Sunday, October 04, 2020

When will they just let me sit under my guava tree, eating my guavas

"Did you listen to the interview on NPR with an Indian-American poet?" she asked.

I used to listen to NPR. A lot. In the morning. In the evening. On Weekdays. On weekend.

It has been a long time since I tuned in.

I still pay my dues every month.  Automatic recurring donation. 

But, I rarely ever turn on the radio to listen to NPR.

All because of one man.

tRump.

I simply cannot bear to listen the orange, arrogant, bloviating pomposity that looks like a human but isn't.

I know I have missed out on a lot by shutting NPR off.  But, I prefer my sanity. My peace of mind.

"He was born in Bangalore, and immigrated as a child."

It rang a bell somewhere.  I tucked away the comment.

Today, I looked up the NPR schedule and tracked down the segment.  I recognized the name: Vijay Seshadri.

The name is familiar because I have blogged about him.  As I wrote there, even winning the Pulitzer is not as big an achievement as "an Indian-American stating to his parents about his wish to be a poet, when the "norm" is to enter the more traditionally high-income occupations."

Seshadri says in that NPR interview:

What we call poetry, I think, riddles and penetrates everybody's life, whether they realize it or not. And it's as simple as creating a narrative of the things you're doing in a day to something as complex as reconciling yourself to things like grief and things like devastation. I would appropriate all of that for the realm of poetry.

Yes, we could all use a little poetry. 

The poem that Sehadri read at the end seemed odd.  So, I looked it up.  It turns out that he read only a part of the poem.  Either that, or they edited the first part because of time issues.

Here's that poem in full from my favorite magazine.

Visiting San Francisco
By Vijay Seshadri

I wanted to curl up
in the comfortable cosmic melancholy of my past,
in the sadness of my past being passed.
I wanted to tour the museum of my antiquities
and look at the sarcophagi there.
I wanted to wallow like a water buffalo in the cool,
sagacious mud of my past,
so I wrote you and said I’d be in town and could we meet.
But you think my past is your present.
You wouldn’t relent, you wouldn’t agree
to dinner or a cup of coffee or even a bag of peanuts
on a bench in North Beach.
You didn’t want to curl up or tour or wallow with me.
You’re still mad, long after the days
have turned into decades, about the ways I let you down.
The four hundred thousand ways.
Maybe I would be, too.
But people have done worse to me.
I don’t think I’m being grotesque when I tell you
I’ve been flayed and slayed and force-fed anguish.
I’ve been a human cataract
plunging through a noose and going to pieces on the rocks.
I’ve been a seagull tethered to Alcatraz.
What can I say, what more can I say, how much more
vulnerable can I be, to persuade you
now that I’ve persuaded myself?
Why can’t you just let it go?
Well, at least I’m in San Francisco.
San Francisco, where the homeless are most at home—
crouching over their tucker bags under your pollarded trees—
because your beauty is as free to them
as to the domiciled in their
dead-bolt domiciles, your beauty is as free to
the innocent as to the guilty.
The fog has burned off.
In a cheap and windy room on Russian Hill
a man on the run unwraps the bandages
swaddling his new face, his reconstructed face,
and looks in the mirror and sees
the face of Humphrey Bogart. Only here
could such a thing happen.
It was really always you, San Francisco,
time won’t ever darken my love for you,
San Francisco.

Take a couple of minutes and listen.

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