The Impossibility of Translation

Stammer is no handicap.
It is a mode of speech.

Stammer is the silence that falls
between the word and its meaning,
just as lameness is the silence
that falls between the word and the deed.

Did stammer precede language
or succeed it? Is it only
a dialect or a language itself? :
These questions make the linguists stammer.

Each time we stammer
we are offering a sacrifice
to the God of meanings.

When a whole people stammer
stammer becomes their mother-tongue:
as it is with us now.

God too must have stammered
when He created man.
That is why all the words of man
carry different meanings.
That is why everything he utters,
from his prayers to his commands,
stammers,
like poetry. (2002)

This poem (Vikku, Stammer) is possibly as much about the stammering self as about stammering people. And the two stammers do not exist independent of each other since the question “why does the self stammer?” can hardly be isolated from the question, “why do people stammer today?” and both of them point to the state of our actual existence as of the expression of that existence in any of the media, especially language.

Several disturbing questions confront us when we discuss the self and its translations, the first being whether at all there is a pre-existing self ready to be translated into diverse forms of expression. At least for those who do not believe in originaries as also in fixed original texts waiting to be translated – if we take the case of translation in its common-sense meaning – such a self cannot pre-exist its expression. I believe that my self as a writer gets defined only through the process of writing: I cannot imagine that I am translating a seamless and doubtless self, the kind that St Augustine or Rousseau speaks of in their Confessions, or the one the Upanishads equate with the Infinite, the self Socrates speaks of in his advice to him to know himself (gnothi sauton), or the one with whose knowledge cosmology begins according to Heraclitus, that was already there, in which case I find the whole business of writing absurdly redundant, at least not more exciting than the job of a transcriber. I do not have a ready answer for the question how the self gets constructed in various discourses like art, religion and philosophy; but we know that most of the contemporary theories of subjectivity point to a discontinuous subject formed in different discourses, ‘I’ being the umbrella term we have been habituated to call these enunciating and enunciated selves – the one that speaks and the one that is spoken about – put together. Jung had seen man as a process rather than a settled state of being and Lacan found the elements of the self in continuous flux and transformation, an idea close to Buddhist thinking. There are other questions too: Is this self gendered? Is it free from class, caste, race, religion and nationality? How is my self related to the other selves and the world, may be the cosmos itself or God? What happens to the self when collective memories vanish and cultural amnesia sets in by choice or by compulsion?

The expression of experience cannot be that of an isolated self. It must be that of a relational self. I believe that is the self Montaigne means when he says, “I study myself, that is my metaphysics, that is my physics,” or what W. B. Yeats speaks about when he declares, “I begin to study the only self I can know, that is myself and to wind the thread upon the pern again.” This again is a self in the process of making as suggested by Hopkins (“What I do is me”) or Octavio Paz (“A human being is never what he is, but the self he seeks”).

Self is not a problem, or at least it has a solution, as long as there is God; it is knowable and can be fully captured in language. Atmajnana is a real possibility in Thirumular, Kabir, Sree Narayana Guru and Mahatma Gandhi. Self is not only knowable, and if it cannot be captured fully in language, it is the limitation of human language, for example, Kumaran Asan, the great spiritual-reformist poet of Malayalam says, “God has given us no tool to reveal our self to others” (Thannathilla paranullu kattuvan/Onnume param upayam eswaran). But in the absence of God, the certainties about the self vanish; the modern self thus is a skeptical and interrogating self. It is also a divided self, to use R D Laing’s well-known term, as modernity that on the one hand threatens to destroy what we have, what we know and what we are and on the other hand promises us adventure, power, joy, growth and transformation of ourselves and the world “pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish” (Marshal Berman, All that is Solid Melts in the Air). To be modern is to be part of a universe in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’ to use Marx’s expression.

Our post-colonial situation adds to this conflict as we are caught between our indigenous culture and the received culture, a conflict Tagore tries to articulate in Gora or U. R. Ananathamurthy in Samskara. The very phenomenon of Colonialism is subject to conflicting interpretations like those of Gandhi and Ambedkar. Sree Narayana Guru of Kerala thanked the British, “They gave us sanyas,” as the backward castes would never have been allowed to be spiritual teachers in a caste-society. Ambedkar too had found an emancipatory value in English education and the West’s secular ideals. To a post-colonial mind, the settling of the question of the authenticity/inauthenticity of the self calls for constant negotiation.

