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Poems by Mani Rao - India 1. The sky is fitted linen, stretched over sealine without a crease, pegged to the spikes and jags of mountains, kingsize, navy, preparing to be sunshot, sooner than lovers can hide, no sooner than the taste of stars striking your lips, one by one stunned and falling to light. It's all been said and yet, need, blowing between our lips, streams inside a tree. We flowed out of time and back so soon eating eggs our own. Through each other we pass like water. At the sun to see how it never changes, at the moon to see how it does, algae slipping beneath our feet, roots travelling and dewdrops dying in visible speed. There is no such thing as a circular river. Unlike bread, the body becomes softer with age. We tag our children with our names, store the plaits of our daughters, stash berries under rocks and look for them later. Held in the fangs of a wristwatch, a well-worn path of a nail in our veins, heart-hammered time trail. No matter who two are kissing, eternity arrives, jelly bean eyes black crystal balls. The longer we look, the more we recognize and anything we could say is too obvious. The songs we like are the songs we know, and every song on the radio is about us. 2. War is a place all thoughts have left, green salad fields sprinkled with blood and bone, birds crash when wind caves in, the cigarette drops from your hands as you water plants with gasoline, mountains wait on the bodies of reptiles, snakes run from burning skins, the ground hangs on to trees as boats to sails. Then nipples get hot as craters, beards are stroked, eyebrows pinched, faces taken off, eyes recruited by cameras, decades of time stolen from bee pollen and clover harvests returned to the apiaries. You know a language well if it does things you don’t have control over. Bring me the words without meanings, words all meanings have abandoned, sentenced to meaninglessness. Fortunetellers smile in magazine columns. A mystery hero steals the fantasies of people he likes the look of.
3. Our lips close in a precise . We correct the punctuation , , , , , , , , , On the telephone, brief _________ . . . Two subtle Four much Object Subject Predicament
4. The past has passed on. Our old people locked up in nursing homes. Laid flat and turned over from time to time, dying evenly on all sides, On lumplump mattresses soaked bedsores stained oozes. Alurk in the dark, their eyes are cannonballs in a battlefield deserted. When they roll in the breeze, you know there are animals inside these fleshcages. Ill-fitting skins. So much skin it could be stretched and wrapped around the body twice. So many things you can hide in the folds of your skin. A disposal bag you weave so we don’t have to bring any when we come With a foreceps and tray, scraping for hair and skin, for signs of violence under your fingernails. We have to come anyway to collect your souvenirs. To slide the ring off your finger and by the way see the skindoodles, the buzzing traffic of lines on your palm. At the lifeline no one is supposed to read, scratched over The child is told to run to the end of the field, touch the post and run back. That precise moment when the hand touches the post and the head turns before the body. That’s when the young get up and go old. When the circle stops going around and starts to come around. 5. My mother came home one day without her uterus. The doctor took it out.
Like someone heard me say Let's act it out act it out physically.
I was the baby who never cried The snake on your breast who stung you dry
The vicious pet and yet you held
I shot past her knees past her hips past her breasts past her shoulders, way past her wisps of hair, those rays of grey light radiating from her shrunken head. She had to look up to speak to me She had to have wide eyes.
Life begins when the children are out of the house and the dog is dead, I said.
She laughed Dyed her hair black Made me stay.
TIME BRINGS CHILDREN THEY BURN HOLES IN OUR STOMACHS POP OUR BELLY BUTTONS. DEATH MAKES SENSE.
Weightless in your sticky fluids too long you kept me in.
6. Disappeared into his shadow. The man without a shadow. The shadow had a person. Don't let your shadow find another person. Escorting our shadows we take them where they want to go. Folding his shadow on his arm he went. 7. (Translated into French by Gerard Henry)
L’âme qui s’éveille Ainsi disent les Chinois
Donc – pas de miroirs Lumière du jour trop vive pour y voir - attirée en plis au travers du miroir, une ligne frontière épaisse gardée par une bête qui me ressemble exactement, plus forte, me renvoyant une image de moi-même, un alibi L’argent tournant s’ouvre dans le noir – de l’autre côté, toutes mes vies – une florissante vie sauvage en bordure de salants deversée et se deversant avec soin dans un verre sans fond une sangsue suce et suce
Bris de verre éparpillés au bord d’un lac
Une nouvelle maison. Les déménageurs se tiennent tout autour
regardant dans mes miroirs déballés 8. The soul picks at cuticles in concentration In the rollercoaster I cling to my body as if I was separating See low white clouds posing like silly ghosts with hands thrown up The sky is limitless however high you fly you know you'll fall down down here Yet jump into a sea and you disappear leaving a bubble Two people exclude everyone else - if one of them should die what is the other to do? Cry, cry, you can reach the end, finally the kitten in the bag pulls in its tail behind it Are you alone? Yes, the friends I love most are far South - And I act as if distances are impermeable Take my face in my hands and show it around Mirrors will keep screaming night after night tirelessly for faces
Every man is my husband Every woman my wife One day we will
unite
9. The core the mantle the crust. Enuma Elish.
Vibrance is auromatic.
Newton ’s moth antennae go zup-zup-zup-zup.
Like the utmost gravity of love in the making.
and not be remembered.
As the faint affection of a dream after the math.
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