Sample Poems by Ravi Shankar
The Condition of Certain Evenings
Have you noticed it? In a tower
On a depilated hillside, bells clap.
Arrival's color has faded from the sky
And snow spreads its blanket on gray mountains.
Elsewhere, lights go on and off in cities,
Avenues are clad in shadow's apparel.
Breaths go in and out of many lungs.
One by one, we wait.
Spangling the Sea
Ruffle and tuck, river fabric wags doggedly towards ocean,
Heaping surface on surface, its cadence a gown.
Perpetually beneath lurks stillness, a calm inseam sewn
By handless needles, distinct from yet part of the sequined
Design that glints iridescent now, then dark as pine.
Between silt and waver live many denizens of the deep:
Zigzagging shiners, freshwater drums, tessellated darters,
Grass carp, a kaleidoscopic plenitude that yaws and rolls
Among root wads and bubble curtains drawn on riparian
Terraces, hinged vertebrae whipping back and forth
In an elastic continuum displacing the fluid milieu,
Enabling them, polarized or not, to scull along in schools.
Nothing in outer space so bizarre as episodes underwater:
The gilled emerge from bouts of massive oviparity
Staged upon plankton columns where some fry turn larval
While the majority never leave the sure rot of egg sleep.
Whether due to snowmelt in mountainous headwater tracts
Or to rainfall from cumulonimbus fancy, for whatever reason
Water appears from serpentine soil and prairie-scrub mosaic,
A small muddy trickle that gains momentum as it swells
And deepens, sweeping along twigs, carcasses, bald tires,
To empty at length into estuaries engulfed by tides
Perpetually born of a body dressed in hastening garb,
Upholstering two-thirds more surface than any ground.
Blotched in Transmission
Bark of the birch, aria of the oriole, grit of the sand-grain,
In the first stanza I shall attempt to confiscate your essence
And each time, you will slip through the noose of language,
Having no owner. Your brief appearance, though, is enough
For the covetous page, conferring the illusion of presence.
Even the breaths heaving in my chest do not belong to me,
These wires of muscles tapping the handês opposable thumb
Upon the spacebar, and the precise machinery of two pupils
Taking it in are not mine, though convenient to think so.
In the second stanza, I shall feel like an outsider in my body.
Emptied of the need to own, I become the pit of a plum.
We color our language, Wallace Stevens wrote to Elsie Moll,
And Truth, being white, becomes blotched in transmission.
In the third, final stanza, I will understand what he meant
For a moment, before the old words come flooding back.
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