When Asked A Question, She Said
The world is opaque with frosts.
The clarity I seek pools
in the lakes that never freeze,
tucked in the high mountain valleys.
The traveler has left for the plains.
The summers were brilliant with their rose blooms. Now ice cackles in the bucket. Light sleeps in most days until late, and then sleepwalks
into the grove of chinars in which we swung in ever widening arcs from those truck tires, the traveler and I, the we that the waves of time didn't sustain.
What is matter is also light, is also time, is also those swinging arcs in which this story was spun. On my wrist his glass bangle becomes a rune, a Stonehenge whose significance will be lost
in time. And in time, it will be summer again. And again the garden will be dug and the roses pruned, and again the thorns of memory will be hidden, for a while, by the blooms of forgetting.
Love is the deep wound out of which flow all the rivers that we drink from, here and there, my traveler and I.
Note: Lines quickly scribbled in response to this song, as Gulzar's lyric loops over and over in my ear as I sit in the sun, and muse on such matters of the heart.
My Poems
... link (2 comments) ... comment
Tall Man To Rescue
Continuing with yesterday's dolphin theme, there are some advantages to being really, really, really tall; you can be a dolphin superhero:
BEIJING - The long arms of the world's tallest man reached in and saved two dolphins by pulling out plastic from their stomachs, state media and an aquarium official said Thursday.
Scannings
... link (no comments) ... comment
End of A Species
WSJ ran the following AP story today on an ending that made me sad for a long minute:
A rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for 20 million years is effectively extinct, an international expedition declared Wednesday after ending a fruitless six-week search of its Yangtze River habitat. The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s.
Apart from the larger reason of the diminishment of the universe that happens when a species simply vanishes, I have a more personal reason: one of my most magical memories from my college days in India was seeing a pair of river dolphins (which I think are related to the baiji, and are similarly endangered), next to the boat's stern in which I was travelling in the Gangetic delta. Here is a poem by Wendell Berry since I can't write an elgy for the baiji myself:
For The Future
Planting trees early in spring, we make a place for birds to sing in time to come. How do we know? They are singing here now. There is no other guarantee that singing will ever be.
My Daily Notes
... link (no comments) ... comment
Next page