The Atlas of Lost Beliefs E-Book

Ranjit Hoskote

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 80

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Commenting on Hoskote's poetry on the Poetry International website, the poet and editor Arundhathi Subramaniam observes: "His writing has revealed a consistent and exceptional brilliance in its treatment of image. Hoskote's metaphors are finely wrought, luminous and sensuous, combining an artisanal virtuosity with passion, turning each poem into a many-angled, multifaced experience."

Leseprobe

THE ATLAS OF LOST BELIEFS

Also by Ranjit Hoskote

POETRY

Zones of Assault (1991)

The Cartographer’s Apprentice(with drawings by Laxman Shreshtha, 2000)

The Sleepwalker’s Archive (2001)

Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (2006)

Central Time (2014)

POETRY (INTRANSLATION)

Die Ankunft der Vögel (in German, 2006)

Feldnotizen des Magiers (in German, 2015)

POETRY (AS EDITOR)

Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (2002)

Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (2012)

TRANSLATION

A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992)

I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Děd (2011)

Published by Arc Publications,

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Ranjit Hoskote, 2020

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2020

This book is an edited and expanded version of Jonahwhale, published in 2018 by Penguin India

978 1911469 63 6 (pbk)

978 1911469 64 3 (ebk)

Design  by Tony Ward

Printed in Great Britain by

TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

Cover image:

Photograph of a sculpture entitled

‘Absence of Assignable Cause’ by Bharti Kher,

by kind permission of the artist.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

Arc International Poets

Series Editor : James Byrne

In memory of Chandra Hoskote (1934-2015),

my mother, my first reader

the great fish glides through the river

                                  touching the near bank

                             and the far

                                  the self swims the currents

                                               of dream

                          and waking

  – BRIHADARANYAKA UPANISHAD

      (4.3.18)

Some of the poems in this collection have further notes. If the first word of the poem is highlighted, please click this to read the note relating to this poem. You can then click from the note directly back to the poem.

CONTENTS

IMEMOIRSOFTHE JONAHWHALE

The Churchgate Gazette

The Map Seller

The Atlas of Lost Beliefs

Seven Islands

Ocean

Ahab

Spelling the Tide

Cape Caution

As It Emptieth It Selfe

The Heart Fixes on Nothing

And Sometimes Rivers

Lascar

At the Belvedere

Sycorax

Cargo and Ballast

A Constantly Unfinished Instrument

Night Sky and Counting

Render

Pompeii Mural

Marine Drive

Natural History

Passage

The Refugee Pauses in Flight

Wound

Redburn on Shore Leave

Baldachin

Highway Prayer

IIPOONA TRAFFIC SHOTS

Poona Traffic Shots

IIIARCHIPELAGO

Philip Guston, in (Pretty Much) His Own Words

Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’

Aperture

Passepartout

Printer

Glass

Rothko

Hangman’s Song

The Oracle Tree

At Twenty Paces

Sniper’s Drill

Open for Business

Under the Tree of Tongues

Eight Rules for Travellers to Thebes

Miniature Painting

Glossa

Tree Line

After the Story

The Bungalows of South Avenue

Self-portrait as Child in the Rain

Marcus Aurelius

Kushan Dawn Song

Dunhuang

Bactrian Drachma

The Swimming Pool

The Poet’s Life

Notes

Author’s Acknowledgements

Biographical Note

I

MEMOIRS OF THE JONAHWHALE

THE CHURCHGATE GAZETTE

I

Last word on the subject, I promise.

I walked into the train station and it was terrifying.

Like nerve gas had laid the architecture out flat,

the tall glass columns bloodshot and the booking clerks

slumped over, all dead at the till.

A plaster Gandhi with sulphur-rimmed eyes

stopped me (what a substitute for kohl and why?).

You missed the last train, it said, he said,

you missed the last and only train that was safe

for a man who’s left half his life behind.

II

A straggler from a late-night movie had more advice.

You could so easily gag on a wine-red, tasselled silk scarf

stuffed in your mouth, he said, you could so easily gag

on sour saliva or a shard of bay leaf,

or a letter swallowed just after the bell has rung

and before the door opens.

III

I thought of the possibilities as I left the station without a compass.

Walk straight enough, said Gandhi, and you could walk into the sea.

At the wharf, the sailors’ wives were keening together:

they were singing the last songs of the whales.

I was their brother and I had killed them

with my broken harpoon and my rusted smile.

IV

Find affection, I told myself. That’s fundamental.

Find a voice that doesn’t draw blood

each time you hear it. I walked past myself,

I rippled across lean men and sleek women

laughing behind plate glass, their hands caught

in pools of light, wine gleaming in brittle flutes.

V

Birdsong disturbs the king of incomplete lives.

He wakes up in the middle of the novel he’s writing

in the Midnight Hotel. His eyes need shielding

from the raw clarity of neon. He is back

where he began, with a plate of waxy grapes

and a blunt silver knife on his bedside table.

VI

Break, ice, for me.

Let me fall through stinging water

in my skin of rust and flame.

