean.
Dreams’ incense seemed to be rising
towards the stars.
In that quiet moment, – compact, magic-wrapped, –
she, – I won’t mention her name, –
her hair just plaited, a sky-blue sari on,
was singing on the open roof-terrace, all alone.
I was standing behind her:
she mightn’t have known that, or she might have.
To the tune of Sindhu Kafi went her song, and said –
If this is what’s in your mind, that you’ll go away –
then I won’t call you back, no, I won’t.
I don’t – do I? – ask the morning star to stay. –
As I listened, the world’s utility-sheath
slipped, and as though from its bud, –
revelation not vouchsafed before –
the unknowable opened, fully blown,
scattering its light aroma in the sky.
It was the unattainable’s protracted sigh,
the unuttered language of difficult hope against hope.
Vedic words, dispellers of death-grief,
had once averred, unveiling the universe,
that honeyed is this earth’s dust.
In the same tune my mind said –
‘This earth’s dust is musical, it is.’
‘Death, honeyed death,’
cried my mind, –
‘On the wings of song
you carry me to another world.’
I saw her. She was like a nymph
sitting at a ghat the colour of touchstone, dipping
her red-dyed feet in evening’s black waters.
Soft ripples of tunes ruffled the shoreless lake,
and charged with my own heart’s trembling, the wind
circled and touched her.
I saw her. She was like a bride
in nuptial chamber waiting, lights turned off,
all the veins in her limbs in one pulsation
in the imminent’s ecstatic expectation.
The Pole Star’s unflickering eye looked on from the sky
and the Shahana Ragini’s tenderness hung in the air.
I saw her. She seemed to have returned
to a fore-existence, to that obscure haze
where the familiar jostles with the unfamiliar.
Bent on recovering that epoch’s escaped phrases,
she was turning and casting her song’s net,
seeking, seeking, with the caresses of her notes,
an identity that was lost.
Before us, a nut tree’s head rose higher than the roof.
Above it slipped the moon, the fourth of the waning phase.
I called her by her name.
Sharply she stood up, turned to me, frowned,
and said –
‘How unfair! Why did you steal up like a thief?’
I didn’t reply,
didn’t say, ‘There was no need
for this trite play-acting. Today you could have happily said, –
“Come, I’m glad to see you.”’ A pall of dust
fell and settled on the honeyed.
The next day was a market day.
I sat at the window, staring, next to me
that open roof-terrace, where now the sun burned,
wiping off, with its clear light,
last night’s spring-excess.
Without making distinctions the light fell –
on field and road, the merchant’s tin roof,
trays and baskets of greens,
stacks of straw,
piles of clay pots,
pitchers of fresh molasses,
touching with its golden stick
blossoms emerging on the mahaneem tree.
By the roadside rose a peepul, twined round a palmyra trunk.
In its shade sang a blind mendicant, drumming a pot –
– Went away, saying ‘I’ll come tomorrow’.
I’m gazing at that morrow, I am. –
The hubbub of buying and selling was like a fabric
on which the notes embroidered with their art
a motif of the entire universe’s tense disquiet –
‘I’m gazing, I am.’
A pair of buffaloes with longing eyes wide open
went along the road, dragging a laden cart.
Bells jingled at their necks;
the wheels groaned at each turn.
A field-flute’s tunes
seemed to be hung out in the firmament’s light.
Embracing all, the mind was entranced.
To the beat of the Vedic verse my mind repeated –
‘Honeyed is this earth’s dust.’
Before the kerosene shop
my eyes spied a latter-day Baul.
Tied to the waist of his patched mantle
was a drum.
A crowd had gathered round him.
I laughed, seeing the absurd too was harmonious here:
this man too had come to fill the market’s canvas.
I called him to my window
and he began to sing –
To market I came, in search of the uncatchable.
Everyone pulls me about, saying ‘Hither! Come hither!’
[Santiniketan, 25 October 1935]
No. 7
Eyes fill with sleep
and from time to time I wake up.
As the water of a new monsoon’s first shower
seeps through the ground to tree-roots,
so has the light of the young autumn trickled
through my sleep to my unconscious mind’s roots.
The day draws towards mid-afternoon.
Thin white wisps of clouds
are afloat but still in the Kartik sunshine –
paper boats made by the children of the gods.
From the west a fast wind begins to blow,
shaking the branches of the t
amarind.
A road goes north to the neighbourhood of dairymen:
from there bullock-carts spread saffron dust
on the pale-blue sky.
In the quiet hours of this afternoon
my mind drifts in the currents of non-work
on the raft of a day without cares.
This day has torn its mooring from the world’s ghat:
to no need is it tied.
Crossing the river of colours, in the evening it will vanish
into the black ocean of unruffled sleep.
In pale ink is this day’s mark left on time’s page
and will soon fade.
In man’s fate-writings it is the luck of some days
to be inscribed in the thickest alphabet:
between such scripts this is an empty space.
A tree’s withered leaves fall on the ground:
the tree too tries to pay its debt to the earth.
The fallen leaves of these lazy days of mine
have given nothing back to humanity’s forest.
Yet my mind says:
to accept is also a way of giving back.
I have accepted in my body and mind
the juice of creation’s fountain dripping from skies.
That coloured stream has given its tint to my life,
as it has to rice-fields,
to forest leaves, and to the wrap
of the migrant cloud of the post-rains.
All of them together have filled today’s world-picture.
That a burst of light has flashed through my mind,
that autumn’s warm breath has ruffled the waters where sleep
and waking mingle, like Ganga and Jamuna –
aren’t these too to be found in the cosmic picture?
