ELEMENTS AND US

You are the earth

And I the sky.

 

You send me your birds

Every once in a while;

I give them the clouds

The Sun and the wind.

 

I send you my rains

Every once in a while;

You give them the thirst

The song and a Sea.

DESCRIBING

I'm trying to describe how I feel

When you take leave of me

At the end of the day

And I see a brown bird breaking

Out of lone clouds

With full throated calls

Wings majestically still

And my hands like ants' tentacles

Searching to comprehend the largeness

Of a strange thing that fills the void

Move up the air in front.

And I'm trying to describe how I feel

When you take leave of me

At the end of the day.

NAME

I hear you call it again.

I have lent it to some before,

Kept it from some,

And though rarely,

Even changed it for some.

I had put it letter by letter in boxes,

And made totems out of it.

But after the excursions

It always came back like

A sullen and silent child.

A history more proper than its bearers’,

An essence deeper than a lifetime of wear:

A name always keeps to itself half its secret.

Time in spate froths off its silt on a name –

A fine silt that glistens in the sun,

Throbs in the rain, and hardens in winter.

You weeded it

And sowed a dandelion;

See, it has sprung again – 

Each silvery down in its fluff

Alert, glowing, as you call it.

I hear you.

WRITE

The witching hour past, the night grows sane.

The wisps of yellow sun pulseless remain

Enclosed in bluish pods half-poignant:

The dreamless slumber of tired children.

Now, toss the amber bead of poetry,

Quip, exorcise the womb of memory.

THE NIGHT BUS

A street winked

Darkness

The fading smear of a wall.

A darting bridge.

A lonely dog.

Hurrying asphalt.

A company of smokers.

It is hard to come to terms with:

the world only absently watches

as I, windowed, nightwards vanish.

Out of the Sea

The wave of your silence crawls over

And bites

On the candescent sands

And ebbs –

                   With a half-moon off my heart.

MONOLOGUE OF A SUICIDE

I’m still

Hanging about (…to turn a phrase)

The scabbed walls evilly itch

ceiling’s sallow white.

I stir in my forever:

it’s time, again.

And this rugged iron-hook:

She’d meant to hang a cradle here.

When the sick-sweet blood

foamed up to my tongue

and icy snakes eased down my spine,

I’d vaguely felt the cradle

tugging at the hook,

creaking,

moving softly,

…

softly.

All that was

before I started ripping

the curtains in desperation

and mirrors cracked on reflecting

my light-passing grief-swollen void 

and windows shattered in my silent screams

and she (at least once a day) entered my vapour-body

and exited with the hair at her nape on end and cold sweat

and they came and packed her things and spiders and lizards

and roaches and the slither in the warmth of my untouched heap

of clothes coldly watched their van disappear whining and snorting.

I thought it was great

I could gather my guts and finally get it done

on a late afternoon, my favorite time of the day:

slowing Sun and glowing silence, an animal of an hour.

Till the two policemen who (after much trying, irritably)

answered their calls and came, disapproved of my choice.

Tough timing, they told the buzzed up crowd. The offices

where the body must be reported are all closed.

He cannot be cut loose till afternoon tomorrow.

The black sun beneath the back-yard bushes stirred in his bed of worms

and I felt it in my deadness and I stirred it shook the hung weight of flesh

and my toes, like dead mice, all turned to meet the balls of my feet,

ached to touch the floor tiles where like clockwork a shadow

traced the swing and turn: left right and left again.

So, I surveyed once again

Things I early put in place:

a brace of keys, a broken watch,

a photograph from mid-school days,

a diary with last pages torn

for suicide note, cigarette stubs,

folded bills in pocket purse.

All’s as I kept, as such.

I was kept as I kept myself: hung,

for a night and half-a-day,

an unsteady straight line

whose invisible ends

pierced the sky up and passed into the earth 

down and bent at an infinite horizon to 

thrust a colossal wreath on the neurotic globe.

From the mossy silence

of a flaked corner

I gazed at them

getting me down

the next day.

Later

it felt so lonely

I kept making circles

and straight lines in the room:

nobody came.

nobody came

for a long long time.

Among

the foliage of ancient trees

I sensed iron fingers

crunching leafy colonies

of red ants haywire,

bursting, spilling 

sour acid

on somnolent green;

sensed sand filling my mouth

when in need of words.

And

I learnt since to wait the true waiting:

to look at the balloon of time incessantly inflating,

every last breath spent filling it out a little, and a little,

every first drawn breath heaving, stopping it a while, a while.

It’s time. As was always.

To stand and die.

To mark the six vertical feet of air with a death,

rather than flattened earth.

To feel it coming from the molten brain

rather than freezing feet.

To take it heads high and not to lie.

