Also me

When the western sky is unsure of its blue

and the dusk slowly curdles the shadows;
when darkness gently drizzles and falls through,
and curls up in a spot somewhere close,
then my leave from my life is curtailed;
the dragonfly dreams, the phrases that I’ve nailed,
the febrile bubbles that I’ve carefully held
are dropped and silver-shattered on the floors;
and I come back and quietly sit by you.

 

When the beach has tiptoed for miles along the thin,

transparent waters of the ocean edge;
and failed to find its end, or where it begins
and stopped a moment beside a rocky ledge,
there my life is recalled to itself.
On a millennia old continental shelf
like a necklace set with a thousand seashells.
You strip me slow of all my need for language
and you open your arms and calmly fold me in.

 

When the foam leaps over the waves better to see

the sunset framed between the crystal hills.
And kites are flown till darkness cuts them free
and they lose themselves in the twilight chills.
Then my life is shaken out of its trance.
Where the cliffs retreat as the waves advance
and signal sternly, and the sea returns.
And I too am home. And things are the same still.
Just that you are still you, but somehow also me.



 

9th of May

 

I.

 

She slips into mind, every year, about this time

when spring hesitates to get to summer, dithers;
a dancing graph, light of dawn, in one straight line
from the sun over the water, she too shivers

 

just like that; the sunrise reflects on the man-made pond

like her smile, and I am more mindful, notice then
without knowing why.  They tell me some unnamed bond
ties me still, ties me fast, closer than tight apron

strings. I can’t believe in soul-aprons, dust and ash
the only ends, the cosmic chasm the last vessel.
They tell me she’s a better place, they know it’s trash -
the feel good chants, cosy hype, raised snug levels.

 

It doesn’t matter where she’s gone.  She was here.

That’s what counts. And that quiver.  This time of year.

 

II.

 

Did I tell you how soft she was? How soft her lap

and what she wore slung over her back? always white
but stained with my finger-marks, turmeric mishaps;
did I tell you that her smile was like the first sunlight

 

filtered through leaves, slanted on streams, dappled glee;

that taut peace of the needle when north is found?
the high-noon ice-cool solace of the filigree
shade of trees? that flock of birds overhead homeward bound?

 

Did I tell you how frail her arms, and yet how wide

their love, how strong their resolve, how tender their touch?
all floated into oceans now on countless tides,
whatever remained after the fire, and that’s not much.

 

As I can’t lay petals on cold tongues of headstones

I lay words here, writing blind, not knowing whereon.

 

 

III.

 

It’s no use now telling me that the earth still bends

magnetic lines from south to north as it always did
and if I held my compass up the needle ends
would still align; but there’s no peace left in the grid.

 

Never again the same refuge in an unstitched cloth,

never again her fingers on my hair and brow.
Let all needles point always to the axis north
what difference can it make to anyone now?

 

It’s a barefaced lie that I said she comes to mind

once a year, on occasion, when the seasons cusp;
I haven’t kept an exact count - how many times
I’ve thought of her since she turned to ashes and dust.

 

But still sunlight’s on the pond, a sudden flicker

about this time every year. When seasons dither.

 

 

IV.

 

One by one the reference points change their spots

from living homes to burning ghats and then nowhere;
not a cordoned off mourning zone, just nothing, nought!
just an immense gulf, a cosmic gulp of ash and air.

 

The deepest loneliness is born of crippling grief

the more they chant the placebos, the deeper it gets
a flicker of light on a wave brings little relief
from this music of lies the myths of light around death.

 

Where are the new cardinal points, where do I go?

now that those wrists have no more an earthly address
no coordinates to mourn at and pent-up sorrow
doesn’t light the way out of any loneliness.

 

Maybe this is all there is to navigate it with:

loneliness, and flickers of light; music and myth.








 

Midweek Sillysong

Don’t judge a journal by its cover

and a person by their clothes and clogs

there’s land under the deepest water

and a wheel’s not a sum of its cogs

 

gold’s always gold, but as for glitter

it can choose to take a shine, or not

who can say that matte isn’t better

and high polish always hits the spot?

