VI
Invocations and Mythologies
I tell you the gods are still alive
And they are not consoling.
“At Delphi”
I turn your face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore—
O secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for.
“The Muse as Medusa”
The Approach—Calcutta
1
Landing
At four o’clock in the morning,
No man’s hour,
I felt only dread.
Muslims drove a herd
Of gaunt cows
To the slaughter,
While the Hindus slept,
A shrouded multitude,
On the streets.
The whole city
Appeared to be
An improvised morgue.
Even a beggar’s withered hand
Stretched out, inert,
As if already dead.
2
Here the gods themselves
Are too thick, too many,
Turn themselves into snakes,
Fish, or even boars,
And into sinuous lovers
Twined,
Erotic and restless,
In the coils of the eternal dance
Hot winds blew me
Hither and thither;
Barren,
Clouded by ignorance,
I peered out
At an impenetrable world:
People, animals,
Earth, gods,
Who none of them smiled.
Notes from India
The letters ask:
You describe so much,
But how do you feel?
What is happening to you?
What I see is happening to me.
1. At Bhubaneswar
The ragged, rough, continental spaces
Where people never stop walking,
Alone or in long lines,
Over the dirt roads
Under hot, windy skies—
Dark figures walking
With the air of pilgrims
In saris faded
Purple, soft red, dark blue;
Clerks in white dhoties
Carrying black umbrellas,
Barefoot, erect;
Old men in dusty turbans
Naked to the waist;
Women carrying jugs on their heads;
Children in bright yellow and pink;
And, against the horizon,
Four carts and their bullocks
Walking, walking.
It has no beginning. It never ends.
Hunching themselves toward the sky,
Lifting the earth with them,
These temples seem to be waiting
For something that happened
Nine centuries ago.
Inside, the rough phallus stands erect;
Outside, the sculptured lovers embrace,
While black kites
Float on the sullen air,
And the world stands still,
An everlasting noon.
The fresh watercolor
Green of rice,
A flight of emerald parakeets,
The kingfisher’s radiant blue—
Among the dead colors,
The cracked dry fields,
They meet the eye
As if earth burst
Like a pomegranate
To show its brilliance,
Fecundity of light.
The woman in a red sari,
Standing, thin presence
Among desiccated fields,
To watch us pass,
Looks as if she alone
Supported the whole sky.
In the temple pond
A young man prays
With folded hands,
His bronze chest bare
As he stands up to his waist
In the filthy, promiscuous,
Healing water.
Old women gossip under the banyan tree
While a Brahmin
Circumnavigates
The whitewashed temple
Chanting the morning prayer.
Little girls,
Damp hair stuck to their foreheads,
Dress in clean dresses—
The pool is troubled
Again and again
By the dark bodies
That go down through the scum
And return to the morning,
Smiling the smile of the newly washed.
In the distance a dove
Repeats itself.
I had been the woman
With a camera eye
Who notices everything
And is always watched,
The stranger on whom
No one smiled.
Then I slipped,
Fell headlong
In the red dust,
And at once the rickshaw boy
Is there at my side.
Thin expert hands
Feel hard for a break,
Then wipe the blood off
With a filthy cloth.
Worth a scraped knee
To land on this earth at last,
To be helped alive,
To be, in fact,
Touched!
The unsmiling people
Throng around me,
Smiling their pleasure.
Yes, I have landed.
Yes, I am alive.
2. ...