Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala in 1959 and educated in Jesuit schools in Hongkong, New York and Bombay. He graduated from Wilson College, Bombay, and received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, New York. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including English (Penguin/Rattapallax, 2004) and These Errors Are Correct (Westland, forthcoming in 2008). He edited Give the Sea Change and It Shall Change: Fifty-Six Indian Poets (Fulcrum, 2005) and Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (Routledge, 2006). He is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. In 2004, he moved from New York to New Delhi and he currently lives in Bangalore.

The Two Thousands

In the end it took so little to do us in:
the imaginative use of fuel,
the fuzzy grammar
of this or that group of logicians,
gifts of money
to the strongest among us.
Who could resist those voices raised in unison?
‘Travel broadens nothing,'
the Great Martyr said, ‘except your tan.'
It was the official position,
broadcast without commercial interruption
every evening at 6.
The time for lyricism had passed.
Also—kissing, sculpture, coq au vin, the tango,
and other items of behavior
too commonplace to mention.
They had G_D on their side;
we had fear.
Same difference, you might have said.
I kept a wet finger to the wind.
Depending on who was winning
I shaved or I didn't.







To Baudelaire

I am over you at last, in Mexico City,
in a white space high above the street,
my hands steady, the walls unmoving.
It's warm here, and safe, and even in winter
the rain is benign. Some mornings I let
the sounds of the plaza—a fruit seller,
a boy acrobat, a woman selling
impossible fictions—pile up in a corner
of the room. I'm not saying I'm happy
but I am healthy and my money's my own.
Sometimes when I walk in the market
past the chickens and the pig smoke,
I think of you—your big talk and wolf's heart,
your Bonaparte hair and eyes of Poe.
I don't miss you. I don't miss you when
I open a window and light fills the room
like water pouring into a paper cup,
or when I see a woman's white dress shine
like new coins and I know I could follow
my feet to the river and let my life go
away from me. At times like this,
if I catch myself talking to you,
I'm always surprised at the words I hear
of regret and dumb boyish devotion.






New Year, Goa

The midnight's cataracts whiten,
and here's the sea hissing
its one stuttered consonant.

Leaf-printed, you track the moon
to a beached, bearded hull, a room
of vertigo or freedom

that narrows like memory.
Small flames ascend a tree
of light. The two-and-thirty

palaces of Bodhisattvam
tremble on the vellum-
smooth water, like flotsam.

If tonight the mind is queasy,
drawing thoughts like flies, he
is fine too with every crazy

scheme you devise, none crazier
than this pilgrimage to a pier
that seems to have disappeared,

leaving you seaborne at last,
ahead of you the past,
and all its famous cities lost.