The Owl and the Laughing Buddha
The gilded laughing Buddha a compact gift
and the wooden owl with one ear chipped
from the time it toppled off its perch
as a makeshift paper weight,
are placed together. The owl
appears to look down, the Buddha up,
and if the owl has reason for its eyes to be transfixed
the shiny Buddha, shinier
in his crossed legs than on his paunch
and oddly light for all his impressive girth,
laughs. He only laughs, gold all over
his shaking belly, only gold
except for the two black slits for eyes
and a bit of red that might be his tongue.
He laughs as if that’s all he has ever done
and nothing has pulled at his dangling lobes.
Nothing can knock him over:
his centre of gravity is his mirth.
His ripples are sweeping outwards, engulf the owl
who is lightly inclined towards him, hearkening
but not swept off his feet.
The owl’s dusty perforations are laved
by his companion’s effervescence
but his stare is round and solemn,
he is too brown and lined, so earnest
a tuner-in to unfulfilment
that laughter might seem too much like an end.
His hoots are held in reserve.
And yet he seems to humour
the Buddha who leans his neckless visage
against the halo that he grips himself:
a slatted parasol no less.
The Fire
Late evening. At the steps of the small seminary
people softly converse.
You catch a phrase or two, and note
that their inflexions are not unfamiliar.
You note that this is noteworthy to you.
White light inside a row of windows
high off the ground but elongated
like ventilators in a factory.
But here the scale is intimate, you skirt
departures from steps, words of parting
in quiet accustomed tones
though something is carrying on inside:
a steady hum that might be man or machine.
To slow in order to hear it better
would make conspicuous your passing interest
and might, in this unobtrusive quarter,
turn the white-capped heads in mild enquiry.
A thought is kindled, and flares the lane.
You move towards the glow
beyond the plainly adorned structure.
Fire is reducing rumours on no man’s land
for anyone who comes this way.
Kaleidoscope
A cloudburst at night in the upper valley.
You cannot do a thing
about jack-in-the-box mountain waters
that petrify the lower lying hamlets.
All you can do is wait
before you descend on suspect paths
to inspect the night’s barrage
of boulders and iridescent shards
embedded in greyish matter.
So much has been carved out, dislodged, strewn
like building blocks at the end of playtime.
The landscape is newly pitted, lunar
but for the blue sky-wash and the pretty stream
giving a lift to the friendly sun.
Your inheritance is a waterfront ooze
your seed is irretrievable.
Yet there are those who will contend
that this is how we are shivered
out of the past and into newer designs;
overlook disastrousness they say
or turn it in your hand
and peer through the eyepiece to admire
in a luminous end-stopped tube
the motley bits being disarranged
each time to settle familiarly
but never quite identically.
Chess
To track the masters is also
to walk the line between
incomprehension and faith.
The openings are familiar –
you might have played them adroitly
yourself. Annotations
ascribe to them a wisdom
of first principles
that you have understood
so your surmises are not
entirely off the mark.
There comes a stage, however,
where you are pressed with choices
that screen the longer view.
One move is unforeseen
and then another, the trodden
path that brought you here
is branching into thickets
and all you have is a hazy
sense of your position.
So you are left to find
that resolve is not enough
nor knowing the principles
that flutter against your skull:
your heart is unsteady, the guide
is increasingly remote,
discarding the routes you would choose
with a logic that leaves conjecture
to hang like a broken wing.
And when the clutter thins out
you see him a long way off
zigzagging away so you
blunder between where you are
and where you think you should be.
Commentary reveals
where intuition falters
something of the design
of your one and intricate life
so once in a way it would seem
that you are masterful,
that this, precisely, is
the way you would have gone
left to yourself: you wonder
at the turning points you’d missed,
are beguiled by slip-ups though yours
have been amateurish,
not subtle, not heroic,
not even worth recording.
Hike
Now that we have traversed there
the hill is different, the yellow slope
is not so bland as it looks, so sheer,
but is face-or-waist-high lemon grass
concealing boulders and sudden pits
between the solitudinous trees.
We lagged behind our visions, but climbed
to views that the sky was lifting off.
A rhythm was rising out of silence.
The wind boosted a bird and sang
the emptiness of the cave. We weren’t
the first but felt like pioneers.
If someone down here had cared to watch
they might have noticed our not quite random
dottiness: the stops and starts,
the skirting of prehistoric barriers,
the leaps, the falls, the moments when we
were extinguished in a yellow vastness.
Nothing’s the same now: our passage was not
without effect. Our tread is lighter,
we know of thorns that are rid of us,
of stones displaced; the wind has heard us.
Invisible lines are where we passed,
remotely, like dinosaurs or poets.
Siddhartha Menon works at the Rishi Valley School. He has published three collections of poems, Woodpecker (Sahitya Akademi, 2010), Writing Again (Folio, 2012) and The Owl and the Laughing Buddha (Poetrywala, 2016).