I’ve jumped from a tree

that’s branched into the clouds.

It’s sucked up all the reality

I’ve watered it with.

Its fruits are red and wrinkled.

I plunge into drowned gardens

where I walked once.

Sinking, the water stroking

my crown of leaves

as it comes apart,

dark tribune, archaic clown,

I open my eyes.

THE MAP SELLER

for Nikola Madzirov

The roof’s dripping with pigeons and I’ve just escaped

the worst of the sun, strapped on my scuffed leather bag,

and in a moment – this shade’s delicious – and before

the pedlars start shouting, Say your piece! Say your piece!

I’ll start calling out names and pulling countries from it:

big countries, small countries, countries broken in two,

countries the size of handkerchiefs and countries engorged

with other countries, buffer zones jostled by failed states,

island republics sinking by degrees. Even nuclear powers

that started as papaya plots or guano archipelagos.

Whatever you like, I’ve got a map that looks like it –

and you can have any piece of my flaking jigsaw atlas,

if only I could reach you across this accordion sky

that’s billowed open to rain on all the hats I wear:

tribune of nowhere, midnight’s newscaster,

out-of-work weatherman, all-terrain refugee.

And across this trench that a JCB’s dug along my street:

tomorrow’s avenue, today’s wide sludge grave.

THE ATLAS OF LOST BELIEFS

Without waking up, turn to page thirty-seven

in the Atlas of Lost Beliefs

and surround yourself

with apsaras, kinnaras, gandharvas, maenads,

satyrs, sorcerers, bonobos, organ grinders,

stargazers, gunsmiths, long-distance runners,

gravediggers, calligraphers, solitary reapers,

beenkars, troubadours, rababias, ronin,

nagas, pearl divers, Vandals, Goths,

mummers, snipers, collectors of moths,

hobos, dharma bums, bauls, drifters,

djinns, mahjubs, marabouts, qalandars,

griots, mad hatters, speakers in tongues,

trippers, star angels, batmen, punks,

eggheads, buffoons, lay preachers, agitators,

friends of the court, friars minorite, agents provocateurs,

bird-spangled shamans, fainting oracles, screeching owls,

wise men of Gotham, and women who run with wolves

all blessed by the blue hand of a reckless dancer

who spares a thought or two for the world but no more

as she poses, heels in the air, Cossack-kicking on a crumbling reef.

SEVEN ISLANDS

sand-wrought storm-humped

                                                    these islands

                          never complain

                                                    they take what comes

craft

        one name for seven

from dropped iron                 lost rivers and

          spits of reclaimed          land starved

                                         ocean

          wind-ripped                   light-riveted

    gravel-spun                          overrun

    roads that take you                          step by step

    to where                                             the water is

                                                          sweet and deep

the only way up

                            until help arrives

                                                                        is south

OCEAN

my name is Ocean

       I shall not be contained

                   my tides spell

                   starting gun and finish line

afterwards only shells

                              and scattered roofs

will remind you I was

                                       there

my combers wash away the roots of trees, towns, the shaken heart

       but mortals there’s hope

                                          my breakers hurl seeds back at your shores

       after the flood the chroniclers will write

                                 in Konkani, Sabir, Aymara, Tulu, Jarawa, Krio, Tok Pisin:

                                 after the flood the beach exploded with giant peacock trees

       in whose branches on windy days you could hear

       the surge

       and swell

                       of Ocean summoning whales, whalers who chased blood-wakes,

                       red-haired women who fought pirates, sleepless harpooners

                       who sailed from fjordlands to where

                                                     volcanoes splintered the sleeping ice,

                       furies who choked pearl divers, drove catamarans aground,

                       voyagers who fell into the sea and grew wings

                                        Ocean reciting from his depths

                       every drifting epic of pursuit, every song of shipwreck,

                       every trace of raft and sail and trailing anchor

flotsam            jetsam            buckram        vellum

                                                                                            he could remember

AHAB

Captain of castaways, the pilot calls out and his curse carries

                                       across docks, derricks, opium factories:

                                       a typhoon in the horse latitudes.

He’s hurled his ship after the whale

that swallowed him and spat him out.

                                    The monster is the only system he’s known.

At the bridge, he’s drenched in the dark:

locked on target, silent, furrowed,

Saturned to stone.

*

Across steep tides, through walls of water, his life has always been pursuit.

                                As the ship splinters on the reef,

                                the rigging becomes his noose.

Brine blistering his throat, he thinks:

                            If only I’d harpooned this monster on a page.

SPELLING THE TIDE

We drew near the island, the surf a cannonade on its stony beaches,

no landing.

We dropped anchor.

Some fishermen came down

           to the water’s edge and called out. We called back.

The surf roared in our ears, no one

                                                             heard no one.

The skirling wind shredded our voices and danced on them.

We pointed

                    at the canoes

they’d hauled out of tide’s reach.

Come get us.

They didn’t get us

                                or didn’t want to.

We made signs.

The skirling wind shredded our signs and danced on them.