First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear. - Adrienne Rich
The needle is expertly
Jabbed into the vein ;
The innermost stranger
Wakes up again .
My mask has fallen ,
It grins at me ;
I go out forever
On a faceless spree .
In a milder light
And a colder sun ,
Absent minded ,
I reach for the gun .
A whole country
Is vanishing now ;
What's left of love
Is my own forehead .
The skull's architecture
And the fading formation
Of reticular frescoes
I bequeath to you .
I bequeath to you
My fossil and my dossier .
And I join the saints'
Immortal choir .
Tukaram in heaven ,
Chitre in hell ,
Sing the same song
Centuries apart .
Their bone derives
From the same stone
That stands erect at Pandharpur
In the shape of a God.
Both gentle and rude
And always
Unmoved . The river flows by
Like so many people ,
While this stance
By itself is
A spire
And a steeple .
History is dust
In this kind of summer .
The heat is
The lasting truth .
Man spreads
His own rumor
In the form of God
To seize a creation .
Not his own .
This kind of summer
Is the brain's
Own blaze .
It is Vitthala
Who creates
Sun and rain ;
Tukaram's joy
And Chitre's pain
Are two faces
Of the same coin
Counterfeit and divine .
The sovereign currency
Of generations
Standing
In the same plain .
Let us speak of God
Since man cannot be spoken of :
Let us infer from the image in stone
The mind , the hand , the chisel , the stroke .
For the Lord is infinite
Sleep from which we wake
And , in the grinning granite ,
We carve Him out of the night.
Into this muscles
We invest our souls ;
For his heart is of stone ,
His heartbeat our own .
Our voices are hoarse with God :
He is our scream , our cry , our moan ,
Tukaram in heaven , Chitre in hell ,
Turned to the same truth , centuries apart .
They dance in the same place
And celebrate
Sameness
As the only art .
Our voice is a village
You have never visited ,
Where God lives
In silent huts .
You have not seen
His million faces ;
For God resides
In uncivilized places .
He is the hunger ,
And he is the food ;
He is the grain ,
The only good .
God is crushed ,
God is ground ,
So thoroughly milled
That He's never found .
He is all we have
From harvests to famines ;
It is Him we praise ,
And Him we curse .
He is our neighbour ,
He is our enemy ;
He is our ruler ,
And He is our destiny .
He is our slave ,
He is our landlord ;
But for our sword
He'd hardly be brave .
God is our village
Idiot and sage ;
He is our convict
And our judge .
Him we worship ,
Whom we whip ;
On bent knees ,
It's him we beat .
He is our sinner ,
He is our saint ;
We begin in Him ,
In Him we end .
Come back pock-marked poets ,
Join Tukaram and Chitre ,
For the song of heaven
Is one helluva chant .
Ask and you shall be refused ;
But do not leave
Your voice unused .
It's all you' ve got .
Remember , our best
Poems were always
As bald as facts ,
As bare as hills .
Because our spirit
Has aspects of stone ,
And because our stones
Are lasting mirrors . - Dilip Chitre
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