1. Venice Canto (IV)
2. The Lotophagi (V)
3. Tagore Meets Pound (VIII)
4. The Elpenor Canto (IX)
5. Pound’s Mr. Gandhi (XII)
6. Daddy Canto (A Fragment)
7. Europe Under the Moors (XVI)
8. Radio or Treason Broadcast (XVIII)
9. The ‘Money’ Canto (XX)
10. Beauty Canto (XXIV)
Venice Canto (IV)
I write this in pencil Tentatively
For I write of great civilisations
I write as if I know nothing...
So came I to Venezia
And I sat on the steps of the Doge’s palace
and wept
Because everything cost too much that year
(what with the Sirocco)
And my sister, all light
Sister of the light touch
and the lighted eyes
took me by the hand from the American Express to
the glassblowers (bypassing the Mosaics)
where silica (sand) is blown light into glass
(And we picked the same vase for each other
—because we were one at root
though separated by our singular destinies)
And onward to Ravenna
Where Estée’s steed still stands
From where sweet Dante descended into Hell:
The same Dante who first got Hell’s map from an Arab:
Al’Maari’s Risaala al Gofraan
And the letter from hell was all Al-gebra to me
Until gentle Jan Kemp of Christchurch, NZ calculated the degrees
— ‘Why, Dante emerged from Hell out on my own homestead
So the world was always really one
Until the shitass bombers and farting lawgivers
ripped it apart for oil
found in the earth’s bowels
Diogenes in his tub was no different
from the anthropophagi Alexander found
who sheltered themselves from the sun with a raised root
And the beautiful free-standing Apollo of Anaximander
was evolved, rotated and revolved
from the grim high-backed chaired pharaohs of grim Luxor
And Venus herself was Black
As indeed was Mother Eve
Until she bleached out at Paphos
while emerging out the sea
—the light! the light!
or, while being ejected from Paradise
(The light here / is not of the atmosphere
but of the mind)
--- Why do I not get tired of writing this?
Or, is anyone really listening? ---
The Vikings and Crusaders
were both seafarers
They were conquerors
Who suffered sea-change
into something rich and strange
So that the cupolas of Venice
began suspiciously to look like the domes of Constantinople
Meat seasoned with cardamoms
Sultan-hating plotters seasoned in coffeehouses
soon ended in the clinker
But let me not tinker with history
Now, in Genoa Massimo kiss-of-the wolf
Heroic soul, translator of Beowulf
takes me by my hand Teaches me simply:
Hoshang! Don’t you see
Genoa faces west (to its peril)
All Venice faced east...
The Lotophagi (V)
The lotophagi
have heads between their legs
(So Homer said )
They go day and night
looking for light
between their legs
I first found them in India
like Alexander
But they all belong to a single tribe
stretching from Bombay
to the Bay of Naples
They’re masked at Venice’s Mardi Gras
And in the loos of Bombay’s Victoria Terminus
they hide their names
In Africa, they hid in the grass
their heads in their asses
(like Ostriches)
But one look from your eyes
Makes the light in their eyes flare up
—Boy! Does it flare up Unforgettably
For even here
We’re all one
in seeking light
Even the men who like ostriches come from eggs
And go looking for light between their legs
Tagore Meets Pound (VIII)
It is in an English garden
(Gone is the summer and every English rose...)
That Tagore gets up his Indian courtesy
for Mr. Pound of Idaho
Son of the Master of the Mint
Let there be new coinage!
But what does the Ganges babble on
About births, this and others
(Give me my chattering, babbling, country brook)
This old English lady in grey wig
and Cashmere shawl!
(It is autumn already)
From their hands fall, leaves and leaves...
—of a book!
Where the mind is without fear
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
And the head is held high...
[Gone is Boleyn and every English rose...]
And the Po goes lazily
As the Padma this hazy morning
(The marshes waiting to be drained
Since the time of Julius Caesar)
‘This liquid is certainly a / property of the mind...’
‘To study with the white wings of time passing
is not that our delight
to have friends come from far countries
is that not pleasure
not care that we are untrumpeted?....
(Thus, ol’ Wuz)
The Elpenor Canto (IX)
Elpenor!
The nape-nerve sever’d
Dead of a fall
Want to Troy to become a hero...
—but!
Io! Io!
The boys call from the sea
Fisherboys
Calling: Dolphino! Octopus!
Io! Io!
The boys calling from land
Calling: Garnāta! Pomegranata!
In each blood-red cell the light shone
Light of the eyes Light of dog
of Ios and of Kos!
And from root and stem springs
the sap
to the mouth!
We drank our fill...
