Glass
As a river traps the shadows of fish
the mirror trawls its freight of daily acts
that hover midstream, then quiver, flash,
plunge into sun-mottled depths:
bodies erased from a surface still rippling
with the phosphor currents of their fins.
The mirror holds the combing of hair,
a loosened strap, a blouse that fell
from a shoulder at noon, a puckered mouth.
Faces that have faded, hands that have dulled:
hasped in the inch-depth of glass, they answer your questions
with the fossil poise of fish bones laid out in a dry course.
Freshet-charged at summer’s end, you dive and sift through what remains
after the doing’s done and, clasping your proof,
break the river’s glass. You wave it arm-high in the rain:
the hieroglyphs twitch, spark, blur in a sound that, Fatalità!, was falling
before you were born, before the sun had opened its third eye
and left barges to rust on salt plains that used to be seas
– a sound louder than the memory of rushing water,
a drumming that beats and soaks and drains
the darting signs on which you’ve pinned
yesterday, tomorrow, up, down, strange, charm, beauty, truth,
faster than you could ever hope
to scan and set them in a flowchart of home.
Self-Portrait as Child in the Rain
shadows trapped in the door
rain tapping out a message on roof and branch
an ampersand of cloud
scared bird wet waiting for the others to catch up
at the finish line
Night Sky and Counting
for Teju Cole
You are in the dark
looking up at constellations and shooting stars
finding traces of adobe roofs and walls
at the eye’s radium rim while grass
tickles your back. You notice
some celestial objects move faster than others
sorting red shift from blue note
You are the samurai of wide open spaces
they scan you in their eyes you’re a ninja
betrayed by body heat you’re that grey-
glowing-to-orange smear in minutes
you could evaporate
leaving heat shadow
printed on the ground to mark the spot
You thought you were the subject the locus of consciousness
when the shooting stars look down they see
an object with eyes a moving threat
under the black mirror at which you point
to finger-link faint trails that might be a hunter
his belt his faithful dogs or a raven a boar
a river of eyes you have no cover
You are in the dark
Render
to provide a service, do [someone] a favour
to give, supply, make available for inspection
to submit an account or accounts
to deliver a judgement
to give up, surrender
to translate
to translate into form, give shape
to represent in a painting or motion capture
to perform a piece, animate a score
to create an image from binary code
to colour and shade that image
to make it solid
to melt fat down to clarify it
to hand [someone] over to [someone] in another country or territory
to extract protein, fat and other usable parts of a dead animal
the first coat of plaster applied to a brick or stone surface
before it’s whitewashed
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. His collections of poetry include Zones of Assault (Rupa & Co., 1991), The Cartographer’s Apprentice (Pundole Art Gallery, 2000), The Sleepwalker’s Archive (Single File, 2001), Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006), and Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014). Two volumes of his poetry have appeared in German translation: Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006), and Feldnotizen des Magiers (Editions Offenes Feld, 2015). Hoskote’s translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of the anthology, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Penguin/ Viking, 2002), and of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012).