Meetings in Mumbai
bedraggled and unshaven, by my bed.
Over black coffee, evenly scarred toast,
we share the papers, but we do not speak.
All conversation now would be grotesque.
He clings like wet cloth, will not disappear.
It's not my fault that he's become so weak,
his dreadlocks white, his face in disrepair.
Mirrors provide no help, take me to task.
With bloodstained eyeballs he accuses me.
When we left London he mislaid his mask,
and, some days after that, his poetry.
Weeping, my shadow brother will not tell
from where or for what reason he has come.
He searched out coffins with no compromise,
and tried, before his due time, to reach hell.
The brittle framework that contained his eyes
Ffell down through small erosive sips of rum.
He's forced to wear his face, and when it cries
it twitches, a wet snail pulled from its shell,
or the spilled entrail of a butchered saint.
Him my ghost envies, once left in the lurch
by god and friends, but still preserved in paint
on the drab wall of some suburban church.
A child's rhyme told his history all the while:
the crooked mile he walked to where he is;
the crooked sixpence underneath the style.
London behind him, and his mask still lost,
he floundered in the heat, his wilderness
always within him, whom he looked at least.
Now when he looks out, under miles of blue,
upon singing tree, shaped like a harp
responsive to the wind, the birds accrue.
Down arabesques of air they dart and chirp.
They're not original in the things they do,
but shake him now, because he did them too.
My brother's face leers at me, wornout, wan.
My shadow enemy, my ghost who grieves
each Sunday for the things he has not done.
As his drained mouth explains itself to me,
his sentences fall, soundless, like the leaves
Swept up in parks, and burnt: like poetry.
(From Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems,
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2001)
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