 

the skies might lighten and get darker

the sun and stars in an endless swap

and yet the dark cosmos is greater

though all of them do a sincere job

 

the road decides when to meander

and when to pull up and dust itself off

and run for a bit, brisk and straighter

it’s much more than its starts and stops

 

graphics well drawn, slicker and quicker

than lightning forks, one click and shot

the essence still escapes the picture

the whole cannot be framed and caught

 

the sense gets dimmer, the meanings splinter

and it's all fine, but we are distraught

come split this hair and point the finger

and tell us exactly what is what

 

there’s more to you than being a reader

there’s more to me than someone who plots

lines of daydreams trailed into rivers,

the heartsblood of nights in inked out clots.



 

Sillysong for Monday

Tell me truly, what makes the potter - 

the turning wheel or the final pot
and what if the kiln is cooler or hotter
and all that effort comes to nought?

 

What changes the ploughman to a farmer

the furrows neat, or the golden crop
and is a soldier victory or armour
or should I let this argument drop?

 

I feel the beat that moves the dancer

maybe it’s her grace makes the beat throb
think on it and give me an answer
are results key, or plugging the job?




 

The translated gist of it

This post is not really a post, at least not the usual type of post I write here, a poem or a bit of fiction, or very rarely, marking a personal milestone or mood.  I wrote a bunch of short stories in Bengali sometime back, and this post is a translated synopsis of a trilogy from there, চিঠি  (The Letter), অষ্টমঙ্গলা (The return of the bride) and সীমাহীন বিদেশ (Borderlessly Foreign), the last title gives the book its name.

On and off the DGP Expressway

Some random snatch of talk, a stranger’s ring

flashes sporadic at rest on his steering
three-faced signals, shamelessly red-eyed
shove me roughly back behind the hopscotch wide
zebra stripes, sunlight drizzles through the trapeze
of cables and dazzling green leaf canopies.

 

A black-crow feather sails down the oceans

of blue skies and frozen peace, broken
strokes of cirrus clouds; so easy to confuse
for migratory bird-wings, and/or the ooze
of peppery smoke from faraway brick kilns
clay on fiery tongues, sky furred with smoke-films.



The strict culverts, the narrowing and  the strips
of sudden widths forge their own narratives
knead their own songs into soft mud, hard clay,
dark tarmac, rear wheel sand and gravel spray
the percussion of pebbles on membranes
thinned with the sounds of distant urban

 

The sky draws its pink fleece, a faded

blanket in one swift move from toes to top of head
the smoke plumes still keep up their dark contrast
till the sunset routine is flushed and done at last
the road now held tender in the palms
of darkness, cradled lullaby-soft in its arms.




 

Ashoka, after Kalinga

The few who return home from here

will never again be quite whole.
Combat zones. Courage and fear.
So many ways to shrink the soul.

 

Not just flesh that is sliced open,

it’s not just bodies that blades maim;
violence plants its secret weapon
and those that return won’t be the same.

 

The tips of arrows, heads of spears

end of day are plucked from skin;
but war is too hard to pluck clear
from the heart once the blade goes in.

 

There could be other paths, directions,

fields, where it’s not this one battle
and maybe they too change a person
they’re not the same once they travel;

 

I’ll take that road and see for myself

if peace can be found a different route,
if a change in travel plans will help
and a war-free way to be will suit.








 

Waiting

You haven’t turned up. The buffer zone

of anticipation already ruined.
I keep my fingers steady on the stems
my lips serene, breath behind voice, eyes fringed
with the twinkling antonyms of forlorn
just on the off chance that you’ll come.
Faces have poked around, come and gone,
a thousand pairs of feet filed past, inch
by inch, but yours weren’t amongst them.
I draw my self around myself, alone
like the eye wraps itself in stormy winds
and unruffled, calmly carries on;
like the foetus curls into its amnion;
and the wound wreathes the pain into poems.






