A Travel Sequence
[1] Exits
Exits curve away into a continent That seems to be without end From ground level. From here the eye Is led to the white verticals Of young birches, naked and tender, At the border of snow covered fields.
Isn't this the way how your hands
sway at my body's periphery?
[2] Mating Calls
The common golden eye male attracts
The female by showing its white breast
And emitting hoarse cries.
And in the evening, it signs its name
On the air with its whistling wings.
The red stag, likewise, roars loudly
And repeatedly to attract a mate.
I do nothing but read and write.
[3] Quaking Aspen
The shapes of trees against the winter snow
Are as if the yearning nerves have sent roots
Upwards into the air for songbirds of spring.
Till you arrive, love, I will stand with the quaking aspen.
[4] Echolocation
Walking into an glass tunnel laid through a bat cave, with the sound of hundred wings flapping, Parallels to my blind groping become evident. See I had to wait for your song to understand that one also finds
the way judging distances by the time it takes for echoes to travel back.
Note: Small trinkets written in, and on the way out of, Montreal - all as SMS/ text messages.
My Poems
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Thinking Of
a blue lightning of laughter, he remembers Ghalib:
"vuh gul jis gulsitāñ meñ jalvah-farmāʾī kare ġhālib chaṭaknā ġhunchah-e gul kā ṣadā-e ḳhandah-e dil hai"
In the garden in which that rose grants us audience, Ghalib, The opening-burst of the rosebud is the sound of heart's laughter.
My Daily Notes
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Nature - Tony Hoagland
I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds
I had when I was ten.
And it has been forever since I pushed my head
under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.
What I had with them was tender and private. The lake was practically my girlfriend. I carried her picture in my front shirt pocket. Even in my sleep, I heard the sound of water.
The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king whose name we could almost remember. Under the rooty bank you could dimly see the bunk beds of the turtles.
Maybe twice had I said a girl's name to myself; I had not yet had my weird first dream of money.
Nobody I know mentions these things anymore. It's as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated among flow charts and complex dinner party calendars.
Now I want to turn and run back the other way barefoot into the underbrush, getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.
Down to the muddy bed of the little stream where my cupped hands make a house, and
I tilt up the roof to look at the face of the frog.
Note: At the end of a day spent wrestling with "flow charts", he secretively reads poetry magazines (this one April/ March issue of The American Poetry Review), and tries to let poems take him back to places including lakes, and creatures, whose memories are going faint in his brain, just like the wetness of water just dispersed from the tongue on a hot summer day.
Big Book Of Poetry
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