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  • The Paris Review

    Vivek Narayanan

    Jun 15, 2019 1 minute

    RAVANA

    after Valmiki’s Ramayana (Aranya Kanda, Sarga 46)

    Dressed simply but not
    without elegance, holding ritual
    staff and parasol

    Radiating gloom, likelike night’s curved shadow that swims across the Earthlike the darkness of our Sun in its deepest explosionslike the planet Budhan about to take hold of Rohinilike Saturn advancing on Chitralike the forests and cities and far ridges of infinityeach planetary body with its moons each moon that governsa forgone set of miserable inhabitantslike the afterglow of a gamma-ray burstlike the coma of gas that covers the nucleus of a cometlike comets, dirty snowballs, signing the skies with their angerlike the coronal holes stirring in solar windlike clouds obscuring double stars of dwarf galaxieslike the Doppler reading suddenly shifted into the bluelike the black sphere of the eventlike the flare in a field of viewlike the imaginary mind on the galactic planealready hollowlike halos and brown disks with spiral armslike Jupiter’s bloodshot eyelike a supernova in its galactic hostlike the warm-blooded animal’s infrared glowlike the ionized airlike the untold spheres of the Kuiper Beltlike the light curve of an astral orb diminishing in relation to timelike molecular clouds stanching all light behind themlike the protoplanet revealed in the eclipselike our own moon in its uncountable rilleslike the Jovian bodywith its back to the Sun.

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