Approaching Mother and Daughter
With the customary jealousy I would feel
Toward the creator of some perfect thing,
I stand at the threshold of the room in Which you are bent over our little egg-
Head, (who is already full of vexing Questions – is this comeuppance for
What we, in turn, did to our parents?) Humming, as you nudge her to hold
Still, as the comb in your hand rustles Through her jet black hair (O! this I
Fell in love with first, before anything when You rose towards me from that market crowd),
And wonder about that someone, who will Descend from the hills, to bear our locus
Of sight away, and spill this dark light, which You are now methodically braiding, all over his
White bed, just as I first loosened your jasmine Scented plait, overcome with desire and love.
Notes: You gaff a sudden image, which in a conversation suddenly lights a sulfur match in the aorta, and sends a spark coursing down wintry blood. Outside as thin rain drips from the eaves into pots of herbs – to grow flowers one needs a feminine presence inside one’s house or oneself – at the front door, you check for the presence of this image in the catalogue of images you loosely hold in a musty drawer standing in your back-skull.
Yes, it has been put there already a few times – first the faces are those of your mother and sister, which then sift into those of a woman who no longer loves you and whom you no longer love, and then finally of these two whom you must now conjure, love, and write about to feel nearly human again.
My Poems
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Fragments from Various Lives
[1] Making Faces
When I pursed and elongated my oblong mouth To make my pig face at her teasing laughter, she Returned and kissed my snout, as if I was pitiable.
[2] Lineaments of Gratified Desire
A quite room humming with slight sounds: scrape of Turning pages, scratch of pen on paper, satisfied ex- Halations of two people deeply engaged in reading. Words that are bearing them across a river of time In their fragrant holds - two castaways, even as they think
Of themselves as important engaged in thinking significant Thoughts, always in need of love, a shoulder to lean back On, and an ear to listen to whatever annotation the other Might write on the margins of the book, the book of days.
[3] Raw Material for Dice
In an ancient epic the fate of a band Of brothers was sealed to twelve years Of forested exile by a pair of loaded dice Carved from the bones of a cursed king.
Here, separated from the shadow that My heart used to cast on a sun-glazed Beach, and a brother who promised to Follow me across few footfalls behind,
I wonder from what demon-bone Were the dice fashioned for that Game in which I was blessed With these many years of exile?
[4] Visions at a Window
This is what I ask strangers first, By the way of opening lines In letters I write to them, “Tell Me what do you see when you Look out of your window?
A tree? A bird nest in the tree? A tarred roof spiked with antennae? A panorama of a city twinkling? Sky crosshatched with jet contrails? Or if fortunate, blue expanse of sea?”
Oak, beech, and oak again have been My silent sentinels in these long years Of silence, in which the knife of exile Had slit open the bag of language And taught me their foreign names.
If I look backward, in that orphic Instant, I am covered with the shadows Of more trees: all bloody gulmohars.
[5] Confessor
She tells me, after warning me that I many not approve (because she Doesn’t approve herself?), that she Is in love with a man, as I had already Guessed, who happens to be married.
I say nothing, nothing at all till her Expectation for consolation, forces My doubts to surface on language:
“What horsemen ride in the human heart I have so far barely deciphered, as I haven’t Understood passion and its attendant grief. So into the gaping maw of want, of wanting To be loved and to love back, I feed morsels Of simpler and surer pleasures: talk, laughter And if possible, an approximate kindness.”
[6] An Encounter with Snake Kin
One sodden night this past winter as I was walking the black dog On one of his nightly visitations to my dump, I saw a baby snake Coiled in the middle of the semi-dark sidewalk, issuing a challenge In its forked language, eyes beady with rain, unwilling to back down
And slither away into the frost-burnt foliage. I don’t remember now What I, searching in my reptilian memory, said to it in return, my Tongue dripping with this sweet venom I force from inside myself On Sabbaths. Did I curse it for Eve’s (who has gone missing since) Temptation, my banishment from paradise & my descent into shame?
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Summer Time
[1]
The dense summer grows all around,
Pressing its evergreen face to the windows,
As it coaxes daylilies, daisies & dahlias
Out from the wet earth into a thirsty air.
And birds having built their nests in spring
Are busy hop-hunting insects in the grass.
[2] This room is empty. This room is full of Books, is full of sweat, is full of longing. Emily looks at you with her one working eye, Her clumped hair dropping over your sheets in Tufts, and her smile becoming more crooked Every morning you reluctantly wake clutching Her, to stare into your empty days, empty fate.
[3] Everything has to have a symbol, a shorthand. Take the seasons. Say autumn. We can speak Of the autumn wind and that restless stranger Who keeps walking up and down the avenues Amidst the ragged orchestras of leaves, looking For some long lost score, when kissing turned Almost fecund, ending in a crescendo of promise.
[4] You are that stranger. This is your absent music. And Emily is a doll who won’t ever call your name. It is that time when you must change your life.
My Poems
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