A Magazine of Many Arts

 

I was born an orphan
a wild and savage tiny thing
and you caught me looking up
hunger making my eyes wide

You took pity on me, Ursa Major,
Big Bear,
nursed me with the warm
cream of your stars, wrapped
your shining paws around me
and licked me clean
with your comet tail tongue

Mother Bear
you have given me the skies
and the night stars
glimmering like fireflies
and I am grown now, feel
the planet beneath me
but earth and rock
are not the hunting grounds you showed me,
are not the wilderness
you bequeathed on me

Mother Bear
I am your wild child
my lips already parted
for the chase
of comets, planets’ rings,
clouds of dust
and maybe somewhere in the black
I’ll find something living wild and savage
as did I

Beauty Remembers

I.

Kindling to anger
like August wood,
your mountain-storm voice
drained and drowned me –

Yes. I’ll admit
I was afraid, at first,
when they brought me
to your house.

II.

Your love of the roses
puzzled me. They never suffered
from your whims, unlike the servants.
I watched you tend them
with gentle claws.
I imagined that touch
on my flesh,

and shivered.

III.

Books I had aplenty,
more than merchant’s daughters
would see in a lifetime.
I ate them up, hungry
for past knowledge and poems.
My fingers grew rough
from the jagged page-edges.

Once I cut myself deep
on The Anatomy of Melancholy
when you prowled the library.
Sucking my finger
till my mouth was iron,
I saw you watch, eyes afire.

And I knew: you, too, were hungry.

THE CAT AND THE TOAD

At the dawn of the world on a tree-sheltered road
an agreeable cat met a horrible toad.
When the cat saw its neighbor it fearfully shook
for in those days all creatures would act as they looked
and the toad was all warty, and bulging, and slimy.
The trembling cat mewed a terrified “Blimey!”
(more vigorous oaths had not yet been discovered)
and looked at the evil made plain on the other
one hideous sin for each hideous feature.
“Oh please do not kill me, most wicked of creatures!”
it begged without hope. But the toad thought awhile
then it gave what might almost have been called a smile
and it said “You may keep what you carry within
but if you are to live, you must give me your skin.”
Now the cat had no choice, though it bitterly cried
but to take off its fur and to put on the hide
of the venomous toad, and no creatures had made
such a villainous threat, such a terrible trade.
Then the cat hopped away where it once would have strode
for the toad was a cat, and the cat was a toad.

This explains why the toad, though so utterly charmless
is gentle in nature and totally harmless
while cats appear graceful and splendid and good
but would murder us all in our beds if they could.

The world on the backs of elephants 

standing room only on the Great Turtle, Akapara
praying she does not dive again
into eternity

but not the Brahmin
riding on the roof of the train car
smoking a cigarette and looking down
on the Ganges, the world-source
choked with sludge
and affluence.

We take the subcontinent and divide it still further
into plots of earth, looking for sustenance
the oil seeping from its wounds and our own
the Gupta regime with its gold trim upon the pyre
a suffragette, a Sati widow
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
burning as the L40 boosters explode
from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, on Sriharikota Island
taking with it our mended limbs.  Our many-armed nation
bursting at the seams as it reaches upward
striving for equality in the cosmos
made hostile only
by the approach
from the west.

Temporal Velocity Theory
(Applied in Relative Poetical Mathematics)

All of accumulated time (including all of anticipated time),
expressed as an infinite line of points progressing through itself at
the speed of light,
is equal to a single point along the same line progressing at
the speed of thought.
THEREFORE
The speed of thought is equal to the entire distance time spans at
the speed of light.
OR
All of time, traversed at the speed of light, is equal to
the shortest span between two adjacent points of time traversed
at the speed of thought.
ULTIMATELY
At the speed of thought, the speed of light through time
appears to STOP.

Saute an chopped onion in some butter. To me, a soup recipe should always start with onion in butter, and then add something, anything, it doesn’t really matter. But for this soup, you’re going to add pork. I don’t know how much pork, as much as you have.  You would be hard pressed to add too much.  Cut the pork into cubes and brown it in the butter with the onion.  Then add water to cover, a teaspoon or two of salt, and bring to a boil.  Add a can or two of pumpkin.  No, I can’t be more specific, you have to see if the stew is thick enough. I suppose it’s better if you have some wonderful pumpkin left over from your carving, but pumpkins good for carving and pumpkins good for cooking don’t always overlap. Besides, one of the messages of Samhain is that life is short, and so we are going to use canned pumpkin.

Add maple syrup, pomegranate juice, and bourbon. If you know your ancestors’ brand of bourbon, get that. The bourbon adds a nice flavor to the stew, but I use it because my ancestors have always liked it and it brings them around. I used about a quarter cup of maple syrup and bourbon and a half cup of pomegranate juice but since I didn’t measure the pork I started off with, that probably doesn’t mean much to you. Use as much as you like.  Lower the heat and simmer for an hour or two or three, or until you’re ready to eat.  This stew can cook for days.  You will see the ancestors gathering around after a while, sniffing the air and gossiping. Just before serving, sprinkle a handful of pomegranate seeds in the bowl so they will still be crisp.

Serve with a side of starch, potatoes or bread or rice.  Serve your family, and make sure to leave a big bowl for the rest of your family, the ones who are gone that you usually don’t see.  Tell stories about them, and wait for them to break in to correct you.  Listen to what they have to tell you. Love them and remember them.

Instead of noisy static, we hear clear beats

grouped in patterns of seven and eleven.

Our entire team is galvanized; not even

the frequent napper holds back to see who gets

to break this code. At last this is the breech

in the chaos where we’ve plunged our heads

for years. If this is more than just a glitch

in our equipment, we’ll do as it bids.

 

We work around the clock like beings driven

by unseen forces. Take-out pizza boxes

fill up the lab. All effort goes toward solving

the encrypted message. The smell of pizza mixes

with smells of a gym locker room: not even

the need to run a clean, tight ship relaxes

the grip of this obsession. Where it leads

is up for grabs. In face of all the scads

of data, interpretation lags behind.

Prime numbers turn to other universals –

Planck’s constant, pi, the speed of light. The mind

of each researcher is party to rehearsals

that leap from a quantitative kind

of knowing through sensual feeling parcels

to mountains forests horses starlight art

and magical perceptions of the heart.