Extract from Cities by Jeet Thayil and John Kinsella
6.
Which could sidetrack us to London
either regretfully or with bravado,
a grim hotel not far from the offices
of Faber & Faber, and a tucked-away
cinema showing art films that don’t quite
time with the lunchtime crowd,
though might if they’ve a mind to.
That’s where we end up if drawn
to the interior of the M25 as if its
been there since the Roman plexus.
But that was always my problem,
wasn’t it, thinking of London
planetrees and not planes
over London? How do we begin
a conversation about crime
and religion, about peace shout-outs
and bargain basements, pretending
the embassy is anything but colonial
from its jarrah floorboards to the stone
of its headstones? The river
can’t be clean though I enjoy
crossing its flood defences. What we inhale
is exhaled in Cambridge, and there’s a theory
the poet Andrew Duncan has about
a ‘bloodsoaked Royston Perimeter’.
Should I begin at someone else’s beginning?
Those building blocks of
‘Commonwealth’
falling down around articulate ears?
JK
7. London Plane
On the blurry edge of Bloomsbury
you'll find Parton Street, which joins
Theobald's Road to Red Lion Square.
It's the square I'm thinking of, John,
the tall and easy plane trees there,
the way the speckled trunks glow
with some solid curvilinear mystery.
The London plane is an immigrant,
of mixed race, whose parents
came from opposite sides of the world,
from Asia and America, say. Or from Spain,
brought over as an urban worker, exiled
by war and a policy of attrition,
execution, murder, assassination.
Or the plane was born at John Tradescant
the Younger's nursery gardens,
the Vauxhall ark to which a decent
number of the city's trees trace their
origins.
However they got there, London's first planes
were planted between 1660 and 1680,
that is to say, three hundred and fifty
years ago, a blip in geological time,
a trifle in the time kept by trees.
Despite the plane's rooted demeanour,
it is an upstart, a Johnny-come-lately,
a rank outsider, a foreign tease.
If you ask me, it should be declared
a transnational treasure of Red Lion Square.
JT
8.
Fair call, Jeet! Which in a round-
about way makes me think of botanical
gardens, and Cambridge Botanical Gardens
in particular. I obsess over these
gardens, but I always have problems
with acts of collecting, accruing and
relocating
for the purposes of display, whatever
the science behind it. An imperial map
that will sweet talk floriography
into a Victorian craze, an arrangement
of implication and suggestion,
a chronology of acquisition.
But taking the ‘British native tree trail’
is not contraindicative, and doesn’t
balance out the contradictions,
though I admit to a feeling of connection
(whether I should have it or not)
to the Fen display, amidst which resides
the elusive and exquisite Cambridge
milk parsley, and maybe that sense
of a garden being knowledge
that cuts both ways in a city
of ‘knowledge’ comes out of the
diminution and vanishing of fens
in a region of fens; habitat destruction
an internal as much as an external
world unbuilding. But there’s little comfort
in irony, only a distancing from loss.
Apropos of this, the Gardens’
Newton’s Apple Tree (version #)
was uprooted by Storm Eunice,
though it had (sadly) already died
due to honey fungus, and to ensure
the continuity of the (eureka!) strain,
a graft from the history of grafts
was ready to grow in lieu, ready to show.
JK
9.
As are we, ready to grow in lieu,
wherever the grafts we brew.
I remember the transplants I knew,
the rooted uprooted, the damned-if-we-do,
the sailor exiled to shore.
I return the name of the storm
to the Eunice remembered in this song:
Eunice de Souza, poet, lover, curmudgeon,
who rendered history to snapshot, theology to
form,
in one or two stanzas, a dozen lines, no more,
and invented a voice so sharp, sardonic and
wry
three generations of poets took up her cry.
But it was love she extracted from fury.
Bombay's almond leaf, impossible to bury,
listing, landlocked, sailor.
JT