(For Avani, who writes soft poems)
The inside
of a soft poem
is the
face of a woman
holding, in
a practiced grip,
the handrail
by the open
door of a
local train
soothed by
the wind on her face
eyes closed,
as if asleep.
The inside
of a soft poem
is the
grip of anxiety
on a
co-passenger’s heart
worrying she
might fall.
When the
train halts
she
alights unaware of a
stranger
so relieved
as can only be
the inside of a soft poem.
Read Avani's "evening train"
A familiar pain is a smaller pain
just as a known enemy is
a vanquishable one.
Memory protects the body.
You endured this once.
You will endure it again.
It is in the unknowns.
The shadowy contours
of some fresh threat
that suffering truly begins.
Perhaps this too
is a minor injury.
You will only know next time.
A jigsaw puzzle where the pieces aren’t made to fit
A bowl of dal microwaved, the bowl hot, the dal isn’t
A book where the love interest dies mid way and it’s too late to put down
The last lighter in the house and its fuel has run out
The point in the party when all the mixers have finished
Watching a film that keeps stopping because the internet is not willing
A national holiday falling on a Sunday
A week where every day is a Monday
Putting an alarm for 8 hours later but you wake up after 6
Something that seems like magic turning out to be a trick.
Coiled power.
Disguised,
invisible.
Only the adept can touch
the true essence.
Content to
hibernate,
it rests without
waiting.
Only nucleus
secrets in atoms,
understand what can
happen –
or not.
The powers of
Water and Fire,
Ida and Pingla,
Yin and Yang
to meet and merge.
The brew of
creation
is about precision.
The right hue
plucked from a
rainbow,
The secret kiss of
the dew drop
merging in the
liquid fire of love,
to tame the bejewelled
light that rises
to release a
terrible delight.
A miscalculation
can ruin
a miracle,
Hold back the
knitting of
gold and silver.
But when science
becomes art,
yoga becomes love,
We are ready for
tea and kundalini.
walk ahead. the vastness will swallow me
windows unfurl sun into empty harems.
making a wish, consuming some apparition of a glorious past.
maintain me. keep me from decay. touch me where a thousand have before
reading statistics - there is 6400 times more fecal matter than the recommended limit in the yamuna under the taj mahal. i suppose some fecal matter is always recommended in river water
walk ahead. i’ve got calluses that nothing can repair
we’ll find passages of survival, ways to ride out the impasse
when the morning sun squints down on the sandstone tower
we need a benevolent emperor to kiss us alright
written on a trip to agra
Night isn't a boulder to drag or
be dragged by. Night is night, cold,
withdrawn. It feeds me bones of primeval
loneliness. I recoil in bed, the fetal
my fragile defence. Mazed limbs scrounge
for warmth in a dark cave. Through tarred
tunnels, mysterious as touch always is,
skin heals skin.
Warm drops of fever rain on me.
Your hand measures my heartbeat.
when we wake
we stretch, releasing
towards the kitchen.
we undo sleep's creases
and press ourselves
into the day brewing
I think of how soon
we will reach
and not find these walls
in which we have taken shape
I wonder how it will feel
to unfold elsewhere:
new borders, knocking corners,
edges unknown,
lines we are still learning
we will cut future
patterns, bracing –
fashioning cranes
to build afresh
She's looking to the right and down
beyond the frame
and smiling
I can't make her turn
or see where her hands are
Maybe she's just said what she always used to say
In the land of the blind
the one-eyed man is king
when I was young and she was old
Now I am old and she's stopped time
in gold sari, hair not grey
Maybe the one-eyed man is kind
The end of March and onset of April,
I met you a year back but
Maybe I had known you since ages.
Told to stay away,
I suppose they knew the best.
Now I am in this place I have been before,
Like proton and neutron,
Close but never enough.
Might be the neutron who has to see you,
Attract and mingle with the electron.
Too much science,
Too much heart.
That day close by,
You by my side,
I would have leaned.
But I did not lean.
No fusion possible here.
I shall be like the Sun.
Sharing the same sky,
Yet seeing you with other stars.
Maybe this is more sincere
More kind
And more than love that could ever be.
Thus, I will not lean.
As her station nears
a woman rests her temple against
the slim edge of the train door.
Outside, the blur of nighttime.
Inside, closed eyes and a
practised hand
around a metal rail.
Some day she will slip
into the other side of this place
between rest and falling.
For now only this
brief pause
on the long journey homeward.
it looked exactly as it did before,
March sun falling on its steps
bougainvillea by the gate. Inside, I gravitate to your room. A rocking chair
sits where you would have been
and the room doesn’t smell the same
anymore.
The sky did not crack upon realising
These sights did not gnaw at me.
No columns of gloom hung over the house.
Your room a living museum
though many of your things have been removed.
Sun slanted quietly on the rocking chair.
I felt only the fond, sad pull
towards you, wherever you are.
Heat is personal.
Marriage has taught us this.
We both adjust
the temperature on our
individual mattress side.
You open your book, a Flaubert novel,
I, mine, a short story collection.
Our pages tease each other;
an exchange we can’t read.
Silences are even more private than heat.
This, we’ve known from years of staying
together in marriage.
Our bodies surrender to the night,
its quilt simmering spent up,
oblivious flesh. In embrace,
I feel your limbs move, feet twitch.
An excited choke escapes your throat.
Where are you though right next to me.
Are you meandering through a
Central Asian souk or could you be
chasing penguins in the arctic. Did
you wander off with your favourite poet
from Pakistan, long dead, to argue
that his evening of sorrow isn’t long,
it’s interminable.
I flounder in my search.
You don’t remember your dream.
We’re lovers who know each other
inside out.
Yet this inscrutability.
These insuperable shores of our dreams.
And yet.