One day in Circe’s house
he died coming down darkly
after carousing
Fell off the perch....
Nape-nerve sever’d .
Dead of a fall
Before the coming
of great things to come
The sea fleck’d red
With Adonis’ blood
‘He looked like he was sleeping
Alive
except for a bruise at the temple...’
All stitched up
After autopsy at the morgue
The fathers had sold his organ
for transplants
translations
for a song
I was not there
I was in Africa
Looking for the source...
Down down he came
like glistening Phaeton
Dead of a fall
The sea flecked red with Orpheus’ blood
Sold for a song...
Ya Tammuz!
Ya Adoni!
Adonis, Orpheus
... Yunus!
Pound’s Mr. Gandhi (XII)
No one liked him especially, I think
Since all saints are great destroyers
Imagine the poor, with a painted paradise at the end of it
without a painted paradise at the end of it
Once there was Cathay Once there was the Great Moghul
Once and only once
Now all roads lead to London
Now all roads lead out of London Now and forever…
Is that expansion or constriction, I ask
Old Ez ever and forever on a voyage
Sometimes irate, sometimes sweet
What is water but liquid fire, ask the alchemists
Poverty but the base-metal for sainthood
Did Esau like his potage? Mr. Gandhi his poor cottage?
Did Mr. Gandhi love his irrigated colon...
All the muslins of Cathay All the brocades of Persia :
A bonfire of vanities...
What do Gandhi, Chaplin and Mickey Mouse have in common?—
They entertained the poor of London’s East End...
All of Manchester’s might Taken up by a mere spinning wheel
Did old Ez care? Did Tagore?
They looked to Ferrara’s Ducal logia frescoes:
The peasant at base
Upon his shoulder the landlord
Above him the king and lords
Above them the angels and god
And somewhere thereabouts, a poet...!
But Jiddu Krishnamurty, Besant’s dull boy, simply
Look at the tree
Strong at root
Beautiful after...
Yes, but the leaf is related to the tree-trunk
And Asia presses at the borders of Europe
Africa presses at the borders of Europe
The new hordes will breakdown the visa checkposts:
Something even Mr. Gandhi did not foresee
in his sweetness and light...
Europe a delicate leaf in the wind
Asia its root
Pull down ‘thy vanity, pull down!
When Icarus soared too high
he fell into the Tyherrian Sea
Lenin and Mao lead the new Mongol and Tartar hordes
Truth shall prevail from sea to sea
But, whose truth?
Water too is a liquid quality of the mind
Wind is of the process
Rain is of the process
The impossible dream on the peasants’ shoulders
And Il Duce dead
Dolce
Lux
et
Decorum...
Daddy Canto (A Fragment)
A booklice leapt out of Pound (the Indian edition)
and like the ant
I described in my ode to Daddy’s 60th Birthday
slowly started to walk the Hindu mile
And when he died I wept not
nor attended funerals
but worked, taught, elucidated :
Read the seven poems (published) to him
with the refrain, My father ! My father!
Pio, Pita, Pitamah...
But before dying he’d said I loved him not
because I refused his money
Which by the end was all he had left to give ---
‘and with a name to come’
And Nadira, too, just dead :
A moon-barge
with a veil-cloud just lifting...
Beauty is difficult
Zeher to pidha jani jani =
= Poisons we took to knowingly
O mai mara baap na paap =
= O Mother! My father’s sins...
[Sujata Bhatt’s] big brinjals
(for Dad)
The Tower all broken
The work all in ruins
Nothing matters –
— but the quality of affection
in the end
Europe Under the Moors (XVI)
Love depended on the lift and fall
of a veil
Love was imprisoned behind crenellated walls
Latticed balcony of stone
But Love ever had wings to fly from The Book
into my mistress’ look
So that when Arnaut hymned the boys at dawn
They were no longer boys but women of stature
grown bold in love
Refusing to shatter the placid mirror
of love of the night before
Morning’s mourning
The Jew grinding his lenses unhampered
for better sight
His hands busy by lamplight
His head afire with the mysteries of Light
Or yet again the rising cadenza
of the prayer-call
Kept time to by small, stamping feet
That extinguish divine fervour like a match, lit—then discarded, dead:
Ole!
Allah!
Radio or Treason Broadcast (XVIII)
When the Telugu glamourdoll
(the same who made a PM translate for her)
came to me and said:
Do for me what you did for Jameela
I sent her packing Having no intention to be an Insider
She also said she despised villages
(that’s who listens to radio, any more)
I’m not ashamed of emotion
(not being bound by codes of my fathers’ foreign masters)
I weep on the radio
And entire villages with a smattering of English
Rejoice!
