ZOOLOGY

Jeet Thayil

JEET THAYIL & HOLLIS COATS: RECORDED IN BANGALORE

ZOOLOGY

God’s apes, we gavotte.
See Kitty under the bench,
ear turned to the trees, listening for me,
the tools of her dismemberment
in my heart if she’s lucky,
in my hands when she’s not.

The birds’ new word is, lonely.
The 264 regent honeyeaters left
have forgotten their own songs
and sound like some idiot new species,
says Dr Crates
of the Difficult Bird Research Group.

It’s really okay, you’re thinking, languages die,
happens all the time, what can you do?
Time is an igloo, and the sun,
the sun is high.
But the honeyeater’s song is a klaxon.
He sings of us. We are his doom.

The strays whose howls mimic the street,
the orca who muscles into channels too small
frantic for the seal’s organs and eyes,
the albatross hissing, meat, meat, meat,
the crows who caw and call,
and the white bear pacing his inch of ice,

they’ve got the news,
that we kill for joy
and die burning down the house.

Jeet Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and North America with his father, TJS George, a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for 21 years in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong, and New York City. In 2005, he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy, Narcopolis, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and became an unlikely bestseller. His book of poems These Errors Are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award (India’s National Academy of Letters), and his musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS, Esquire, The London Magazine, The Guardian and The Paris Review, among other venues. Jeet Thayil is the editor of The Penguin Book of Indian Poets.