A whole lot of the poems in this book
are influenced by what's called Sangam poetry.
And the next poems I read are modeled on that tradition.
So between 300 BCE and 300 CE, there
was a blossoming of literature in Southern India that
came to be called Sangam, which is a word that means
convergence or coming together.
One of the two styles of that poetry is called Akam.
It's a poetry in which personal emotions, the nuances of love
are likened to landscape in such a way
that human feeling is inseparable from the place
where that feeling takes place.
It was considered not only unethical
to write about your feeling apart not connected to place
but impossible to do so.
The scholar- poet A.K. Ramanujan translated and introduced
a lot of that poetry which might be considered
now a kind of proto ecopoetry, a phenomenological poetry
in which human subjectivity merges with the world,
with the landscape.
Because California where I live shares the same basic five
landscapes of Southern India, I've
written poems influenced by the Sangam tradition
but relocated to California.
This is called "Wasteland."
When I first moved to California, the town just North
of the town I was living in--
I was living in Petaluma.
And the town just north of me is Santa Rosa.
And twice, two years in a row the fires came through
and burned out a lot of Santa Rosa, killed people,
killed animals.
This is "Wasteland for Santa Rosa."
Wasteland is one of the five landscapes
that come up in Indian poetry.
I have heard that there's another poem called
"Waste Land" by somebody.
But mine says "for Santa Rosa" after it.
"Green spring grass on the hills had cured by June.
And by July, gone woolly and brown.
It crackled underfoot, desiccated.
Well within the clamor of live oaks,
an infestation of tiny larva clung to the under
leaves feeding between veins.
Their frass, that fine dandruff of excrement and boring dust
tinkled as it dropped onto dead leaves below the limbs.
You could hear it 20 feet away tinkling.
Across the valley on Sugarloaf Ridge
the full moon showed up like a girl doing cartwheels.
No one goes on living the life that isn't there.
Below a vast column of smoke, heat flame,
and wind I rose swaying and tottering on my erratic vortex
extemporising my own extreme weather,
sucking up acres of scorched topsoil
and spinning it outward in a burning sleet of filth
and embers that catapulted me forward with my mouth
open in every direction at once so I came for you turning
the present into purgatory because I
need to turn everything to tragedy before I can see it
because it must be leavened with remorse for the feeling
to rise."