Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan's first book was Universal Beach (Harbour Line, 2006). He has been publishing his poetry since 1994, and has been performing it since 1995. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in a number of
journals, including the Boston-based international poetry annual, Fulcrum (where he is also an Associate Editor), Harvard Review, Agni and Open Space India, and in anthologies like Reasons For
Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking Penguin, 2002) and the forthcoming Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, & Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008).

He is currently based in Delhi, where he works atSarai-CSDS and is Consulting Editor for a new online literary journal,Almost Island, edited by Sharmistha Mohanty (http://almostisland.com/ ).

"Homeless Man Washing His Foot in the Bathroom of a Bus
Station" Agni Online

(Charleston, South Carolina)

How I trail in,
desperate to decode or divine the record
that would open and end
this ancient baptism under a cold fire,
fluorescent light. How I try
and do not matter. How I'm left to depend
on irregularly regressing detail: his flared
boots worn thin,

and their flaps, twisted,
stiff at oblique angles; his jeans darkened
below the knees and corroded
in streaks; or his yellow cap
which still bore, monogrammed
in green, the cheerful hieroglyph of a former
employer. And his foot, under the tap,
unmoving, blistered,

a fat brown eel
against the porcelain; and the purple
wash of blood returning,
veins aligning, in branches under
the chipped-bark skin
of the image of the foot of this man, who
with tap water and coarse hands was trying
to make his body feel.

ELEGY FOR A MARUTI 800 (1987 Model)

In car years, you're 95
and although death is a nothing
for you that were never granted life,

on the sharpened asphalt now you fling
me, make new and darker
sounds, almost as if stuttering, muttering

and as your indicator
lights blink and flicker erratically apart
your insides rebel, your carburetor

clogs, your very engine is but a heavy heart.
Each trip to the mechanic
man brings the same news, each little part

fixed only opens the seam. What magic
trick of articulation
kept you together for years, then left you? It's

the elements, they say. Nothing escapes erosion.
O my dusky-blue Maruti 800
object of my accidental affection

what hopes we invested
in you, not a car but a dreamthought!
Do you remember that highway night when I begged

and begged you alive? For me, you will not
go out of style. But the world has come in
to your cocoon, and the lanes you once made short
have lengthened again.