Flock to me to learn:
EMOTION!
Thou shalt not betray your nation
BUT : Thou shall correct your father when he’s wrong
This is all a bushfire
No war but bushfire
It’ll die when the dread deadwood
is all burnt out
‘We’ve cleared the deadwood
Now is the time of planting / carving’
Pull down the vanity Paquin or Coco Chanel pull down!
In Konya I saw a resplendent Sufi
In magnificient gold and green
pray at the Maulana’s door
(because Attaturk turned mosques into museums)
And he was so magnificent
He bought a vendor’s unsold daily store
(all tomato)
at day’s end
he was American:
Let the world be filled with pickles
Jellies Jams (all tomato)
I was so touched
I wrote and spoke about it
on AIR
Radio Ankara picked it up Ah Marconi! – of eyetelly!
—who’s this merchant who makes Sufi pickles?
A tomatoseller’s heart must’ve danced
And that very instant a wastrel Turkish 16 year old
must've become a Sufi, full of beauty
— all for love
Love is the highest treason
poor Anais said
And as poor Pound knew.
The ‘Money’ Canto (XX)
The rupee (Indian) is pegged too low
Against the dollar and euro
So that though we work and work
We’ll never catch up with them
So s/d Nowroji in 1857
– but who listens!
And Mr. Gandhi
And the other Gandhi (Indira, no relative)
devalued the currency
(when I wanted to study at Oxford
study at Oxford?
– That’s impossible)
A move she lived to regret, too late
in the grave
Keynes post-war indebting the third world
to the World Bank
Saying like Dad : ‘You can live without ideas
But not without money!’
And Wallace Stevens : ‘Money is a kind of poetry’
‘To build the city of Dioce
Whose terraces are the colour of stars’
I went past Ecbatana (ancient Dioce)
in Sughdiana
And met my Alexander
All flushed with victory (Beauty is difficult)
The Khoemeini goons rounded on me
—How much? they asked
I refused to pay them off Beauty is difficult
I neither buy nor sell
(The only poet in the world named Merchant)
Just as I refused to pay to be fellated
Under Rajabai clocktower (Bombay Univ.)
Or to receive money for ‘mani’
(as in Om mani...)
Until the cunning man at Lost Property Office, BEST
found the rupee I’d secreted
in my lost plastic wallet (1960)
so deep like a deeply buried secret
I’d forgotten about
And he tricked a child
Was shamefully richer by a rupee
The tower fell
of Babylon
of Ecbatana
of Rajabai
(mistakenly called – ‘bhai’)
Amore!
Dove sta memoria : ‘Money = prostitution’ (Mother)
she refused Dad’s $ 1 million!
the women in the cages (B’bay’s Foras Rd.)
Dad’s workers grown old at their lathes
Turned out into the streets
by stepmother, the prostitute
on his death
I refusing guilty money
Refusing to pay blood money
wages of sins visited on the children
the tower broken The tower of silence
50 years’ work in ruins
And a buzzing of bees
leger mormorio Daddy! daddy!
I shut my eyes and see 26, Pali Hill
Baccarat chandelier Kashan carpet
Czech crystal Murano vases
balm to my heart
unguent to mine eyes...
To teach at Harvard?! – It’s impossible to teach at Harvard!
Beauty Canto (XXIV)
I wanted to write a poem on beauty
but I’m so tired I went to sleep
3 hrs. into sleep I dreamt a devastating fire
A sister-figure survived :
Has my dying sister in Chimayo, NM finall died?
I felt peaceful : Like the landscape after fire
Last night it rained :
I wake up. I read. I write. It’s 3 am
Once the classical poets appeared great
Now even contemporaries appear greater
– than me
This cannot be
Or is it the beginning of a new humility
before death
‘The only thing that knows how it’ll end
When it begins, is a sentence....
I was never proud Just angry :
with a rage for beauty
Now I’m not beautiful, I’m fat...
Don’t you understand that my little microcosmic me
Is only all of the universe
inside my head / belly / butt / balls
And my hand caresses all that
As it invites your hand to caress that in you
– or me
How are we different?
At 60, I hold back
Do not molest the boy bringing me home from a party
He’s 20. He’s polite. He says he can pretend
He’s from Arizona. Was I like him when I came back?
All of India’s become like that, very hip and with it
Thank God I slipped back into my Indian ways
Is that when things begin to appear like other things
Today’s summer here was a Bombay summer then
I was trembling with rage, near to tears
begging the univ. from 9-5 i.e. 8 hrs + 18 yrs.
to make me a professor: Filling applications in quintuplet
Prove you were born etc.
