“Ravana,” Vivek Narayanan

 

“Ravana,” Vivek Narayanan

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  Sat, May 30 at 8:15 AM

  View this email in your browser Vivek Narayanan Ravana 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.   From issue no. 229 (Summer 2019)