THE BLUE HORSE
– Arun Kolatkar
The toothless singer
opens her mouth .
Shorts the circuits
in her haywire throat.
A shower of sparks
flies off her half-burnt tongue.
With a face fallen in on itself
and a black skin burnt blacker in the sun,
the drummer goes blue in the face
as he thumps and whacks the tambourine
and joins the chorus in a keyless passion.
His pockmarked half-brother
twiddles, tweaks and twangs
on the one-string thing.
God’s own children
making music.
You turn to the priest
who has been good enough to arrange
that bit of sacred cabaret act at his own house
and ask him,
‘The singers sang of a blue horse.
How is it then, that the picture on your wall
shows a white one?’
‘Looks blue to me,’
says the priest,
shifting a piece of betel nut
from the left to the right of his mouth.
And draws an end of a nutcracker
along the underbelly of the noble animal.
Picking on a shade of blue
that many popular painters like to use . .
to suggest shadow on an object otherwise white.
The tambourine continues to beat its breast.
