Seshadri relishes this kind of complexity, whether it means extending a conceit or changing the scale of a poem like a detective zooming in on surveillance footage. Consider âBirding,â which begins with the simple image of âA gray bird with a crest and a black maskâ that expands to âa large wader, gimlet-eyed, under / the sunâs gimlet eye.â And then this happens
When you can shift from a blackbird to the solar wind to the blackness of space, which is looking at you even as you are yourself engaged in looking, there is very little you canât bring into the conversation.
Seshadriâs prickly inventiveness serves him especially well when he writes about gender. âMan and Woman Talkingâ is exactly that, a dialogue premised on the assertion by âManâ that âwe built the world,â which proceeds through both the obvious problems with this claim and questions about what, in any case, has been built. The poem ends by quoting Henry Vaughanâs âThe Worldâ in an acid rain of irony. There is a similarly uncomfortable yet fitting sense of doubling and reversal in âMarriageâ (a companion, it seems to me, of an earlier poem called âFamily Happinessâ), which pictures the male speaker as having âtwo people inside me,â one adult and capable, the other consumed by infant ego. The speaker doesnât want these identities resolved; rather, âI want them to be inseparable, inevitable. / I donât want the children to suffer.â
To write as an ironist, especially today, is to risk that the reader loses patience with hedging, backtracking, spirals of cleverness. But sometimes the layers of the onion ensure the purity of the tears. âThat Was Now, This Is Thenâ is anchored by âCollins Ferry Landing,â an elegy for the poetâs father. Its middle section, in prose, begins by addressing Seshadriâs father in the self-amused voice that is typical for this writer: âI have a friend. (Youâll be glad to know.) She and I work together. (Youâll be glad to know I still have a job.) Sheâs an ally. Sheâs sympathetic.â But it turns out that this sympathetic ally has done something terrible. The poet had been speaking about his loss (âI was telling her about youâ) and then shied away from it into a galaxy of other subjects (âI was describing cultures of shame evolving across millennia; economies of scarcity versus economies of surplus. ⌠Deep India, strewn with elephants and cobrasâ). And then the woman does this: âShe put her right hand on my left arm and said, âHeâll always be with you. In your heart.ââ
This âidiotic outburstâ causes the poet to shuffle almost manically through the selves that his fatherâs death has torn through like a stone through paper (âI was seeing myself as the star of my loss, its protagonist, treading the boardsâ), leaving him with a terrible knowledge that is âunendurable.â The sentences seethe across the page. âThis is why I kept talking and talking, whenever I could, climbing hand over hand up the rope of words.â He arrives at last at the simple, excruciating, pedestrian realization that all he wants is âto be sitting on the living-room couch, watching âJeopardy!â with you.â The poet is there, his father is there, we are there. Each one of us is there, before the flickering screen, and so none of us are there, and so all of us are there. How high that highest candle lights the dark.