Srikanth Reddy

Then the pulse.
Then a pause.
Then twilight in a box.
Dusk underfoot.
Then generations.
*
Then the same war by a different name.
Wine splashing in a bucket.
The erection, the era.
Then exit Reason.
Then sadness without reason.
Then the removal of the ceiling by hand.
*
Then pages & pages of numbers.
Then the page with the faint green stain.
Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded, is thrown onto a wagon.
Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else.
Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else.
Then the page scribbled in dactyls.
Then the page which begins Exit Angel.
Then the page wrapped around a dead fish.
Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean.
Then a nap.
Then the peg.
Then the page with the curious helmet.

Then the page on which millet is ground.
Then the death of Ursula.
Then the stone page they raised over her head.
Then the page made of grass which goes on.
*
Exit Beauty.
*
Then the page someone folded to mark her place.
Then the page on which nothing happens.
The page after this page.
Then the transcript.
Knocking within.
Interpretation, then harvest.
*
Exit Want.
Then a love story.
Then a trip to the ruins.
Then & only then the violet agenda.
Then hope without reason.
Then the construction of an underground passage between us.

I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation
extends over the entire psalm. Once I have begun, the words I have said
remove themselves from expectation & are now held in memory while
those yet to be said remain waiting in expectation. The present is a word
for only those words which I am now saying. As I speak, the present
moves across the length of the psalm, which I mark for you with my finger
in the psalm book. The psalm is written in India ink, the oldest ink known
to mankind. Every ink is made up of a color & a vehicle. With India ink,
the color is carbon & the vehicle, water. Life on our planet is also
composed of carbon & water. In the history of ink, which is rapidly
coming to an end, the ancient world turns from the use of India ink to
adopt sepia. Sepia is made from the octopus, the squid & the cuttlefish.
One curious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, its body begins to
glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity a few days
after death, then ebbs away as the body decays. You can read by this light.

In one of Grimm’s stories, a little tailor defeats a giant in a throwing contest
by lofting a bird in the air. Happily ever after arrives, but the bird never
lands. She flies straight out of the tale. Tonight, a vessel catapults through
the heavens with a gold-plated phonograph fixed to its side. In less than
forty thousand years this craft will drift through the nearest system, bearing
greetings in fifty-seven languages, including the encoded song of the
humpback whale. By then our tongue will have crossed into extinction or
changed utterly no doubt. Lately, I have taken an interest in adverbs like
“here.” Here was a chapel, for instance. Here is a footprint filling with
rain. Here might be enough. Could not the same be said of elsewhere?
Yes, I suppose. But I know precious little of elsewhere.

She was watching the solar eclipse
through a piece of broken bottle
when he left home.
He found a blue kite in the forest
on the day she lay down
with a sailor. When his name changed,
she stitched a cloud to a quilt
made of rags. They did not meet,
so they could never be parted.
So she finished her prayer,
& he folded his map of the sea.