The process of globalization further complexifies the question as it raises the question of the future of our past, promoting cultural amnesia in its subjects. It is a monologue of power that imposes Western values and traditions, turning us into unthinking mimics of the West and making us forget our traditions in knowledge, cosmology, arts and aesthetics. In a sense, all of us are becoming diasporic, aliens in our own land, forced to live in what Homi Bhabha calls the ‘third space’. The reality of the body, a material production of one local culture and the abstraction of the mind, a cultural subtext of the global experience, provide the intertwining threads of diasporic existence. The products of the hybrid location are the results of a long history of confrontation between unequal cultures and forces in which the stronger culture struggles to control, remake or eliminate the subordinate partner. The negotiation of cultural identity involves the continual interface and exchange of cultural performances that in turn produce a mutual and mutable recognition of cultural difference.

Though I have indulged in painting, literary criticism, travel writing and autobiographical exercises, poetry has been my primary and most natural form of enquiry and expression of the self. I do not at all mean to say that poetry to me is ‘self-expression’ in the conventional sense, first, because I do not believe in a self that pre-exists poetry and, second, because poetry has been to me a way to express my relationship with myself, others – that is society as well as the species – nature, and the mystery that surrounds us that some choose to call God. The editor of my collected poems (1965-2005) has, following the Tamil tradition, titled its three volumes Akam (Inside), Puram (outside) and Mozhi (Speech/Language), the first carrying my poems on the self and immediate surroundings, the second, poems on the larger social world and the third, on poetry and other arts. The first part also includes a few poems that can be called autobiographical like Ammoomma (Granny), Atmagita (Song of Myself), Aswastham (Disquiet), Nalpathu (Forty), Anpathu (Fifty) and Arupathu (Sixty) besides poems on my family, love poems, poems to friends, poems on the body and on death. The poems on myself are mostly ironic; only in the early poem Atmagita have I indulged in some nostalgic narcissism; the poem belongs to my early individualistic phase. But in the later poems I often look at myself with self-mockery. Look at the poem, Ammoomma (Granny):

My granny was insane.
As her madness ripened into death,
my uncle, a miser,
kept her in our store room
wrapped in straw.

My granny dried up, burst;
her seeds flew out of the window.
The sun came, and the rain,
one seedling grew up into a tree,
whose lusts bore me.

Can I help writing poems
About monkeys with teeth of gold? (1973)

Here is the opening section of Disquiet: Autobiography, First Canto:

I came bursting open a proverb’s belly
one afternoon of impending rain,
gasping like the salt that leaves the sea
fighting my exile from the dark eternity
of the dead and of gods
screaming against being hurled into
the loveless light of the living.

It was a difficult delivery,
recalls my mother, the labour was long.
How would she know
I had been hiding in my watery chamber
scared, without letting go of the umbilical cord?

I was a blood-soaked riddle, say the neighbours,
and still had only a single head.
Father says I was damp like a swamp,
with that marshy smell.
And sister tells me I was lean
having squirmed out of a folktale.

A huge question fell loose from the roof
suggesting an inauspicious birth. (2000)

The mood also permeates the poems I wrote when I was 40, 50 and 60.

I have several poems on my mother, father, sister, partner and daughters where I recall, celebrate or analyse my relationship with them. In the love poems, especially the longer ones like Apoornam (Imperfect) and Anantam (Infinite), I try to look at every aspect of love, physical, intellectual and spiritual, both in the phase of union (as in the section , ‘Presence’ in ‘Imperfect’) and of separation (the section, ‘Absence’ in the same poem). ‘Infinite’, attempts to integrate the political and the erotic, which is something new to my poetry as also perhaps to poetry in my language. (I have tried it also in an earlier poem, ‘Mon Amour’ that takes off from Alan Resnais’ film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, to explore the violence involved even in love-making):

I hug you with my eyes
you caress me with your wounds
I peel off your garments
you wipe off your bloodstains
I suck your lips
your acid burns mine
I taste your tongue
your untold tales sour my mouth
I rouse your nipples
you mourn your estranged son
I run my fingers across your belly
you start as if recalling a rape
I play on your behind
it grows heavy with distances
I press my lips on your petals
you remind me of our orphaned kids
I enter you
you scream like an embattled city
I raise you to the rainbows
you climax in a rain of bombs
I break and scatter in you
my shrapnels pierce you

