RAVI SHANKAR


LANDSCAPE IN CHELSEA / SIMPATICO / THE WELL /
THE ESCAPE LADDER, GOUACHE AND OIL ON PAPER, 1940

Landscape in Chelsea

Garble gray the lean beaked bird aquiver upon the post
With needle eyes discerns bulldozers regurgitating silt,
Cataracts of people edging past an orange-vested man
Fronting a quarry noisily being turned into a Multiplex.

One by one hoary sites are razed to raise new steel girders,
Leaving traffic with less lanes and more honking rancor
Sporadically nonstop. Scraped billboard flakes overflow
The gutters, the latest face stretches glossily along buses,

Men wearing hypo-allergenic masks emerge from grates
That lead beneath the sidewalks to where waste resides,
While on a block hung with plastic sheets, steam machines
Whine ear-splitting fumes to clean dust from damp walls.

The city, never to be finished, juxtaposed with a pigeon,
Eternally recurrent, hints at an address that I, being a bit
Of neither and a bit of both, yet something else besides,
Can neither decipher nor disregard as the light changes

And sundry vehicles pause in phalanx at the crosswalk,
Perpendicularly retrograde to the surge of pedestrians
With whom, under pigeon-gray skies, I am swept along
In dissonant, improvisational song. All of history is here

Now, and the city, our protean home, is a confabulation
In the minds of those who have yet to be born. Gods
Are swept up by the street cleaners on alternate days,
While through clots of diesel soot, gray birds still skate.

[reverse]

Simpatico
For K.E.

Unavowable, us, after midnight’s plash has darkened
The storefronts and filled the cabs,
Leaving behind a keening the flavor of turmeric,
Yellowing the air, acquitting the moment
From historicity. What exists but now, wet and pulmonary,
Rinsed of context like two glasses used to mix a drink,
What’s not soluble in liquid exchange?
Personally, I’d trade my kingdom for your clavicle,
The chance to draw a bow across the viola of your hips.

[reverse]

The Well


Granite-willed, a wall encloses the well
where a rusty bucket teeters on a hook,
its bottom blooming with algae patches.

Years since anyone lowered the bucket
or there was drinkable water, yet as stone
testament to another time, marker

of those who once tread the field among
cattle and square bales of hay, no shrine
would better suffice than this old tool

burrowed through topsoil, loam and sand
to tap an underground stream: whatever
we were, how we are, such water knows.

[reverse]

The Escape Ladder, Gouache and Oil on Paper, 1940

“Monstrous animals and angelic animals.”
- Joan MiróSquiggle-bird beware!


longlegs dangle asterisks
apt to act as traps,
when shape meets shape
they color change,
snooty-nose got a brand
new con, stalk-eyes
about to leave the scene,
it’s getting hairy honey,
I’d ladder up and out—


[reverse]