Black Notes on Genre for My Beloved

BY RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR

I POETRY

Pull down the crows from the sky

Piya, summer’s blood is barely dry
What is a poem if it cannot try
To call you a ****ing ***** or die
Whispering in your arms, this lie
When Kabira met Keats, he said:
Our poems make canopies overhead

Always

Or, beloved, if I told you

We are words
And the spaces between us
Make poetry
Would you not say
Piya, why the fuss?
We knew it was thus

Always

sun’s
amber
squirt
or
piss’s
intricate
stains
on
indian
walls
voice’s
uncertain
trickle
down
page’s
length
small
syllables
entombed
in
marble
vastness
kisses
kismet
some
call
this
poetry

Others declare it’s a fact! Check it out on Google or Wiki or just

about anywhere.
India is the only country in the whole wide world with an ocean
named after it
Where cunning gods tricked flatfoot demons into parting with
sublunary nectar
Placed in mythic textual jars no human hands could ever touch
and lightning
Struck dead in the water lovelorn whales keening in decibels no
biped ear might
Fathom and red coral crumbled to depths in which no ship
anchored and grainy
Infinities of sand queried: what’s any poem but this endless
curving water body?

Always

Okay, all right, I think I get it

But, Piya, this universal shit
Kaavya, dhvani, and infinite woe
This my clownish, doggerel show
It is not poetry, nor Indian
And I cannot call it English
Except the crows insist it is, it is

Always, the cawing

Poetry does not sell!

Which may be just as well
No bourgeois form, this
Shaped like a kiss
At the world’s dawn
Was a tulip poem born
Maybe it was the dawn

Always
When that first turtle
Space-time loaded
On its crenellated back
Limped gamely ashore
A love poem took shape
Out of thin air and lack
And that, Piya, was that

Always

II PROSE

Pull down the crows from the sky, Piya!

Long before those roads diverged
They cawed above the yellow woods:
Syntax is wing and body! Surge
Of air pushing a weight of words
Had we no prose, Piya, we could not ask why!

Why, Piya, why?

III EPIC

Of the epic, we demand feats great gods

Cannot perform but men easily accomplish.
When the Ramayana went to Bali, the gods
Mounted stilts, casting huge shadows on dim
Walls, and the crows crashed from the sky

That was history, Piya

IV TRAGEDY

Everything happens offstage

Clytemnestra’s scream, Draupadi’s rage
Catharsis rehearsing softly in the wings
Then the crow-garbed chorus troops in and sings

Fate, Piya, is a funny thing

V COMEDY

Beloved, if I told you how the rangeela women

Of  Barsana curse and beat their cowering men
At Lathmar Holi, would you ever stop laughing then?

Even the crows, Piya, cheer!

VI NOVEL

1864: the first Indian novel in English, Rajmohan’s Wife

Black and white make gray: the long, postcolonial twilight

Crows are early birds, Piya

VII TWEET

Twitter 2006: in this electrifying handholding, our new,

pterodactyl longings & language in its 6-inch grave unmaking
president & slave

Characters reveal character, my sweet