‘To ride the river, to know desire’: Five poems from Jeet Thayil’s new book of poetry

Pet Sounds

The Beach Boys made Pet Sounds in 1966.
Some critics say it’s the greatest album
of all time – better than Kind of Blue,
better than Around the World in a Day
or Body and Soul or There’s a Riot Goin’ On
or Electric Ladyland. Taste is destiny.

What about albums out the same year,
Revolver or Blonde on Blonde or Aftermath?
What makes Pet Sounds the greatest?
A band that loved Black music made Revolver.
A band that wanted to be Black made Aftermath.
A Jewish poet made Blonde on Blonde.

Pet Sounds is a reminder of a gone time,
when Black or Brown or Jewish people
weren’t seen. You saw us only when you drove,
windows up, through certain neighbourhoods.
You love Pet Sounds because this is music
before blackness entered the world.

Friday Night on the Ark
for Vijay Nambisan

The wind pours wine, slings chansons to the palms.
See the captain, there and there, lifting his glass
to the woolly mammoths and clubfoot angels.
The seas are calm tonight. The moon’s on high.
But he won’t sail until the mammoths blow psalms
in reply. Meanwhile he’s stress-testing the cutlass,
priming the front deck, tuning the curfew bells.
There is no right way to say goodbye.

If there were, this would be it, a night like tonight,
the moon fully lit, false calm upon the water
covering the diseased towns, people stunned
by famine and obesity, by drought and flood,
new spikes within the latest variant of fright.
Nothing ages you like the death of a daughter.
The earth ages under the close eye of the sun.
Nothing prepares you for the spurt of loved blood.

Seven-year Season
with Pascalle Burton

I whisper your name and the day turns warm.
A third-quarter moon holds the father of Jupiter
in place, farther than ever, slower and meaner
through space, disappearing, simmering.

The day turns and I whisper your name,
your thousand-maned name, so terrible and rare.
In rain and in sun, I cup its flame.
Better than thinking, better than prayer.

Jupiter’s father holds the moon in thrall.
You know what comes next.
One by one, the days wobble and fall.
This is the hexed season.

Slower and meaner, disappearing in space,
the world spins in circles. The worm
knows when to show her face.
“Well done,” she says. “Good form!”

We disappear. We simmer.
The day turns from doom to doom.
In the fall, I may remember
to whisper your name from room to room.

Natural History

“Why do we live here?”
said the kid to a sky that rained fire.
“To ride the river, to know desire
and live in the shiver,”
he said, moving higher.

Meanwhile these words
appear as on a magic screen,
and they don’t just appear, they mean
more than they seem to mean,
or maybe less, maybe they collapse inwards.

What will the wind and the tree,
the reptile on the golf link, the vivid green
parakeet, retain of us after we leave?
The earth’s metallic sheen,
pink froth blowing on an inland sea?

Only the futurists kept score,
by means of handheld semaphores.
Firelight flagged our calls for more
when we measured the coastal haar.
Our HQ was windy Edinburgh.

All gone now and gone for good,
into the storm, the endless flaming wood,
helter-skelter, busy, intently mad.
The kid said, “We been had.”
It was the end of the…I forget.

Birth Dirge

At dusk
the fields are

pitch. Unrecognizable.
We fall like

fruits from the
jamun

tree. Black
fruits burst under

their boots.
My neighbour’s pregnant

daughter dropped.
The baby still

moving
gently inside her.

The men
cut

her open. The
dancers.

They dance
sitting.

Even in the
dark they

shine. One
sings while he

works. How hard
he

works. His
voice of the golden

raptors above.
Golden

voice flies
sitting.

Her husband
now.

He buries himself deep
beneath the

red soul
His red mouth’s

laugh is a small
happy

animal. The dust
rises into the

fruit of
our mouths. We say,

Our mother,
love us

Excerpted with permission from I’ll Have It Here: Poems, Jeet Thayil, HarperCollins India.