Thought is moved onward at three miles an hour
Inside the brain's cramped carve,
Bewildered, upturned in the delirium of dreams,
Or should we say adorned:
A city clasped by six hooked legs
In an economic spider's web,
Clasped by a doctor's hand at the ghat*,
Feeling the dying pulse in its wrist;
But this is a cartoon city.
Advertisements upon the walls
Are blurring with smoke and dust
The pullings of lousy horses,
The tensings of hard-worked muscles,
Stamp the town's fortune onto the streets;
But this is a cartoon city.
Fleas nip the stray dog's many backs,
Reminding them they are in the city,
Beneath a pillar a bull sighs long
Near new suburbs of brick and cement;
All day he ignores the calendar's hours,
Freed to chase calves, to count their tails;
He chews and reminds you, you are in the town.
Nearby, from the benches of park and station,
A stench is flung into the sky,
Swollen by cold drops of rain,
Arising too from discarded leaf-cups
And vendors' peanut shells.
High over the clouds a shoot of darkness
Flies up to a mountain peak,
High above a bud of white light
Comes out alone on the skyline:
Christ's candles arisen in prayer
Before the Buddha's contemplation:
Two soft images of tousled calm,
Two pillar of world peace, artifacts only,
Artefacts only here, lifeless.
Close by, a mountain wind blow down,
It licks up the rubbish to midden pile
And then it falls still.
Cold drips ooze from the eaves,
In the dawn a woman empties an ashtray
Out of her window, pretending
To the crowds below that it was not her.
Street newspaper-sellers have washed their faces.
They cry out aloud in the mist,
With others proclaiming hot toast and tea,
Without conviction, for another day-
To declare a New Year budget with prospects of profit,
When back cowrie-shells tumble into man's while fate,
And a modest smile drops a cigarette on a sofa.
There a man dares to say, 'Keep to the right!'
There a man gives orders, 'Keep to the left!'
Translated by:
Michael
Hutt
*
Grave Yard
