Dedicated to Derek FOGG and his then companion.

"This poem is gratefully dedicated to Derek FOGG (and his gracious companion) who, when I first got to know him during the summer semester in 1957, taught English at Heidelberg University. They lived up at the Collegium Academicum and always received me with inestimable consideration, for which and for his most appreciable efforts at propagating my early poems, I have always harboured a feeling of unrepayable debt. Derek was then working on George Bernard SHAW for his doctorate, and his lectures on the incomparable wit in English letters were - as far as I could judge - the most popular course at the university. The few lectures I attended proved to be eye-openers on the Nobel Prize winner. There was never a dull moment, and the spacious hall - with windows opening into the central "plaza" - was always packed and had to accomodate standing-room as well. I have lost touch with him and the university since then. I can only hope they are doing as well as can be expected after all these years. Every good wish and warmest thanks to the both of you. TW in Paris, 2023. BONNE ANNEE !"

You will not see the original layout of the poem..

Poems Omega Minus - Parts One to Five

I

For once he banished all birds
from the air
not just Mynas tick-picking
on twitching backs
but all birds, unnamed
and high bred
with each wave of his contrived hand
extending the pelting rice on the shorn land.

Some came to sort the heedless grain
in their hunger of disdain
Some fluttered from hump to hump
from his total need
to his clambering might.

Each time they came and went
he let them alone
choked in their distensions.

He could not see their pain.

Perhaps their general nature - too
grave to offend
saw in his absence
in his indifference to want
the chance of their malice
their frolicksome end.

II

Too late in the arboured rites
he careered with his adolescent fancies :
the ghee-man
with his pails of souring milk
Working within his churning bones
old rishis’ immolating ambitions :
the curious incantatory neologisms
the crowd-infused lusty prayer
the unsliced un-schismatic advaita piety

What should he take : the game or the adulation
both silently exploding buds
in the crammed clutch of mania.

Somewhere in the lambent miasma
Old age and the deep cloistered pining of chaste women
roused out of season
make mud the surmounting of goals.

Must he not retreat then and melt
Fuse into a negating asana
Conniving at the self-raped
furtive orgasms.

That
he could extinguish his cravings
with too much incontinence
he saw
That
he assailed entrances along marbled corridors
with hardly a mindful push
he knew.


III

Kept out
kept out he was: muzzled and shut out
from mothering social approval
and the usual conning courtesies

Kept shut
Involuting in the hippo-lipped paranoïa
from the darling eyes of his deriding kinsfolk
from packed houses’ applauding mental aneamia.

The touch-me-not
pricking even in the withdrawing shyness
no middle way in the eight-fold path
piston-pummeled by the venom-limbed banyan
the unsuspecting aqua-anemone lashes
bludgeoned from the bandit-fish club

the unhailed conquering hero
without a hometown coming
bullied by the brass band’s
trumpeting forgetful brashness

He bound his house using unseverable streaky tissue
drained of the blood of lost causes
propped his wordy-walls up with nervous sinew
and for want of laughter
hung his loin-cloth up
high on the mast posts
of his fluttering shame

Something
In the nature of his coming to his senses
compelled
the inviting of contemptuous laughter
something of the brazen sea’s encroachment upon land.

Would that he had
in the Three Kingdom’s way been raised
he would
hoist his sorrows in the public’s jaws
and sport his ennui by pleading laws.

IV

It was a time of year too that mattered
not just the finite month
disgorging
it was the time of doing.

Into the empty mouth of his
scaling
he saw, not just wanted
the alien assault, the politicking manoeuvring mirth.

It was a time too for waiting all alone
for the luckless voices belted to cries.

They changed, not just moulting a tan
And dug and divided into splintering worms.

Was it the time of year now
he bowed
out and away
When the Chersonese
smote his pang’s worsted bile :
he lay there not daring to move
nor just faking
(the least he could do)
unfret
his ageing anger to work
his passion to a numb centre
and die there a shamed
and inglorious thing.

V

Once coming down from the mountain
to which he never went
there was no mountain
from the summit he never left

Once coming down the mountain
to which he never came
he stalked down the leeward

and said :

‘I am come from the mountain
which in me shows no pains
I am locked in the mountain
my feet dug in the plains.’

Can you hide a water-melon in a plate of rice
Or a mountain under the earth without a rise

There where the lowly land barely humps
I beseech you seek my nape, my knees, my lumps.




(c) T. Wignesan - 1965 in "tell them i'm gone" collection.[Don't buy BLIND MAN'S LANTERN. Printed by the Vanity-Printer] Paris: 1983.