Poems by ​Mustansir Dalvi

Janus takes a selfie
(for Sampurna Chattarji)
 
Behind you
chalk turns to cloud.
Lime effloresces on wet walls, marking time
for daubing pigment,
fastening hue.
 
Behind you 
the doppelgänger stares, behind you.
Holding on to the power cord
of possibility and restraint,
Janus squats by your head. In your head.
 
Behind you
the gossamer wire
appears thick as ropes that harness 
clippers to shore, or stymie
the archaeopteryx from the ionosphere.
 
Behind you 
in Plato's zoetrope
fires cast unbidden shadows
spinning reality like Muybridge sequences
as you smile in my direction.
 
Behind you 
the taxidermist's pride, in orange and blue
is nailed ungently on the head of the boy
who awaits any resolution
for his constipation.
 
Behind you
is perched a kingfisher, not an albatross.
Take off. Do the triple-lindy.
Dive into the shallow pool.
Choose your prey.
 
 
 
 
Vertigo
 
Laburnums explode, like a pie 
in your face. Summerly single, 
virtual peacocks shriek, duel 
vocally with missing koels. 

Squirrels headfirst down Amaltas, 
make ready before the heat 
softens the Alai Darwaza 
to plasticine mulch. 

My eyes glaze, creating 
mirages in afterimage. 
I loose all on the causeway 
to the Qutub. A pashmina sky: 

hue shifts to peacock. 
Five-striped squirrels, 
large as vans shuck up 
and down the victory shaft. 

Yellow blooms mature noisily, 
wilt like used crepe down my throat. 
I taste every sour petal, slump 
headfirst into the custard, 

slide, but never hit. 

About the poet

Mustansir Dalvi is an Anglophone poet, architect and translator. His first book of poems, Brouhahas of Cocks (2013), was published by Poetrywala. His poems have appeared in several anthologies, including These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (eds. Eunice de Souza and Melanie Silgardo), Mind Mutations (ed. Sirrus Poe), The Bigbridge Online Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry (ed. Menka Shivdasani), and in the Sahitya Akademi’s To Catch A Poem, an Anthology of Poetry for Young People (eds. Jane Bhandari and Anju Makhija). Dalvi's translation of Iqbal’s influential Shikwa and Jawaab-e-Shikwa from the Urdu as Taking Issue and Allah’s Answer (Penguin Classics, 2012) has been described as ‘insolent and heretical’, while making Iqbal accessible to the contemporary reader. His latest book is 'struggles with imagined gods', translations of poems from the Marathi by Hemant Divate (Poetrywala, 2014).