Thread decays, clothes fall to pieces. Books moulder away.

Plaster cracks, timber rots,

the matting hangs in shreds. Fungus inscribes itself

on vellum bindings as the tattoo of rain on the roof

drowns out the mind’s arias.

The clouded mirror’s been my only proper companion

since Ovid and Seneca fell apart.

I’ve been reading palmleaf manuscripts with sour pandits

and picking up opium and Tamil from sallow lascars

in this pidgin district, waiting for the mailboat

to bring me the necessities:

sherry, walnuts, Trichinopoly cigars.

I have hidden in the houses of the bibis who breed

our scabby byblows, who run around the gullies

with their tow hair and improbable grey eyes:

their fortunes will be the fortunes of Homer’s sailors.

Before they indenture themselves

to war or shipwreck or sirens or mutiny,

we’ll tame the little devils, give them Greek

or Irish names, teach them a respectable tongue.

Then we’ll lop them off the family tree

and send them out on battered frigates

to fight and die for King and Country.

III.

Try mangrove instead of watercress.

Try chameleons instead of retrievers.

The earth webs your feet here, and look out

for rivers that bite.

Stone in the veins.

This country smelted from copper

and scented with mustard

has secret names that only

its lovers can nose out.

IV.

The river stabs the sea.

Water, salt and fresh, bursts up

through the splintered ribs of the scuttled boat

that’s trailed a wake of belly-up fish.

Thalassa. The compass bird points to the coast:

to a rivermouth disgorging crumbled islands,

to the tidewash that numbs the wounds

by which conquerors named it.

Trapped by the trader’s sovereign eye,

by the surveyors of revenue lands,

the purveyors of clove and camphor,

the coast signals its own tongue:

breaking with the horizon’s grammar,

a stutterance.

Lascar

Bombay–Liverpool–London, 1889

The lascar was always sallow. It didn’t help

that his name anagrammed rascal. He carried

a whiff of scurvy, a hint of rats in the hold,

hulls battered by typhoons.

He was never far from dirty work.

Here’s what the detective said:

There’s a trapdoor at the back of that opium den,

near the wharf, which could tell strange tales

of what passes through it on moonless nights.

Here’s what the good wife said:

At the foot of the stairs I met this lascar,

who thrust me back and, aided by a Dane,

pushed me out into the street.

Meanwhile her husband:

Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper

of a low den in which I used to lodge.

A lascar, well paid by me for his rooms,

my secret was safe with him.

Neither detective nor wife nor husband knew

the bleached village on the Konkan coast,

or had seen the forced parades at tropical noon,

the forts locked in rising silt, the standing crops burned.

History gave you one name. Fear