I know the Christmas season has dawned upon us, but the senescence of my naïveté is killing me. The cool, still walks back to the apartment on fog-filled mornings have me fumbling for answers and pondering the brevity of the present and the leering inevitability of a hazy, pre-drawn future… In other words, why am I not feeling Christmas? The words of another have me figuring it out…somehow. Stargazing with my friends on the way home has given me temporary refuge.
Sky-man in a manhole
with astronomy for dream,
astrology for nightmare;
fat man full of proverbs,
the language of lean years,
living in square after
almanac square
prefiguring the day
of windfall and landslide
through a calculus
of good hours,
clutching at the tear
in his birthday shirt
as at a hole
in his mildewed horoscope,
squinting at the parallax
of black planets,
his Tiger, his Hare
moving in Sanskrit zodiacs,
forever troubled
by the fractions, the kidneys
in his Tamil flesh,
his body the Great Bear
dipping for the honey,
the woman-smell
in the small curly hair
down there.
by A.K. Ramanujan
1929-1993, written in 1986
