poems by Vivek Narayanan

an excerpt from:

FERNANDO PESSOA IN DURBAN
(to Derek Walcott)


The man who sleeps in your mother's bed
drinks tea with the British ambassador so

the house is kosmos enough. In one room a calliope
like an engine plays; in another, a stone horse smooth enough

to ride or a carved wooden mask with a nose-hole
stinging skin. There's a monocle

and a pipe, a flyer for Ruth St. Denis, there's a feathery moth's wing
and part of a chewed-up but bright pink Europe.


(You tick in sticky names the pages of your enemies—
Plato, Ptolemy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Conan Doyle

and the schoolboys who scrape you on the ground until your knees go red.
You see a girl playing in the street and feel pity.)



for those not familiar, if you click on his name above it will take you to the openspaceindia poetry site where you can read more poems by him