Responses to Binoy Majumdar
1)
One bright
fish flew once
Only to sink again into the visibly blue, but truly
Transparent water - watching this pleasing sight
The fruit blushed red, ripening in a deep abyss of pain.
The flight of the bright fish is only a leap
the
salmon makes to catch the
fly in water transparent only to whales
& those who ignore their pain in moments like this.
2)
If you never come again, never blow through these steaming
regions
like cooling drifts of the upper air, even that absence is an encounter.
Your absense is as of the blue rose
from the kingdom of flowers. Who knows, some day
you may yet appear. Maybe you have, only you are too close.
Can I smell my own hair?
Marvellous sights have been seen.
A full moon was to have risen last night --
only a quivering sickle appeared!
It was an eclipse.
You never came here, never blew into the steam local volcanoes
push out in May, except for your post-mortem visage which peaks
from under January headdress upon a flower
which appears as your large white mustache.
The sight we all crave to see beyond the smell
of a loved one’s hair is a giant, burning, orange, half-Snow Moon
eclipsed by the jagged edges of skyscrapers which,
after the cello’s jazz tones are reduced to whimpers and memories
somehow seem to remain as solid
as the memory of your last mustache.
3)
What is
needed is a sudden turn
leaving the swift hand that plucks butterflies out of the air
gaping at a loss.
The others exist pale and ghostly as stars
brought to brief life by a total eclipse of the sun.
But I cannot change my course now; can the leopard
unspin its leap in midair?
Moreover, they may still be wrong. She can yet appear.
Cream rises only if one lets boiling milk stand and
cool.
We make a sudden turn on a Friday night & pluck snowflakes
from the valley sky, snowflakes which bombard the asphalt
in the soft fury only a snowstorm can be. Our course defined
by a seemingly random series of leaps unintentional
& surrenders we only see later
have faith or one more lingering lust at their frothy source
stopping only when the matcha cools
and we watch the trail one snowflake makes
that to our untrained eyes looks random.
4)
The blue
stone on my ring shimmers with unquenchable thirst.
I fear the day of my death will be one like this.
Because in some distant age, you had an assassin
for enemy, you live like a rose encircled
by thorns. And I, like a letter gone astray,
have come to the wrong address.
The thirst of stones is worst after the hunt
& the assassin who tracked me in a long ago world
still informs my walk, still melts my wax
only because of the wind
in my bones which I fear to push out
ignoring the example of the rose and its petals.
5)
The pain
remained with me a long time.
Finally the ancient root was cut --
from immersion I emerged blinking into light.
I am restored to health now though the season is gray.
Surgery everywhere; this tea table was once the flesh of a tree.
I’ve learned to dodge the ancient pain, or cope with
a veritable carnival of meat and sweet things mama
might’ve warned me about to no avail. The gray season here
never ends except for moments when blue flame burns
through the veil and a smile cuts through the mask of fat she wears.
6)
I have given
up strewing grain on the ground
to have the birds join me at lunch.
Only when the baby is cut adrift
does it have its free hunger and thirst;
like taking off a blindfold to be confronted with
a curtain, being born
into this vast uterus, lined with a sky porous with stars.
I kiss the bread before throwing it to November
sparrows as my mother taught me
before the crows ward them off,
before
the vultures can be seen from
rooftops mimicking my once prodigious hunger
fired by a universe of memories older than an ancient
wall of surprising stars a wise man once warned about.
7)
flowers have
no room for geometry or even its traces
they are all mixed up into a singular mess
geometry makes the landscape
all those lines we use in poems
I study the geometry of flowers
trace the January sky for memories of meteors
and the angles in the poems are served better not
by the logic of geometry but the motion of the Bemsha Swing.
8)
from time
immemorial have these poems existed
like serene mathematics
lying in an unseen corner
awaiting discovery this autumn evening
in the Bakul grove under faint moonlight
Before there were serene mathematics there was an angle
an African cornered in an Igbo minute
or a sunbeam reflection off an ancient
mountain at dusk made of pink and purple hues
only a glacier could create.
Responses, (on the
right) composed by Paul Nelson at 6:01P, January 13, 2007 in
Poem
Notes from:
http://www.kaurab.com/poetry_peripherals/binoy.html
Binoy Majumdar
(1934-2006) was a brilliant, eccentric, obscure and controversial poet whose
life and work await chapters of penetrating research. Binoy
is an extremely rare poet – it is hard to find a parallel in the western
hemisphere. The intense purity with which geometry,
mathematics, science and logistics fill the bone-marrow of his poetry, marks
his rare genre. Despite being a fine and talented engineer, a brilliant,
innovative mathematician and an even more brilliant poet, Binoy
led a rather distraught and disoriented life of extreme poverty. Failed by
one-sided love (for Gayatri Chakraborty),
he lost his mental composure and attempted suicide several times in his life.
At times, he would turn violently schizophrenic. In the 1990s, the state
government of
Some sample
translations from his famous book Phire Eso Chaka (Come back, O Wheel);
Sample 4 is
translated by Ron D.K. Banerjee. Sample 7 & 8 are
done by Aryanil Mukherjee.
All other translation-samples are done by Jyotirmay
Dutta, a celebrated poet and editor. Dutta was Binoy’s contemporary,
simpatico, his patron and rescuer-in-chief.
