Bright Copper Kettles (Excerpt)
Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—
this is one of my favorite things.
I like it so much I sleep all the time.
Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed
deep in the dreams where they appear.
In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,
before the empress with the melting face, under
the towering plane tree, they just show up.
Imaginary Number (Excerpt)
The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
is not big and is not small.
Big and small are
comparative categories, and to what
could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed
be compared?
Life of Savage (Excerpt)
I’ve been excited about him as an individual.
I’ve met him as a person, emerging from his own shadow.
Indeed it is remarkable.
Indeed it is to be remarked of my friend Savage that
the desolation of hopes not merely deferred
but by impracticability brutalized
little marred his genial spirit.
How such a one, so circumstanced by parentage—
the mother crippled by disappointment; the father by rotgut and Percodan—
as to blight his prospects, and blacken with untimely frost the buds
of those ambitions justly excited
by manifest powers, graces, and propensities,
should nonetheless display
Sequence (Excerpt)
1. HELL
You’d have to be as crazy as Dante to get those down,
the infernal hatreds.
Shoot them. Shoot them where they live
and then skip town.
Or stay and re-engineer
the decrepit social contraption
to distill the 200-proof
elixir of fear
and torture the...the what
from the what? And didn’t I promise,
under threat of self-intubation,
not to envision this
corridor, coal-tar black,
that narrows down and in
to a shattering claustrophobia attack
before opening out
to the lake of frozen shit
where the gruesome figure is discerned?
Turn around, go home.
Just to look at it is to become it.
Three Persons (Excerpt)
That slow person you left behind when, finally,
you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,
where is he while you
walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,
organizing with an electric clipboard
your big push to tomorrow?
Oh, I’ve come across him, yes I have, more than once,
coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian.
Thunderstruck (Excerpt)
The house collapsed and I was crushed under the rubble,
pulverized, but here I am,
walking around as if I were alive —
the swain,
with an oxeye daisy in my buttonhole,
the bitter voluptuary, never satisfied,
- Vijay Seshadri
