The Cinnamon Peeler Read Online Free PDF

this country your mouth
    feels the way your shoes look
    Everything is reducing itself to shape
    Lack of light cools your shirt
    men step from barbershops
    their skin alive to the air.
    All day
    dust covered granite hills
    and now
    suddenly the Nile is flesh
    an arm on a bed
    In Indian miniatures
    I cannot quite remember
    what this hour means
    – people were small,
    animals represented
    simply by dust
    they stamped into the air.
    All I recall of commentaries
    are abrupt lovely sentences where
    the colour of a bowl
    a left foot stepping on a lotus
    symbolized separation.
    Or stories of gods
    creating such beautiful women
    they themselves burned in passion
    and were reduced to ash.
    Women confided to pet parrots
    solitary men dreamed into the conch.
    So many
    graciously humiliated
    by the distance of rivers
    The boat turns languid
    under the hunched passenger
    sails
    ready for the moon
    fill like a lung
    there is no longer
    depth of perception
    it is now possible
    for the outline of two boats
    to collide silently
THE PALACE
    7 a.m. The hour of red daylight
    I walk through palace grounds
    waking the sentries
                             scarves
    around their neck and mouths
    leak breath mist
    The gibbons stroll
    twenty feet high
    through turret arches
    and on the edge
    of brown parapet
    I am alone
                   leaning
                   into flying air
    Ancient howls of a king
    who released his aviary
    like a wave to the city below
    celebrating the day of his birth
    and they when fed
    would return to his hand
    like the payment of grain
    All over Rajasthan
    palaces die young
                             at this height
                             a red wind
    my shirt and sweater cold
    From the white city below
    a beautiful wail
    of a woman’s voice rises
    300 street transistors
    simultaneously playing
    the one radio station of Udaipur
USWETAKEIYAWA
    Uswetakeiyawa. The night mile
    through the village of tall
    thorn leaf fences
    sudden odours
    which pour through windows of the jeep.
    We see nothing, just
    the grey silver of the Dutch canal
    where bright coloured boats
    lap like masks in the night
    their alphabets lost in the dark.
    No sight but the imagination’s
    story behind each smell
    or now and then a white sarong
    pumping its legs on a bicycle
    like a moth in the headlights
                   and the dogs
    who lean out of night
    strolling the road
    with eyes of sapphire
    and hideous body
                             so mongrelled
    they seem to have woken
    to find themselves tricked
    into outrageous transformations,
    one with the spine of a snake
    one with a creature in its mouth
    (car lights rouse them
    from the purity of darkness).
    This is the dream journey
    we travel most nights
    returning from Colombo.
    The road hugs the canal
    the canal every mile
    puts an arm into the sea.
    In daylight women bathe
    waist deep beside the road
    utterly still as I drive past
    their diya reddha cloth
    tied under their arms.
    Brief sentences of women
    lean men with soapy buttocks
    their arms stretching up
    to pour water over themselves,
    or the ancient man in spectacles
    crossing the canal
    only his head visible
    pulling something we cannot see
    in the water behind him.
    The women surface
    bodies the colour of shadow
    wet bright cloth
    the skin of a mermaid.
    In the silence of the night drive
    you hear ocean you swallow odours
    which change each minute – dried fish
    swamp toddy a variety of curries
    and something we have never been able to recognize.
    There is just this thick air
    and the aura of dogs
    in trickster skin.
    Once in the night we saw
    something slip into the canal.
    There was then the odour we did not recognize.
    The smell of a dog losing its shape.
THE