Love bleeds in prisons. (2001)

Nature and its thoughtless violation by man is another recurring theme in my poetry. I had opened a talk on my poetry with these words: “I cannot tell from where poetry came to me; I had hardly any poet-predecessors. Whenever I try to think about it, I hear the diverse strains of the incessant rains of my village in Kerala and recall too, the luminous lines of the Malayalam Ramayana I had read as a schoolboy where the poet prays to the Goddess of the Word to keep on bringing the apt words to his mind without a pause like the endless waves of the sea. My mother taught me to talk to cats and crows and trees; from my pious father I learnt to communicate with gods and spirits. My insane grandmother taught me to create a parallel world in order to escape the vile ordinariness of the tiringly humdrum everyday world; the dead taught me to be one with the soil; the wind taught me to move and shake without ever being seen and the rain trained my voice in a thousand modulations. With such teachers, perhaps it was impossible for me not to be a poet, of sorts.” I have several poems on trees, plants as also on animals and insects like The Wolf, The Fox, Cicada, Snail, Earthworm, Spider, etc. written over the years. There is even a poem on the cactus:

Thorns are my language.
I announce my existence
with a bleeding touch.

Once these thorns were flowers.
I loathe lovers who betray.
Poets have abandoned the deserts
to go back to the gardens.
Only camels remain here, and merchants,
who trample my blooms to dust.

One thorn for each rare drop of water.
I don’t tempt butterflies,
no bird sings my praise.
I don’t yield to droughts.

I create another beauty
beyond the moonlight,
this side of dreams,
a sharp, piercing,
parallel language. (2000)

The dead too are part of my landscape and right from an early poem, Oppol (Sister) where I experience a visitation from my dead sister, spirits have kept visiting my lines. I Can Talk to the Dead can be an example:

I can talk to the dead:
dead men, trees, rivers.
Sometimes I see my ancestors:
My granny flies on proverbs,
my grandpa crosses rivers on riddles.
Some swing on quatrains and couplets,
some ride chessmen.
Some play in circles, ploughing fields,
some pluck the betel leaves of heaven.

Sometimes I come across my dead friends.
They have not changed much; only
their bodies have turned into glass.
We can see their hearts inside.
No, they have not stopped, they beat
faster than our hearts.
They cry in the voice of drizzles and
laugh softly like falling leaves.
they are not very different from us,
the so-called living; only sometimes
they choose to fly. Their desires, anxieties,
disappointments: everything is like our own.

Death is not the end of doubts;
questions still haunt them.
But they lost their language long ago.
Their sun rises like a skull in the east.
Mushrooms grow on their foreheads.

When I am talking to myself,
I am really talking to the dead.
When I am talking to you too.
Sun has set in our language. (1988)

Related to this may be my sympathetic involvement in what is often considered deviant and abnormal. The mad occur in many of my poems, may be because I had learnt my early lessons in poetry from a mad man, Shankaran, a Malayalam pundit before he lost his mind, who used to recite and interpret the poems of Kumaran Asan on the street corner before an appreciative crowd, or maybe I grew up with several mad people in the family including my grandmother, two aunts and a cousin. My poem, Bhrantanmar (The Mad):

The mad have no caste
nor religion. They transcend
gender, live outside
ideologies. We do not deserve
their innocence.

Their language is not of dreams
but of another reality. Their love
is moonlight. It overflows
on the full moon day.

Looking up they see
gods we have never heard of. They are
shaking their wings when
we fancy they are
shrugging their shoulders. They hold
even flies have souls
and the green god of grasshoppers
leaps up on thin legs.

At times they see trees bleed, hear
lions roaring from the streets. At times
they watch Heaven gleaming
in a kitten’s eyes, just as
we do. But they alone can hear
ants sing in a chorus.

While patting the air
they are taming a cyclone
over the Mediterranean. With
their heavy tread, they stop
a volcano from erupting.

They have another measure
of time. Our century is
their second. Twenty seconds,
and they reach Christ; six more,
they are with the Buddha.