A word clicks shut.

I stir in my forever.

LAST RITES

Body of the day in cold-storage:

I strewed loosely ivory-grains

Of your Si

len

ce

And

Left the stamen

Of my latest thought

Stuck on the gasping block of ice.

PEBBLES

They kept falling –

Pebbles - in the lake –

Making circles smooth-expanding

Around gulping dips,

Lapping each other’s make. 

As they cease

The sounds retreat.

In silence, the lake is an expanse

Of flickering sense

From a ceremony just recessed.

The pebbles rest

Sunk fathoms deep

Shaking loose musty bottom-dust.

They'll soon cool and

Gather a full and sated chest:

Those stones that scraped the sunbaked banks.

A BIZARRE BED-TIME RHYME

There were chess-pieces three:  

Two of them were queens,  

The third one but a pawn.

The queens had all the moves,

Panache and good elan;

They fought till ghastly sea

Turned blood in every wee.

Odalisks of their clans

Cheered them on and on.

The king mighty observes

From his chequered throne:

What mire! What pity!

The war worsened: every

Sword in clam'ring tones,

The moors imbued sanguine.

And lo, suddenly queens

Both fall mutually slain.

The noises cease quickly

As someone shuts the board.

The war was done, mated.

The game long since ended.

Surprised, a life began:

The king had become pawn;

The pawn, a headstrong queen.

BUBBLES

I took my new poem to her,

A good poem it was.

She read it

And we discussed how

It falls in place with the new cryptic genre:

We saw that the images held together well.

One of us, must be me, even gave count of the syllables

To see how much of a haiku the poem was.

Later I remembered that she never asked who the poet was:

Something within me burst like a soap-bubble in sun.

A NEW YEAR WISH FOR THE PAST LOVER

Our memories

All of a sudden

Seemed so beautiful yesterday

When I saw you pass

Under those morning trees

Rustling their morning leaves.

Nothing.

The sharp jasmine perfume on your skin,

Your intent coffee brown eyeballs:

Now that we are done with each other,

All that has whirled and blurred

And sank and become white and non-sensual.

And those memories

Seemed so beautiful

 As you passed yesterday

With a peculiar nonchalance

Under those morning leaves,

Drops from your wet untied hair

Sticking satin wrinkles to your back.

Nothing,

I just wanted to say

You did betray

Though you did a great job of hiding it

Your sidelong glances

To where I should have been standing

With a New Year wish. 

RASHMI DANCES BEAUTIFULLY, AND WORKS FOR AN MNC

 She flicks my eyes

With a mudra

To the left of the stage:

“Look!

The moon has come down

To graze along the hilltop.

Krishna, the Lord, is playing his mesmeric flute

 Somewhere In the honey-enwombed sylvan arcades of Brindaban

And –“

Arre! Look to the right!!

“ - Engrossed gopis

Walk out of their homes in half-sleep”

At night

As we shared our dinner

She, but, seemed not so comfortable

Fidgeting in the chair

Giving strained smiles

Eyes not where they were best;

All the way saying something else too

Than what she was saying.

To know that her body could be so sure of

Each tiny muscle-twitch and every single lift or drop of eyebrows!

But I have seen this before:

Her office in her mind,

After performance nights,

She behaves like a wild tree in flower

Somehow fit into a cubicle.

“Well, Rashmi, enough!

The week’s work is done.

And you do remember, right…?”

“Are, haan, it’s New Year yaar…”

–  Her sudden laughter peeled like stubborn sunrays into the December night.

LOVING ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON THAT SPREAD THROUGH A WASHED-CLEAN GLASS-WINDOW

Bright gold of the ripe day oozes over

The succumbing petals of the bedside flowers;
Your gold fish breathes, wide-eyeing us from its clear bowl.

All noon we lay naked on the bed

Not once looking at the bodies

That had by now returned to their own skins.

The afternoon held time in a limbo

And we slept and woke,
Breathing the slow heat,

Breaking in golden sweat,

Until the ring in your sleepy hand
tugged at my hair and broke the spell.

SHE LIKES US TO WALK TOGETHER THE BUSY CITY-ROADS

Anonymity is a function of these roads:

It is festival week

And the noisy city night

Rubbed our pasts off our names.

Among the clamor of the bazaar

I see your face receiving

The evening's chimerical patterns,
As moving lights kiss and flee the moving us;

I turn my eyes up

To study the patterns

Of April stars

As you stop at a bangle shop

To bargain in vain. 

The stars seemed like

Broken lights from an exhibit-design

That tried to replicate the bazaar ground.

They held the moon in a hazy wet bowl of light
and whispered through a hustle of the wind

How anonymity is their idea of a night.

