PHILIP NIKOLAYEV - Featured Poet

CALCUTTA FLOWERS The bard addressing with his weightless quill the human will in its futility observes the florist with bunched and garlanded conflorescences who supplies his goods to dozens of local cults and is quite the worshipful man himself. The sorry samsara-swathed dusty sun reemerges among the clouds and the micromonsoon wrung out of a nowhere pit by Indra's unknowable hand is over. Magic is the name of oblivion and the reed pen and flowers now are merely methods of forgetting even the unforgivable. For the continuous self must forget itself in time where everything reduces to its opposite in the end and the end is merely the other side of a fixed beginning. Here the marigolds in their January loveliness and buckets on the sidewalk seem to know their fate. They silently belong to a caste; they are on the wrong, the chantless end of sacrifice. But here, here in their flimsy present they seem reconciled to their route of migration. The sidewalk enshrines many-handed anonymity. This marigold was a poet long ago.

(Published in Dusk Raga, Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 1998)

Bio:
Philip Nikolayev is a Russo-American poet living in Boston. He is editor of FULCRUM, a serial anthology of poetry and criticism. His poetry collections include Monkey Time (2003) and Letters from Aldenderry (2006). A collection of his Indian poems, Dusk Raga, was published by the Writers Workshop in Kolkata in 1998. New volumes are forthcoming from MadHat and Poetrywala.