Specially for me, she had some breaded
fish; even thrust a blunt-headed
smelt into my mouth;
and looked hurt when I could
neither sit nor eat, as a hood
of memory-like a coil on a heath
opened in my eyes: a dark half-naked
length of woman, dead
on the beach in a yard of cloth,
dry, rolled by the ebb, breaded
by the grained indifference of sand. I headed
for the shore, my heart beating in my mouth.
Source of the text - A.K. Ramanujan, Collected Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Bourguignomicon: Why ‘Specially’? This poem—tightly wrapped in stanzaic form & rhyme—employs a queasy yoking of lakefish & dead woman, of memory & cobra.
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