I was still my father’s child
Abandoned wanting approval
How can poets look for metaphors
When all of life is a morality play?
At the Farewell Party the Jewish boy
Who’s walked barefoot through Africa
Asked a fat classmate to jump on his belly
— As she did this I saw the rise in his crotch
And his head thrown backwards from the stage
Hanging off the proscenium he recited ‘Macavity’ – all of it
Is this a metaphor for the poet
All of it happening right before my eyes
Who then was it who died
As I turned into sleep
Why is all this not included in our poetries?
Everything seems to happen in a haze : Insomnia?
—Don’t tell me it’s the poet’s condition
Today I saw the whole campus somnambulate
even unto my joking clerks + typists
As they type they try to read my poetry
They try to learn They know I teach
But it eludes their grasp
Ganesh from Hebbagodi called :
‘I was about to die... kill myself...
Yaraana saved my life!
Am I crowing? Or crying?
Nambisan (Vijay) talks of going dry
He always addresses me like a lover
a suitor
(Though he’s as straight as a pin)
He was walking through a bog
He was wide awake when they pumped his stomach
He knew he was a slob
Both in drink And knowing a drunkard’s stink He was god
What made him so human?
Poetry doesn’t make anything happen
But in giving wisdom it saves us a lot of trouble...
Is that why
Everyone And every era of my life appear interchangeable
So that then we exchanged bodies
now we exchange souls
(what the saints call ‘pity’)
Is that why everyone appears so close
And so remote from me?
Afternoon is the glycerine hour :
We navigate its fog
May be those who read my words
Look for a raft on the flood
But, first they must drown :
‘Forever wilt thou run and she be fair’
(Was she ever really there?)
Is this why Nambisan goes mad
and /mocks my line on the night when pearls are ground
and drunk?
When Catullus records the fall of Cleopatra
for Rome
He does not forget to understand a defeated queen’s need
for beauty
Is ours only a difference in practice
of poetry
Both being poets for solid reasons?
(Modern criticism sez the reasons don’t count)
And what is Uncle Ez doing in all this?
—To refine the language of the tribe
Refine / Define
A tribe of versifiers scattered like his seed
throughout the world
He gave me prose
—Thank you, very kindly for the prose
thou shalt not poeticise!
‘Is Beauty half of the religion?
Ananda asked
—’No Ananda,. It is all of it
said the Buddha...
ROSA
It is as if I know Rosa of Barcelona
She threw her head back and laughed
Her Iberian hair-halo thrown back to show
The Iberian fire bubbling in her sea-depth
She was of the sea. She touched many shores.
The Gaelic. The Basque. Within her they warred
For though she died for Beauty. She stood up for Love :
that is to say for those unloved
The fire in her eye reached out to everyone
Her heart opened out her house-on-the-hill :
Love its key And love its door
So that the poor when they entered it
Were poor no more
She shared in the world’s essential poverty
Became pure
O Lynx guard our water trough
Keep our supply pure
Two leopard sat by a river brink
It was evil they lapped up
O Lynx keep our sources pure
Anais Nin
Nearest thing to Venus walking
amongst us
Spanish / Cuban, Belgio / French, Catholico / Jew
Sit Beauty on your knee but do not insult it
Did Anai’s like a spanking?
Never left her at peace
Chaiin se sone na diya
They went for the jugular...
Born in 1947 to a Zoroastrian business-family in Bombay, India, Hoshang Merchant graduated second in his BA Class (1968) with a major in English and a minor in the culture of India. From his mother’s family he descends from a line of preachers and teachers. He holds a Master’s from Occidental College, Los Angeles. At Purdue University, he specialized in the Renaissance and Modernism. Anais Nin and he corresponded for four years. His book on Nin, In-discretions, earned him a Ph.D. from Purdue in 1981 and is published by Writers Workshop which has also published seventeen books of his poetry since 1989. He helped establish the Gay Liberation at Purdue. After leaving Purdue in 1975, Merchant attended the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Centre, Massachusetts, and lived and taught in Heidelberg, Iran and Jerusalem where he was exposed to various radical student movements of the Left. He has studied Buddhism at the Tibetan Library at Dharamsala, north India, as well as Islam in Iran and Palestine. Rupa and Co. published his book of poems Flower to Flame in 1992 in the New Poetry in India series. Yaraana: Gay Writing from India (Penguin, 1999), Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets (Routledge, 2009), Indian Homosexuality (Allied, 2010) and The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fiction (Penguin, 2012) are among his notable works. Presently, Merchant teaches Poetry and Surrealism at the University of Hyderabad and is unmarried by choice. Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant (OUP 2016) is his most recent work.