My gladness without reason that gleams
with the peepul’s restless leaves in the juice-hall
of water, land, and sky may not leave its mark
upon the history of this universe,
yet its art is among the universe’s expressions.
These moments, drowned in creativity’s juice,
are the seeds of my heart’s red lotus being threaded
into a chain in the seasons’ royal court –
a garland made of the gladness of all my life.
Nor has this not-famous day of an idle chap
left a gap in that chain:
this day too has witnessed the threading of a seed.
By this window I spent last night alone.
Stuck to the forest’s forehead was the moon’s curve –
the fifth of the waxing phase.
The same universe was that,
save that the maestro had changed its melody
with the ascents and descents of hazy light.
The earth, that busy wayfarer,
was then motionless, sari-end spread on the yard,
no longer heeding the household by her side,
listening to the legends murmured by starlight.
Childhood memories came back – from a far-off vaporous age.
The trees were still,
the massed embodiment of the night’s quiet,
their shadows cast in a row on the obscure green of the grass.
In the daytime, by the road of daily living
those shadows had been nurses, companions
giving refuge to herdsmen,
peace from noon’s fire.
Now in the moonlit night, with no more duties to discharge,
they sat, silhouetted in the night’s light:
brothers and sisters had together made with brushes
compositions as their whims had dictated.
My diurnal mind
had changed its sitar’s pitch.
I was like one transported to a neighbouring planet,
watching through a telescope.
The deep feeling that gathered mass in my mind
throughout creation I have dispersed.
That moon, those stars, those trees – clusters of darkness –
became one, became vast, became complete
in my consciousness.
That the cosmos has found me
and in me has found itself
is surely a triumph for an idle poet.
[Santiniketan, autumn 1935 (Kartik 1342)]
No. 8
They brought me this wild plant, its leaves
a yellowish green, its flowers
like crafted cups of a violet hue
for drinking the light.
I ask, ‘What’s it called?’
No one knows.
It belongs to the universe’s infinite unfamiliar wing,
where the sky’s nameless stars also belong.
So I’ve made it captive in a pet-name
to get to know it by myself in private.
I call it ‘Peyali’, Miss Cup.
Invited by the garden, they’ve all come –
dahlia, fuchsia, marigold.
But this one enjoys the unspotted freedom that comes
from not being cared for, not being bound by caste.
It’s a Baul, living on society’s edge.
In no time at all its flowers have fallen off.
The sound that the falls made
couldn’t be caught by ears.
The conjunction of moments that make up this plant’s horoscope
is infinitesimal.
The honey stored in its bosom
is a minute drop.
Its journey’s complete in a tiny spot of time,
even as the fire-petalled sun completes its flowering
in an eon’s span.
This plant’s little history’s written by the cosmic scribe
with a very small pen in the corner of a very small page.
Yet at the same time is that vast history unfolded,
where sight cannot climb from one page to the next.
The currents of centuries that flow without intermission
like slow-motion waves, carrying in their course
the rises and falls of so many mountain-chains,
in seas and deserts so many costume-changes –
the same endless time’s long flow has advanced
through creation’s conflicts
this floweret’s primeval purpose.
For millions of years in the path of its flowering and falling
that ancient purpose has stayed new, alive, mobile.
Its finished, finalised picture’s not appeared yet.
This purpose without body, that picture without lines –
in which invisible’s vision do they live without end?
In the infinite imagination of the same invisible
which holds me and the history of all men
of the past and of the future.
[Santiniketan, 5 November 1935]
No. 11
As day by day the woodlands slowly cause
Phalgun’s colourful mood to fade away
into dry Baishakh’s bareness, so have you,
enchantress, in wanton neglect,
withdrawn your witching arts.
Once with your own hands you had spread magic on my eyes,
set my blood swinging, filled me with drunkenness –
my cup-bearer!
Now you’ve emptied the cup,
dashing the magical juices against the dust.
You’ve ignored my compliments,
neglected to summon the surprise of my eyes.
There’s no accent now in the way you dress yourself,
nor, in my name, any of that hushed vibration
which had once made it musical.
They say that once winds whirled
round the moon’s body.
Then had it the craft of colours,
the witchery of music.
Then was it ever-new.
Indifferent to all that, why did it, over the days,
block the flow of its ow
n play?
Why did it grow weary of its own sweetness?
Today all it has
is the unfriendly duality of light and shade:
flowers don’t bloom there,
nor do murmuring streams glide.
That silent moon you are to me today.
And this is my sadness – that you are not sad about it.
Once, sorceress, you were wont to renew yourself
with my own delight’s dyes.
Today you’ve drawn over that scene
the black curtain of an epoch’s end,
colourless, tongue-tied.
You’ve forgotten that the more you gave yourself,
the more you found yourself in diverse ways.
Today, by depriving me,
of your own triumph you’ve deprived yourself.
The ruins of the era of your sweetness remain
in the strata of my mind:
the crumbled gates of those days,
foundations of palaces,
garden paths choked with weeds.
Among the scattered fragments
of your fallen grandeur I live,
groping for the darkness that lies beneath the ground,
picking up and saving what my fingers knock against.
And you dwell
in the wan desert of your own miserliness,
which has no water to slake thirst,
nor even the means
to con thirst by mirages.
[Santiniketan, 16 February 1936]
FROM Shyamali (1936)
Dream
In the deep dark night
the rainy wind
lashes indiscriminately around.
Clouds rumble,
rattling windows,
causing doors to vibrate.
I look outside:
rows of areca and coconut palms
are restlessly tossing their heads.
Lumps of darkness
heave in the jack’s thick branches
like ghosts conspiring together.
A ray of light from the street