In a single day, they reach
the big bang at the beginning.

They go on walking restless for,
their earth is boiling still.

The mad are not
mad like us. (1996)

I also have an early poem on the homosexual experience and a more recent one on the third gender where those who belong to this gender criticize men and women who have apportioned the world between themselves. This may be part of my empathy with the marginalized in general that became a defining aspect of my poetry in the 1970s when I, like a lot of middle-lass youth, was inspired by the Naxalite movement and was active on its cultural front. I was soon disillusioned with the movement and have since distanced myself from all dogma; but the responsiveness of the Seventies is still alive in my poetry. My commitment is largely ethical – to certain values, like justice, equality, freedom, love, respect for all forms of life. These have become all the more significant in a world governed by the values of the market and increasingly and violently being colonised by the forces of globalisation. While I have continuously raised the issues of women’s emancipation, the rights of the marginalised, ecological harmony and a world without wars, and kept responding to the tragic turns of social events, from the Emergency to the rise of communalism in our society, I have not ceased asking the deeper existential questions, of being, freedom, instincts, nature, relationships, death. I find no contradiction between the sacred and the secular; I can well be spiritual without being religious. This is something I have learnt from our Saint and Sufi poets and reformers like Kabir and Gandhi who battled against hierarchies of every kind, challenged Power in its diverse manifestations and interrogated the superfluous externals of practised religion. I have a series of 12 poems on our Saint and Sufi poets whom I bring to the present to comment on it. I have a whole series on the Malayalam poets too who form my canon and another series on Kerala

2

My interest in painting and music (cinema being another) is as old and deep as my interest in poetry and literature in general. It is only natural that my poetry often becomes a dialogue with these arts though its primary conversation has been, as must be evident from what I have said so far, with the art of poetry itself. Perhaps this is the sign of a crisis: poetry becomes a subject for poetry in times when the very art is in danger or is passing through an uneasy phase of innovation, experimentation and interrogation.

I took to writing seriously in the second half of the 1960s, a period dominated by modernism in all the arts. It was a time of intense enquiry and experimentation when a new, shared sensibility seemed to be shaking the very foundations of all arts in India. The earlier trends did co-exist with the new one in all the Indian languages, problematising the chronological concept of literature and the transformation of poetry, music and dance was not as complete as was that of painting and sculpture, perhaps because these are more conservative genres and resist change more strongly than the other arts; perhaps also because the pressure of the audience is felt more on these arts than in plastic arts where the spectators are fewer in number and better trained to accept change. The transformation is not complete even today as in almost all languages there are poets who choose to use older forms and styles.

However that be, those who were excited by the change in sensibility, looked for fellow-practitioners in other arts, and sometimes collaborated with them. This brings to mind some familiar European parallels. One is the case of Bauhaus, the German school (1919-33) established by Walter Gropius, and supported by well-known artists like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Naum Gabo and Piet Mondrian whose impact was felt across the West and across arts from architecture to industrial design. The later movement, Fluxus, may be even a better example since the notion of indeterminacy in art it put forward has had a wider international impact on music, poetry, theatre, fiction and painting, and the attitude it generated has created new playful genres like concrete music, random music, happening, collage, installations, concrete poetry, visual poetry, sound art, shuffle novel, SMS poetry, video-novel (including youtube novel), multimedia digital art performances and other chance operations. Launched in the 1950s by John Cage and practised by painters like Marcel Duchamp, Allan Karpow and Yoko Ono, poets like Jackson Mac Low, fiction writers like Le Clezio and Marc Sapota and musicians like Stockhausen, its influence still works through Jung Fluxus, Fluxpan, ‘mail art’ , ‘no wave art’ and other spin offs.

