Sahitya Akademi

Poem Conceived in Several Hospitals

Author(s): Dilip Chitre
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 53, No. 6 (254) (November/December 2009), pp. 23-24
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23348084
Accessed: 20-03-2020 03:05 UTC

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Who crafted the first words out of wild corn
And the bones of animals?
Who told the first lies
Upon which our profession is based?
On waking, he soothes himself by asking difficult questions.
But once he goes to sleep,
His own ambivalence disturbs him,
Producing nightmares
Out of the savage silence of four different languages.

The Painter

The slow-drying colours on the canvas

Watch the painter
With the glazed eyes of wounds.
The painter becomes aware of their steady gaze.
He wishes he were blind and had no hands.
A deathly decoration is born
That belongs to no studio.
Behind the decoration lies a space
Of deceptive surfaces and depth;
Colours that cannot be entered,
Mirrored faces of the pain
And the acute pleasure of seeing.
The distance between the painter and the canvas
Is a terror neither can share,
Even blindness has holes one can see through.

Poem Conceived in Several Hospitals

Others worry about blindness as much as I worry

About losing the taste and the smell of the world
Once my animal connections with the vast substances
Lying out there are cut I shrink into a dark area
Where I hear nothing but the helpless ticking of my body
And the dim grey roar of the saltless ocean of my self

To be able to see and to hear is to know the pain of space

To be able to touch and grasp is to feel the spasm of time
Dilip Chitre / 23

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Only in tasting and smelling one dissolves the world
Passion such as I have is a secretion
And its interior metaphor is of appetite and digestion
My bloodstream is the flow of that pervasive juice
And visceral presence in which the fragrance of galaxies
Mingles with the flavours of life

In hospitals the antiseptic smells of death

And the disgusting flavours of disease accost the body
As in the artificial sacredness of temples
The absence of God is at its sharpest
A patient lies surrounded by quiet white walls

I Built a Warehouse

I built a warehouse
In the middle of nothingness
And let the desert
Enter it
Stones, thorn bush, cactii
Stuffed in the throat of my song

It had two doors and no windows

It had one loft and a staircase
It had a catwalk made of creaky planks
Just like a human mind
When the wind entered and shook it
It produced a ghostly whine
Like a ruined church-organ

One of the doors showed

The last sign of civilization
And the other opened out
On the mountain

I built a warehouse
In the middle of nothingness
Like the pangs
Of the cactus

24 / Indian Literature: 254

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