Look how they wire the house-bull’s horns

to blow up when the mobs cry foul.

But the house-bull, rampant, commands the sky’s corrupt

and long-out-of-focus lens to adjust itself,

and snapping like a hangman at an inquisitor’s frown,

the lens hones its blur to the commanded intensity of vision,

reducing every stray detail and whiff of desire

to a scar on the glass, a land fault, an opium dream.

Sprung back and thrown, the hills sag like jelly.

Everything I dream is about Babel and Zion.

Everything I sing is cement picked out in neon.

Everything I read is a track on the fictioner’s disc.

Everything I hear is fury gift-wrapped in zinc.

V.

The kick-starter has whooping cough, won’t purr.

A dead crow’s beak

points from the trash heap like the tip of a schooner

sunk in a shallow bay, a bruise

at first only grazed, then scooped by nautical furies

from the coast’s offered skin.

The schooner’s drowned mariners have been studded

in the inverse sea that swims

in the fitful logbooks of wandering planets:

they’re sun and moon

locked in wary, trucial equinox.

But on rain-veiled days

this shallow bay, though bandaged in cloud,

allows the blood to run

freely, singing pomegranate tunes in hamlets

cracking under hot-tipped spears.

Impaled, its guardian icon flails its arms,

squinting against fate’s stony winds

through emerald eyes. These are snatches of a district

I’ve recorded. And don’t miss the dancers

in the ten-act opera that I’ll consecrate

to the solstice

and to whatever gods have managed to survive

the depletion of the ozone layer.

VI.

Chitale among his cycles sits,

a Peshwa in a yellow shirt.

Turbaned turkeys strut in a pavane

around the Library; above them, an old bat flits,

too old to pounce.

He tells himself the assorted rodents

nibbling at index and annotation

are simply not worth the lunge.

Yawning, he crowns Chitale’s shed with himself.

Rounding the rusty cape of handlebars and mudguards

as the squall streaks out in lightning,

the ship that makes it to the gate shored up

with sandbags and breakwater tyres

is a girl in a black skirt.

VII.

At Khadki, a field of litmus lotuses

begins to blue in the alkali rain;

the Army trucks passing up and down

that bumpy, haemorrhaged section of road

are the imperially mute Chitale’s

thoughts in camouflage.

Foghorns tear sometimes through the scarecrow trees,

shoving the bell-metal afternoon aside;

lorries pull up alongside coughing tractors

and ogres stick their caged heads out to ask

for directions, spraying a mist of pigeons

over startled cyclists.

A typist keys a message downstream, a whistle

answers him. Not far from the express tracks, on a siding,

soldiers have pitched their tents on the spine

of a goods train. It’s a knobby plain they’ve come to,

these gunners who trundle across the country, going

wherever the gauge and fishplate take them.