The Indian art scene too was abuzz with new movements and discussions that followed the age of the Tagores, Nandalal Bose, Sailoz Mukherjea, and of Jamini Roy in the 60s with established and emerging artists like Ramkinker Baij, M. F. Husain, F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza, Ramkumar, Bhupen Khaker, Gulam Sheikh, Manjit Bawa, K. C. S. Paniker, K. K. Hebbar and several other painters and sculptors. The film society movement brought us close to contemporary post-realist experiments in cinema, from Bergman, Bunuel and Tarkovsky to Godard and Kurosawa. The Indian cinema scene was vibrant too, with Ritwik Ghatak, Satyjit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Kumar Sahni and others. Kerala produced its own new wave filmmakers (Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, K. P. Kumaran, John Abraham) and new artists (K. C. S. Paniker, K. Damodaran, C. N. Karunakaran, Kanayi Kunhiraman). The new poets like Ayyappa Paniker and N. N. Kakkad and fiction writers like O. V. Vijayan, Kakkanadan, Paul Zacharia and M. Mukundan were already on the scene and found many followers; it may be said that they created their own readership. The avant-garde was an inter-art concept for us; the numerous avant garde journals of the period reflected this new ferment. I also edited a journal, Jwala (Flame) that had special issues on concrete poetry, articles on John Cage, and featured a lot of new writing in Malayalam. Ayyappa Paniker edited the poetry quarterly, Keralakavita – that I am editing now – around which the new poets rallied. M. Govindan edited Sameeksha, a quarterly dedicated to new thinking and sensibility. They were all designed by modern artists. I wrote a series of articles on Modern Art along with studies of the new in poetry. Translations too played a major role in reinforcing the new sensibility in literature. Poetry from across the world got translated by the new poets like Ayyappa Paniker, Attoor Ravivarma, Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, K. G. Sankara Pillai and myself. The performances of poetry were a regular feature in the quarterly release meetings of Kerala Kavita. These were directed by film and theatre directors like G. Aravindan and Kavalam Narayana Paniker. Sometimes art exhibitions and the staging of new plays, including those of translations like that of Waiting for Godot took place during the launch of little magazines. Little publishing houses also sprang up in Kerala during the time. Most of these turned political in the 70s, ushering in a new ‘avant garde’ in the sense in which Peter Berger uses it, as a politically aware group that interrogates the very institution of art and its established canons; but the sensibility created and promoted by ‘high modernism’ that had privileged form and the autonomy of the aesthetic realm, remained. There was no going back in terms of idiom and the sense of formal freedom though new forms began to be tried too: the monologues of the 60s became dialogues and polylogues as characters entered poetry, irony gained political hues and folk modes of imagination reappeared in some poets in fresh forms.

It was this turbulent creative atmosphere that shaped my poetry and hence it was and is quite natural for me to attempt poems on painters and musicians.

Is there something common to painting and poetry in the modern context except the search for fresh means of expression? Many modern painters in Europe as well as India have also been poets from Picasso and Marc Chagal to Gieve Patel and Gulam Mohmed Sheikh. The new approach to the visual language in their paintings is complemented by an unorthodox approach to language in their poetry. The image holds the central place. There is an attempt at restructuring reality and reorganising the world of nature and of human beings as can be found in the impressionists (Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Pissarro), post-impressionists/fauvists (Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse), pointillists (George Seurat), cubists (Picasso, Braque), etc. Accompanying it is the creation of new worlds, like the dream-worlds of the surrealists (Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Joan Miro – the movement already finding partners in poets like Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard) at times soothing and often disturbingly nightmarish. One may also try to decomplexify the world as Paul Klee attempts to do. This tendency to abstract expression can be found in a Rothko and a Kandinsky too. This instinct can at times go wild as in the abstract expressionist action paintings of Pollock or De Kooning. I have called some of Ayyappa Paniker’s poems ‘Dadaist’ considering their element of play and some others ‘Pop’ in their approach to objects and their comic replication.

Many of these tendencies can be seen in my poems in general as I am primarily an image-maker and have felt the impact of surrealism; but here I am focusing on my poems about artists and art, where art sometimes provides a contrast to reality (The Beggar of Konark), sometimes stops us from seeing the real standing between what we want to see and what we get to see (Imperfect, 15) and sometimes reinforces the sense of the real (Pieta). At times I imitate the artist’s mode of imagination (Salvador Dali Meets God); at times a work of art becomes a starting point for meditation on poetry or life (The Fall of Poetry, The Last Judgment). Sometimes I focus on its transformative power as in Vara (The Line) that takes off from Paul Klee’s statement, ‘Drawing is like taking a line for a walk’:

I took a line for a walk.
Walking, it bent down
and straightened up.
But it never barked
nor wagged its tail.

