SAMPURNA CHATTARJI
‘Why does it have to be a poet?’
A piece dedicated to all the poets I have read, translated, loved
Space Gulliver’s sadness is monumental
Monumental her desire for friends
Who will draw her back into joy
Poets who will write songs for her
Poets she will write poems for
Poets who will offer her room in their small
One-room flats
Poets who will understand that flatness of emotion is not the thing
Poets who write in languages she cannot read
Poets who vanish so swiftly she must have dreamed them up
Poets who tower above her
Or stand easily beside her shoulder to shoulder at a bar
Poets she could smoke with in a fine drizzle
Poets she could smoke with under lamp posts sizzling with moths
Poets she could be loud with like sixteen years of carousing
And no knowledge it ends in death
Poets in slippers and shorts
Poets who once had stammers
Poets with preposterous and ironic eyebrows
Who will hold her as she stands in the sea
Poets who eat only raw food and watch the light fade
Poets so beautiful they lose everything
Poets with orange notebooks filled with sketches
Poets with cardamom on their tongues
Poets let loose in a country house
Poets reading
Sitting in large carved chairs wearing their glares
In the middle of the night
Poets who can walk into bedrooms unembarrassed by shed skins
And the detritus of thinking oneself unobserved
Poets who have chased monkeys
And saved red books with golden letters from destruction
Poets with footballer’s hands
Poets who buy her rings
Poets who buy her drinks
Poets who teach her words she may never need to use
Poets who have vertigo
Poets who once lived in brothels
Poets who have children from many women
Poets who build their own houses then leave them for sheds in the garden
Poets who hold her hand
Poets with very soft lips
Poets singing suddenly
Haunting her long after
Poets on the floor sitting cross-legged with the door ajar
And the windows blowing
Eating with their fingers which they have never done before
Poets rambling falling quiet wanting to cry
Poets catching buses and trains to see her
Poets leaving in small blue cars
Poets driving lime-green Citroëns with sun-roofs left open
So wind chills ears and everyone wears a cap
Poets careful not to trample on moss
Walking through Blair Witch forests
Linking arms but not too close
For fear of misunderstandings
Poets in jackets that make a swishing sound
Poets born in Ethiopia
Poets hugging poets
Poets writing in pink ink on the title pages of their books
Poets making promises
Riding motor-bikes
Poets being asked to leave it’s closing time
Poets in blue sweaters that cling
Poets in boa constrictors
Poets forgetting their lines
And what it was they were meant to do
Poets momentarily lost
Poets posing
Taking photos, always the same photos
Poets kissing her on the mouth
Why does it have to be a poet?
Space Gulliver thinks
Why not
Parachutist or pediatrician
Poltergeist or puppeteer
Pickle-maker or punk
Because
Poets know
Know crows and alphabets
Know Fibonacci numbers and Gypsum Red D
Know anti-poem and counterpoint
Know tree and reed
Know there was nothing inside
Know Beelzebub in Bombay
Know canticles and Karna
Know wanting to be a roof is not a sign of insanity but of love
Know kindness is everything
Know the eerie longing
Know pelvises and shoulders
Know old houses where men hung themselves
Know beds in Peru
Know figurines the shape of Amsterdam
Know linguine and lascivious
Know
Philharmonic
Oysters, hieroglyphics and axes
Know girls from A to Z
Know one-camel clans and Babylon
Know lost earrings in grass
Know spectres in glass
Know the basket-weaver’s love
Know how
To remain alone at the end of a rhyme that will not deceive you
Know cliffs
Know the circus animals’ desertion
The rag and bone shop of the heart
Know long grey beard and glittering eye
Know salt and sea and synaesthesia
Know horizon
Where she came from
Knowing nothing but the daft unsolvable
Equation
from Space Gulliver: Chronicles of an alien (HarperCollins)
reprinted with permission of the author © Sampurna Chattarji