Two Poems
ABOUT THE POEMS In these poems by Nabanita Kanungo, sex and desire are seen flooding into everything else we do in this world, whether as actors or observers. Kanungo gives us portraits of two human beings out of joint with the world, one because of a want of vital energy, the other from an excess of it. Age has diminished the old man: “the root of his life’s tree”, which was once generative of an entire world, has withered, and everything he thinks and feels and does follows from the fact of a real stick having replaced his metaphorical one. Kanungo’s second figure, a woman rapt in sexual fulfilment, suffers the censure of her companions for being in possession of those very pleasures and riches (held to be incongruous with “her age and situation”) that the old man misses and mourns. When we read the lines “But they’ve not been able to corner the man’s face/ against the whereabouts of her thoughts” we sense how powerful and pervasive is that imagined and suspected horizontal world beneath our visible vertical one. Until that scent of musk is “cornered”, no one can be at peace; elsewhere, falling away from life before the body itself passes away, it leaves behind an unrest of a different kind.
Old Man’s Stick
His sons came of this despairing love once,
this original thing, this third wooden leg of his.
They will never amount to even one of its scraping drags on the street,
in which now his father and mother call out his name
and his woman smiles, always waiting just a little ahead
on the slow creep of morning.
When desire revolved around it,
and his clock of salt had more tomorrows than yesterdays,
he would not mumble to himself so often.
There were better sounds to hear:
someone moaned under him on balmy spring nights,
a bed creaked reassuringly in the rains,
children burst forth with their cries,
there was that gallop of things happening.
And ferrying dreams between shores of body,
he lent death his blood and face
for the day it would come for him.
A world collapses on his back with every passing hour now
devoid of that axis of fables
and bent under its house of ashes,
he takes a morning walk, crouching lower and lower until
it seems as though some pervert drunk with power were holding him
by the scruff of his neck, forcing him to sweep the streets with his nose,
punishing him for not dying.
Yet there he is, taking those excruciating walks every day,
leaning heavily on a stick which has lost all memory of the time
when it was the root of his life’s tree, when it was of flesh,
alive with the smell of hope, a woman’s sea.
His body, recumbent with gravity,
shows a bum at the meaningless sky.
His feet whisper a promise unto his ears:
Soon, he will be everywhere.
Musk
In the busy house,
the women’s buzzing eyes stalk her
as she goes about her daily work;
they swarm around her head,
when she sits by herself between chores and chat,
her eyes glazed with another light.
The men cluck their all-knowing tongues
in their walled circles, sniggering.
It’s the musk wafting off her body
at the thought of a man’s touch;
that fleeting look that gave secrets away
without digging,
without any breach in the usual defences.
But they’ve not been able to corner the man’s face
against the whereabouts of her thoughts.
Most of the women hate this stench.
They may even will their eyes to grow fingers
and draw some of that rain blooming
from between her thighs,
hold it to her nose in the clouds,
expose her for the whore she is.
And the few who have counted her storms,
silently warn her, of the bullet
destined for her fragrant navel in this forest,
plead her not to die living.
It has not been long since
she failed to settle down again,
and not long before since she failed the first time.
It’s not of her age or situation now to be so quietly happy.
They would like to strip her off the contentment,
the smiles she smiles when she’s alone,
the songs she sways to these days,
the other-worldliness of it all.
And they know she wouldn’t feel a thing
if they even beat her up;
she’s a malaise far too ancient for that remedy.
Everyone around seems smug with the thought
that they are not her.
She is disgustingly divine.
She is in love.