Elements of Composition
By K. Ramanujan
Composed as I am, like others,
of elements on certain well-known lists,
father’s seed and mother’s egg
gathering earth, air, fire, mostly
water, into a mulberry mass,
moulding calcium,
carbon, even gold, magnesium and such,
into a chattering self tangled
in love and work,
scary dreams, capable of eyes that can see,
only by moving constantly,
the constancy of things
like Stonehenge or cherry trees;
add uncle’s eleven fingers
making shadow-plays of rajas
and cats, hissing,
becoming fingers again, the look
of panic on sister’s face
an hour before
her wedding, a dated newspaper map,
of a place one has never seen, maybe
no longer there
after the riots, downtown Nairobi,
that a friend carried in his passport
as others would
a woman’s picture in their wallets;
add the lepers of Madurai,
male, female, married,
with children,
lion faces, crabs for claws,
clotted on their shadows
under the stone-eyed
goddesses of dance, mere pillars,
moving as nothing on earth
can move &mdash
I pass through them
as they pass through me
taking and leaving
affections, seeds, skeletons,
millennia of fossil records
of insects that do not last
a day,
body-prints of mayflies,
a legend half-heard
in a train
of the half-man searching
for an ever-fleeing
other half
through Muharram tigers,
hyacinths in crocodile waters,
and the sweet
twisted lives of epileptic saints,
and even as I add
I lose, decompose,
into my elements
into other names and forms,
past, and passing, tenses
without time,
caterpillar on a leaf, eating,
being eaten.