At times the line became a tree,
and kept me in its shade.
At times it became the very forest:
I heard beasts roaring in it.
It became a waterfall at times,
bright, laughing like a wood- fairy.
Became a river at times,
beckoned me to swim.
Sometimes it turned into a rainbow
and invited me to play it.
Became musical notes,
singing many melodies.
When it turned into a sea,
I launched my boat on it.

Sometimes it turned
into a stream of blood,
called me murderer.
Then it turned into prison bars
and put me behind them.

I came back,
it was a line again.

In the beginning was
not the Word, but the Line.
From the Line came,
Planets, stars,
Earth, Adam, Eve, us. (2008)

Sometimes it is an occasion for a visual-verbal play (Kovani Irangunna Nagna, Nude Descending the Staircase):

The nude
is descending the stairs.
The staircase is nude too.
Touched by the nude’s fingers,
the stairs sing
the descending notes of nudity.
The staircase too descends with the nude
so that the descent never ends.
The nude and the staircase
exchange their identities
in the infinite speed of descent.
Duchamp covers the naked speeds
of the wood and the woman
with his browns.
Now it is Duchamp
who is nude. Picasso lends him
his blue, Van Gogh his yellow,
Gauguin his sepia, Cezanne his green,
Matisse his red.

How many nudes
make a sun?

No love ends
in just two. (2009)

Music is another art that has ever inspired me. Indian music is often poetry set to music, and in that way both the arts have an organic connection. Some of my poems have also been sung by musicians in Kerala and there is an album of my ghazals too, which are perhaps closer to the Tagorean geet tradition than the ghazal tradition in Persian and Urdu. A lot of my work follows metres or create new metres. There are also some that invoke folk models. My poems around music too are not all of the same kind. It can be a celebration of a great musician’s art (Ramanathan Sings, a tribute to M. D. Ramanathan), the translation of a raga into images (Thodi, dedicated to Kumar Gandharv), at times it is a context that leads to contexts of real life (Changing House that begins with the lines, ‘Piya, neend na aay’ sung in Bihari by Mallikarjun Mansur). At times it invokes something in nature (Cicada) or the domestic past (Symphony):

My mother never played the Veena.
Not that she had no fingers;
our home had no instruments to play.
But she would winnow
the grain in the sieve, sa-ri, sa-ri
Sister would keep blowing
the fire in the fireplace, soo-soo.
The pot of rice was boiling gul-gul
The eaveswater went on falling tup-tup
Father’s spade fell on the earth, thak thak,
like drum-sticks.
The wind was turning the trees-
peepal, mango, guava and tamarind-
into a row of violins.

Remembered that family symphony
five hearts and the whole cosmos
used to play in unison
as yesterday Zubin Mehta’s choir
played Verdi’s The Force of Destiny.

Father was the Stravinsky of the family plot,
Brother, the Beethoven of the court-yard
And I, the Schubert in the pond.

That orchestra got dissolved long ago;
Only the bamboos remember it, sometimes.

I want to hear, here and now,
Bach’s Sleepers, Wake! (2006)

At times it justifies the presence/relevance of art in tragic contexts (Nero’s Soliloquy) and at other times provides a sharp contrast to reality (When Lalgudi Plays Violin, Music after John Cage).

My nostalgia for the 60s and the 70s of the last century springs mostly from the happy memories of those eventful days when the artists had come out of their cloisters of isolation, exchanged ideas, shared sensibilities, attempted collaborative work and exhibited camaraderie which in the main seems to have been lost in our times for diverse reasons, one of which I fear is the intrusion of market values on arts like painting. While there are artists who still take risks and experiment, I fear their number is decreasing and the burgeoning art market, despite the temporary recession, is tempting artists to imitate the modes, their own or of others, which have found commercial success. The poets too seem to be finding greater comfort in retreating to the sequestration of their writing rooms than engaging the practitioners of other arts in creative dialogue. I can only hope the times will change and the conversation will be resumed.

At the end of all the stammers, I begin to wonder whether I have been translating my self or exploring the self of others. A contemplation that begins in stammer may justly end in suffocation:

Our poetry is
the last dreamy song
sung in haste by
a head on the rails
listening to the rumble
of the approaching train
before the steel
crushes its thought. (Farewell, a poem addressed to Saleh, the Syrian poet from The Arabian Nights)