Ravana

Fotografia Olho de Gato

after Valmiki’s Ramayana (Aranya Kanda, Sarga 46)

                                Dressed simply but not

               without elegance, holding ritual

                     staff and parasol

Radiating gloom, like an asteroid with designs on a star
like night’s curved shadow that swims across the Earth
like the darkness of our Sun in its deepest explosions
like the planet Budhan about to take hold of Rohini
like Saturn advancing on Chitra
like the forests and cities and far ridges of infinity
      each planetary body with its moons each moon that governs
               a forgone set of miserable inhabitants
like the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst
like the coma of gas that covers the nucleus of a comet
like comets, dirty snowballs, signing the skies with their anger
like the coronal holes stirring in solar wind
like clouds obscuring double stars of dwarf galaxies
like the Doppler reading suddenly shifted into the blue
            like the black sphere of the event
like the flare in a field of view
like the imaginary mind on the galactic plane
         already hollow
like halos and brown disks with spiral arms
   like Jupiter’s bloodshot eye
      like a supernova in its galactic host
like the warm-blooded animal’s infrared glow
               like the ionized air
like the untold spheres of the Kuiper Belt
like the light curve of an astral orb diminishing in relation to time
like molecular clouds stanching all light behind them
like the protoplanet revealed in the eclipse
like our own moon in its uncountable rilles
         like the Jovian body
                     with its back to the Sun.

Vivek Narayanan