S B EASWARAN: Five Poems

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S.B. Easwaran, a former journalist who has worked in Gujarat and New Delhi, now lives in Sakyong, a small village in the eastern Himalayas. His poems have appeared in Prosopisia (an Indo-Australian journal), Interlitq, Drunk Monkeys, and Prometheus Dreaming.

Sudeep Sen

Secrets
for David Lynch (1946-2025)

A speckled monarch reverses into a velvet corridor,
poisoned wings pivoting like gates to a netherworld.

Baited eyes crest a terraced motel roof: the wandering
enemy is spooled in, his breath a tautened violin string.

This ash-strewn town, tethered to a nameless gridwork
is where he professes trades pried from layered bedrock:

now he is a patient embalmer of cloud-tufted embryos,
now an assassin, his cooling metal crackling in its case.

You, sly witness resurrecting ranch houses out of fire,
your Mobius loop menaces every facade, every erasure.

Swansong
another for David Lynch

Eyes locked behind a white mask,
the bit player plumbs a dark stage.

Her chant swells into twilight, ash
flecks a child trampling a sandcastle.

For an instant a framed dagger holds
lightning and a magician’s arched glare.

What miles, my sweet, to a father’s finger,
hooked in the rip of a yellowed leotard?

The trill of a trumpet fades away,
a torn page blots out an eagle’s peal.

By a logging station a doomed shingle,
water gnawing the contours a corpse left,

the drag marks trailing to a pine grove,
where someone stifles a cry, shaking.

Last Hour

Dawn cuts its edge on the city,
unheard by vagrant ghosts.

The skyline smoulders, newsprint
teased by my last cigarette,
or the morning’s incense.

Where I grew up, the ground curved
to meet the sun — night and day,
embroidered flags my mother made.

A turbaned head, red against the everywhere
whiteness of saltpans. Then the swivelled flash
of a mirror would summon us to school,

quivering on the dark curves of our huts,
nudging us, laughing, sulking. We are rabble,
we’d brag, not ocean-murmuring conch.

Here, black silence burns faster than white,
drinking heat with the hunger
of paired mongrels, clanking trains.

As light advances, in imprudent skirmishes,
across the tops of the shipping containers,
this expanse of inland port slopes forward,

inviting me to pass, with priestly steps,
over a shadowed meridian.

Gnomon

My shadow cannot vault the moist valley,
shade the silver streaking the distant hill:
this island sun defines too high and tight
a circle, alienated from every horizon.

A sandbar stalled the conqueror’s boat.
Ancient engram, his upraised broadsword
magnetised the wedged cohorts, drove them
through leaning shrubland, palisaded village.

Slave artisans planed the summit of gibbous
boulders. Gay matrons, their paps gold-dusted,
froze into a dance of abandon. A blooded priest
malleted me into place, an implacable lateen.

The imperial atlas marks me, a minor curiosity
on a minor outpost. Bleached winds shudder
past my humming edge, sliced centuries falling
on my obsidian platter, engraved in minutes.

Manual of Intrigue

bring bitterness sealed in a mirror,
wiles beaded into buffed amber.

Memorise the bestiary, recite
threadbare the burlap of regret.

Strop the turning edge of bias
and set upon it the whisper of a lie

to tip the gimbal, spring the orrery,
impel and steady the poisoner’s hand.

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