Srikanth Reddy

Srikanth Reddy was born in 1973 in Chicago. He holds a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the University of Iowa, and is currently a doctoral candidate in English literature (writing a dissertation on digression in 20th-Century American poetry) at Harvard. His first collection of poetry is Facts for Visitors (University of California, 2004), and poems from this collection have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Ploughshares, and Verse. A former fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Reddy now lives in Chicago, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Corruption

I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation extends over the entire psalm. Once I have begun, the words I have said remove themselves from expectation & are now held in memory while those yet to be said remain waiting in expectation. The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying. As I speak, the present moves across the length of the psalm, which I mark for you with my finger in the psalm book. The psalm is written in India ink, the oldest ink known to mankind. Every ink is made up of a color & a vehicle. With India ink, the color is carbon & the vehicle, water. Life on our planet is also composed of carbon & water. In the history of ink, which is rapidly coming to an end, the ancient world turns from the use of India ink to adopt sepia. Sepia is made from the octopus, the squid & the cuttlefish. One curious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, its body begins to glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity a few days after death, then ebbs as the body decays. You can read by this light.

Scarecrow Eclogue

Then I took the poem in my hand & walked out

past the well & three levelled acres

to where the sugarcane built itself slowly to the songs of immature goats

& there at the field’s shimmering center

I inserted the page

into the delicately-woven grass of the scarecrow’s upraised hand

where it began to shine & give a little in the gentle

unremitting breeze sent over from the east.

I stepped back several paces

to look at what I’d done.

Only a little way off & the morning light bleached out my ink

on the page so it simplified

into a white rectangle against a skyblue field

flapping once, twice

as if grazed by one close shot after another.

The oxen snorted nearby

& there was a sense of publication

but not much else was different, so I backed off all the way

to the sugarcane’s edge until the poem was only a gleam

among the fieldworkers’ sickles surfacing

like the silver backs of dolphins

up above the green crop-rows into view, then down from view.

How it shone in my withdrawal,

worksongs rising

over it all. So then I said the poem aloud, my version

of what the god dressed up as a charioteer said

to the reluctant bowman

at the center of the battlefield.

How he spoke of duty, the substance

of this world,

& the trembling armies ranged.

Second Circle

Now, darling. It’s time you strapped me back on that wheel.

Strap me on, my salt girl, O sweet Lady Slip—

I’m down on my knees. At last I’ve learned how to kneel.

It’s turning without me. One misses the halo, the steel

gear-teeth at the spine, the way the world flips

now, darling—it’s Time. Strap me back on that wheel.

Two scarecrows faced each other across a dark field.

How do they do it? I asked the front seats, inflatable globe

on my knees. At last I’ve learned how. To kneel

without touching the earth, mouthing O as one reels

past the urinal doors to the dancers with whips…

Grave darlings of the times, you strapped me to that wheel

& I ripped myself free. Mother, you wept for a while

under the golden-red plectra of Fall & then stopped.

I’m on my knees. At last they’re knees. I need them to kneel

but can’t rise without you. O tie these hands, they feel

so cold they must be my hands, old things that grip

in the Now, darling. Strap me back on that wheel.

I’m on my knees at last. I’ve learned how to kneel.

Evening with Stars

It was light. Whoever it was

who left it under the gumtree last night

forgot to close the gate. This morning when I stepped

out on the breezeway I had to shoo off a she-pig

& three rag-pickers before I could tell

what it was they were carting away

through the leaves. I had the houseboy bear it

into the sunroom. After attending to my & my employer’s

business, I returned sometime after midnight

to examine it. A pair of monkeys

were hoisting it over the threshold

toward a courtyard of fireflies. When I shook my fist

they dropped it & I settled down at last.

It was gilt. It was evening with stars.

Where a latch should have been, a latch

was painted on. Over the lid, a procession.

Chariot. Splintered tree. Chariot. Chariot.

In the lamplight the hollows

of the footsoldiers’ eyes were guttering.

I’d say they looked happy.

Tired & happy. Their soil-flecked boots

sank down to the buckle in weeds

& lacquered nettles, six men to a burden.

It was light. I could see

in the middle distance a bone priest

picking his way through crop rows

toward the wreckage of an iron temple.

Scarlet clouds moving out. Jasper clouds moving in.

Here, on a cistern, a woman

keeps nursing her infant.

She is unwell.

The workmanship is astonishing.

You can pick out every lesion on her breast.

Mostly, I am alone.

Burial Practice

Then the pulse.

Then a pause.

Then twilight in a box.

Dusk underfoot.

Then generations.

*

Then the same war by a different name.

Wine splashing in a bucket.

The erection, the era.

Then exit Reason.

Then sadness without reason.

Then the removal of the ceiling by hand.

*

Then pages & pages of numbers.

Then the page with the faint green stain.

Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded,

is thrown onto a wagon.

Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else.

Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else.

Then the page scribbled in dactyls.

Then the page which begins Exit Angel.

Then the page wrapped around a dead fish.

Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean.

Then a nap.

Then the peg.

Then the page with the curious helmet.

*

Then the page on which millet is ground.

Then the death of Ursula.

Then the stone page they raised over her head.

Then the page made of grass which goes on.

*

Exit Beauty

*

Then the page someone folded to mark her place.

Then the page on which nothing happens.

The page after this page.

Then the transcript.

Knocking within.

Interpretation, then harvest.

*

Exit Want.

Then a love story.

Then a trip to the ruins.

Then & only then the violet agenda.

Then hope without reason.

Then the construction of an underground passage between us.