AT TIMES

I dream I tumble from skyways

Hang onto a dandelion,

And land safe in a lilting boat

Where talking, sadly, makes no sense.

Confused I dip a fingertip
In the Sunward flowing stream.

And wake up to see

My hands have lost their sense of touch.

THE TRIP BACK

Goddess, the wounds of your words haven’t quite healed.

Like a batch of seasoned butchers , they had flayed my days quite skillfully; 

I have come to hate the cuticles that newly sprouted on them

Under your studiedly tender nursing.

I would prefer the seething unskinned day

to this meek new one you’ve graced me with.

In the mopped tidy room, on the table, white papers and an ink-drunk pen;  a scrupled
shelf, a sparse chair and a wooden cot; a memory-snuffed
ashtray; four whitewash-smelling undecorated walls.

Like it was before you.

JUST TO RECORD THAT I REMEMBERED US

I set on this whiteness

Two blue-green marbles (that turn mud-red when wet);

Two scarlet wild-berries (so alert, pert – throbbing to touch); 

A golden brown tuft (or a bird's silky perch);

Skins, one dark atop of another fair (with love teeming in between).

Just to record I remembered us

I set on this whiteness

A whiter expanse (of two souls in free flight). 

LANDSTORK

The unwinking eyebutton of the landstork;

The beak’s polished ochre

Combs the yellowed grass for prey:

The moment does not have meanings –

The moment is the meaning.

A shock of its neck to the ground –   

An eyeful of white whooping wing –

A spasm of the wind –  

Is the only memory of violence.

The rest, like before, is a zen koan.

The bird slowly wading the sky cloud by floating cloud.

THE CAT

The cat is simply everywhere on a given day.

On the culvert sleeping, his ears keeping watch;

In the shade purring angrily at himself clutching the earth;

Out in the sun as a proud machine-perfect movement of limbs;

At the wayside trashcan licking wet the dry fish bones:

Always involved most in himself.

Or he scratches the truck at rest

Thumps dying moths with soft white paws

One moment here and the next, up, on the tree,

Busy at some self-occupied spree,

Till the Sun goes down.

Then in dark, he spits out daylight

Through two sulfur balls in his head

And looks at the moon’s skeletal white face

To study the scratch patches closely.  

DISTANCE

The distance between you and me is unreal: sometimes it shrinks to a speck and dissolves, but then as soon expands and throws us seas apart. Worse, once written, this fact becomes either poetry or raving, and not the felt experience.

When I say I do not feel I'm alone anymore, I keep the sense of my life at some specific distance away from your life – the distance needed for you to support me. But isn’t that distance between you and me unreal too? You could be thrown far apart the next moment – so far apart from where I mightn’t even exist for you.

The only real within us is a redraftable version of life. A version that burns down the bogus life lived up to now, along with its trials and errors. But that, when written, becomes either poetry or raving. 

MIRROR, IMAGES

I watch her from the bed

As she stands herself

Before the tall wooden-frame mirror

Studying her naked torso.

Thin shoulders bowed with hopelessness

Bracketing two sags that refuse to look

At anything else than her own feet.

She moves both her hands over the belly

And gathers the folds of skin that hang loose

From her navel to the stubbly pubis.

Desire and humiliation swept over me:

Pity and lust, otherwise;

Decay and new birth troubled me:

Ruins and salvations, otherwise.

AFTER THE RAINY NIGHT

It rained torrents last night

And as usual the power failed:

Sitting in the dark, I listened

To the mayhem outside.

The wind turned and returned to the windows

As if emitted from the howling nostrils of

An angry elemental god.

In the morning, when I opened the window

The trees were still, scared, and bent

Amid a sprawling calm that spread around them.

TRAIN NUMBER 7229 SABARI EXPRESS FROM HYDERABAD TO TRIVENDRUM CENTRAL CROSSES THE KERALA BORDER

Train number 7229 scuffs and paces the sun-scattering silvery rails of bare and remote villages. Mud-walled houses, like modest indifferent raccoons, rise, stare and turn away as soon.

Railway-gates where vehicles wait and watch.

Windswept platforms throwing up desolate benches.

Huge haphazardly lying boulders basking naked in the plateau sun.  

I sit back as the light fails outside: into eyes that aren’t looking at anything come a hand that swings a lantern, a pattern of lights left behind in a town, a cold bulb lighting an empty street circle, a shadowy mansion with just one of its top-storey rooms still lit – someone reading?

Train number 7229 races into the wet morning with its one and twenty sooty coaches, thumping through more bare and bushy villages. Sunlight slowly filling the panes, tall green trees swinging their smiles, a river shying away amongst glistening sand – the train leaps and catches up the seven minutes it was late for Kanjikkod.