IndiaStar Review of Books     "Calcutta Flowers," a poem     by Philip Nikolayev [Editor's intro: "Philip Nikolayev is a widely published Russo-American poet with a long-term literary (as well as personal) connection to India. His poems have most recently appeared in The Paris Review, Grand Street, Verse, Exquisite Corpse, CultureFront, The Formalist, The Dark Horse,The Indian P.E.N., and have been broadcast internationally on Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. His first collection of verse,Artery Lumen, was published in 1996 and his second, Dusk Raga,recently by the Writer's Workshop in India."-- c.j.s. wallia]     CALCUTTA FLOWERS (for Shoumyo Dasgupta)   The bard addressing with his weightless quill the human will in its futility observes the florist with bunched and garlanded conflorescences who supplies his goods to dozens of local cults and is quite the worshipful man himself. The sorry samsara-swathed dusty sun reemerges among the clouds and the micromonsoon wrung out of a nowhere pit by Indra's unknowable hand is over. Magic is the name of oblivion and the reed pen and flowers now are merely methods of forgetting even the unforgivable. For the continuous self must forget itself in time where everything reduces to its opposite in the end and the end is merely the other side of a fixed beginning. Here the marigolds in their January loveliness and buckets on the sidewalk seem to know their fate. They silently belong to a caste; they are on the wrong, the chantless end of sacrifice. But here, here in their flimsy present they seem reconciled to their route of migration. The sidewalk enshrines many-handed anonymity. This marigold was a poet long ago.