Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

VIJAY SESHADRI

VIJAY SESHADRI Vijay Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom (1996) and The Long Meadow (2004), both from Graywolf Press. His poems, essays, and reviews have been published in AGNI, the American Scholar, Antaeus, the Nation, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Shenandoah, the Southwest Review, the Threepenny Review, Verse, the Western Humanities Review, the Yale Review, the New York Times Book Review, and TriQuarterly, and in anthologies such as Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, The Anchor Essay Annual, Best American Poetry (1997, 2003, and 2006), and Best Creative Nonfiction (2008). Seshadri’s awards include the Paris Review’s Bernard F . Conners Long Poem Prize, the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, and the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Prize, as well as grants from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Born in Bangalore, India, in 1954, Seshadri came to America at the age of five. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. I like being many different things and am grateful to history for opening the doors to so many different worlds and peoples to me. The Disappearances “Where was it one first heard of the truth?” On a day like any other day, like “yesterday or centuries before,” in a town with the one remembered street, shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore— the street long and true as a theorem, the day like yesterday or the day before, the street you walked down centuries before— the story the same as the others flooding in from the cardinal points is 30 turning to take a good look at you. Every creature, intelligent or not, has disappeared— the humans, phosphorescent, the duplicating pets, the guppies and spaniels, the Woolworth’s turtle that cost forty-nine cents (with the soiled price tag half-peeled on its shell)— but from the look of things, it only just happened. The wheels of the upside-down tricycle are spinning. The swings are empty but swinging. And the shadow is still there, and there is the object that made it, riding the proximate atmosphere, oblong and illustrious above the dispeopled bedroom community, venting the memories of those it took, their corrosive human element. This is what you have to walk through to escape, transparent but alive as coal dust. This is what you have to hack through, bamboo-tough and thickly clustered. The myths are somewhere else, but here are the meanings, and you have to breathe them in until they burn your throat and peck at your brain with their intoxicated teeth. This is you as seen by them, from the corner of an eye (was that the way you were always seen?). This is you when the President died (the day is brilliant and cold). This is you poking a ground-wasps’ nest. This is you at the doorway, unobserved, while your aunts and uncles keen over the body. This is your first river, your first planetarium, your first popsicle. The cold and brilliant day in six-color prints— but the people on the screen are black and white. Your friend’s mother is saying, Hush, children! Don’t you understand history is being made? VIJAY SESHADRI 31 You do, and you still do. Made and made again. This is you as seen by them, and them as seen by you, and you as seen by you, in five dimensions, in seven, in three again, then two, then reduced to a dimensionless point in a universe where the only constant is the speed of light. This is you at the speed of light. Elegy I’ve been asked to instruct you about the town you’ve gone to, where I’ve never been. The cathedral is worth looking at, but the streets are narrow, uneven, and a little grim. The river is sluggish in the summer and muddy in the spring. The cottage industries are obsolete. The population numbers one. The population numbers one fugitive who slips into the shadows and haunts the belfries. His half-eaten meals are cold on the empty café tables. His page of unsolved equations is blowing down the cobblestones. His death was so unjust that he can’t forgive himself. He waits for his life to catch up to him. He is you and you and you. You will look to him for your expiation, face him in the revolving door...