 

Things fall apart and into place; and not always a comfortable place

I’d never thought about him till he died

without public drama at eighty two;
I’d carried his books tucked into my side
and flicked the pages as schoolgirls will do
and puzzled a little over the context
the abstruse climate and customs portrayed
and nothing in it bluster or defensive
a firm outline to the ancient and complex -
or so I chose to hear, so the teachers said
and it was enough to pass the exam, and live.

 

Sometime during the years that he wrote

I stopped being a schoolgirl, and I grew
my hair out, and even more remote
from nuances, and the immediate milieu.
The books stayed thrust somewhere aside
their pages rarely handled and splayed open
their spines slow faded, tight, still intact
their seeping fame spread slowly worldwide;
but the connect snapped with them way back then
and beyond that no memories, no impact.

 

It takes many random years to gauge

the words of a writer read in early youth
to reckon the deadweight of an unturned page
of letting a book dissolve in its own truth,
lie dusty and forgotten on the shelf.
The news streams its way around the world
and death is a sudden spike of interest
stabbing time, a leap across the wide gulfs
of my understanding, sharpening what’s dulled
but little point now that his hand's at rest.









 

Mists of glass

Do I tell you to look me in the eye

and speak your mind, move around, come and go
between hours? choose between things to say and know
and yet not know a thing and not care why?
you live and love the way you want, and I

"Each of us leaves an unfinished life"

The first name that springs to my mind when I read that line by Mary Oliver is Sukanta Bhattacharya, the youthful rebel-poet of Bengal.


হে মহাজীবন, আর এ পদ্য নয়
এবার কঠিন, কঠোর গদ্য আনো
পদলালিত্য ঝঙ্কার মুছে যাক
গদ্যের কড়া হাতুড়িকে আজ হানো

প্রয়োজন নেই কবিতার স্নিগ্ধতা
কবিতা তোমায় আজকে দিলাম ছুটি
ক্ষুধার রাজ্যে পৃথিবী গদ্যময়
পূর্নিমা চাঁদ যেন ঝলসানো রুটি

How to write a sonnet

Beginnings – I’d start there, I’d start with you -

that is the sole, central hypothesis -
it morphs to both argument and premise
and a summing beyond debate, and true
in all positions, from each point of view.
The rhythms I’d pick up from your sturdy wrists
no figures of speech required, no smart twists
of language, just fourteen plain lines would do.

For you are the poem, its start and end

the lightning fork, the naked flame, the plume
of grass, the forest’s silent canopy;
you are the sonnet’s sharp post-octave bend
words written, wreathed in papery perfume
and in some ancient birth given to me.







 

In the eye of the dream

Each time you raise your lids

horizons float fuzzy fluid
and when you close them shut
the trickle of the road dries up
inhale, exhale, hold
dreams get quickly cold.

 

The winds from an exposed place

flay open the planes of a face
a small window in the cheek
shows the movements as each speaks
climb up, climb down, stop
it’s all just idle talk.

 

So a machine emits poetry

as the finger jabs at a key
hardly anything involved
horizons easily dissolved
regroup, recoup, stream
the crusted eyes of dreams.

Escape

Not in crowds, nor in the company of a few

close friends, nor when I’m alone, and even with you
there is this restless weight the soul won’t relinquish,
small knots of sorrow it’s strangely loath to undo.

 

I wish I knew to unravel their ends, I wish

I could tease their rough hemp fibres from my flesh
and bones, from spaces of the self, I wish I knew
to snip one link and escape beyond the whole mesh.

 

But no cities there made of jade, there are no views

of freeways glistening in rain, no green ooze
of rivers, nothing beyond the pale knots of anguish
that’s any different from here, nothing to choose

 

between these two sides of the rough tightened lattice

at least not so marked that you’d sit up and notice.
What world can be made whole if it’s without you
and what’s an escape if you aren’t an accomplice?






 

How will you take it - light or dark or grey?

Everything must thin

for the dark to come in
for the light to pass through
and become the dark too

 

all must be effaced

and the feelings faced
and maybe that’s just light
but could also be the night.

 

It may be either-or

but equally, nuanced more
a long gradual fade
from slow light to shade

 

both of them must thin

so how’ll you determine
which of them will do
and which is finally true?