Three Persons

By Vijay Seshadri
Read the Translator's Notes
That slow person you left behind when, finally,
you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command,
where is he while you
walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours,
organizing with an electric clipboard
your big push to tomorrow?
Oh, I’ve come across him, yes I have, more than once,
coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian.
Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished
not just in themselves but by the stories
we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises:
the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet
or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother
flailing in the millpond beyond the weir,
dragged down by her woolen skirt.
He doesn’t see you as a story, though.
He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines,
he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops
and the thunderheads gather,
he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with
the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library.
He asks me to look out for you.


Translator's Notes:

Q & A: Vijay Seshadri

Who is the “you” addressed in the poem?

The “you” is and is not distinct from the speaker. I began with a specific moral situation, that of someone who has abandoned or repressed complex, ambivalent, wayward, and vulnerable aspects of himself because they compromise his will somehow, and such a person is the one addressed initially. That situation didn’t hold my interest, though (it’s an old story, and not particularly edifying, and it seemed a little too easy), and so it changes as the poem develops, especially as it begins to delve into narratology. The poem slowly entangles its speaker. By the end the only way I can understand it is as occurring in the theater of the mind.  

 

Can you tell us more about the barking-dog tale?

When I was a child, tv shows had dogs as heroes—Rin Tin Tin, Lassie. Dogs, not industrialists moonlighting in gizmo suits, were our superheroes. And they were always saving drowning people. 

 

Where do you imagine the poem, with its freeway meridian, overpass, and public library, taking place?

New Jersey. One of those towns on the turnpike just below New York City—Rahway, maybe. I had a distinct image of the turnpike, and a sense that New York was close, just over the horizon.

Source: Poetry (December 2010)