The Disappearances

The Disappearances
By Vijay Seshadri

"Where was it one first heard of the truth?"

On a day like any other day,
like "yesterday or centuries before,"
in a town with the one remembered street,
shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore--
the street long and true as a theorem,
the day like yesterday or the day before,
the street you walked down centuries before--
the story the same as the others flooding in
from the cardinal points is
turning to take a good look at you.
Every creature, intelligent or not, has disappeared--
the humans, phosphorescent,
the duplicating pets, the guppies and spaniels,
the Woolworth's turtle that cost forty-nine cents
(with the soiled price tag half-peeled on its shell)--
but, from the look of things, it only just happened.
The wheels of the upside-down tricycle are spinning.
The swings are empty but swinging.
And the shadow is still there, and there
is the object that made it,
riding the proximate atmosphere,
oblong and illustrious above
the dispeopled bedroom community,
venting the memories of those it took,
their corrosive human element.
This is what you have to walk through to escape,
transparent but alive as coal dust.
This is what you have to hack through,
bamboo-tough and thickly clustered.
The myths are somewhere else, but here are the meanings,
and you have to breathe them in
until they burn your throat
and peck at your brain with their intoxicated teeth.
This is you as seen by them, from the corner of an eye
(was that the way you were always seen?).
This is you when the President died
(the day is brilliant and cold).
This is you poking a ground wasps' nest.
This is you at the doorway, unobserved,
while your aunts and uncles keen over the body.
This is your first river, your first planetarium, your first popsicle.
The cold and brilliant day in six-color prints--
but the people on the screen are black and white.
Your friend's mother is saying,
Hush, children! Don't you understand history is being made?
You do, and you still do. Made and made again.
This is you as seen by them, and them as seen by you,
and you as seen by you, in five dimensions,
in seven, in three again, then two,
then reduced to a dimensionless point
in a universe where the only constant is the speed of light.
This is you at the speed of light.

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This poet will be reading tonight along with: Meena Alexander, Marilyn Chin, Luis Francia, Eric Gamalinda, Kimiko Hahn, Barbara Tran and Shanxing Wang. Opening remarks by Arthur Sze. I'm gunna miss Smallville for this.

Copresented with The Poetry Society of America and The New School Graduate
Writing Program.

@ Wollman Hall, 65 West 11th Street, Fifth Floor
Enter at 66 West 12th St (btwn 5th & 6th Aves)
New York City

Vijay Seshadri was born in India and came to the United States in 1959, at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and has lived in many parts of the country, including the Northwest, where he spent five years working in the fishing industry, and the Upper West Side, where he was a sometime graduate student in Columbia?s Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern Languages and Literature. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Antaeus, Boulevard, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, Verse, and Western Humanities Review. A collection of his poetry, Wild Kingdom, was published in the spring of 1996 by Graywolf Press. He currently makes his home in Brooklyn, with his wife and son.