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.
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A Ghazal After A Villanelle
"We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow".
~ Theodore Roethke
After those blizzard-obliterated dawns in which waking & walking was slow A clear moonlit night arrives in which these feet seem to know where to go.
After seasons spent shuttling - map-less, frost-masked - between cities of snow, I turn into her lane, and seem to know this is where I should have been ages ago.
After all she seems to know how to strike each note of your heart’s arpeggio. But do you, breathless Sashi, know how this emphatic YES to her should go?
for N.
Note: the track I was listening to while attempting to make this ghazal out of my scribbles
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Thinking Of Eden, April Fool's Day
Waiting inside an ubiquitous Star-
bucks on 6th Avenue,
where a jazz riff attempts to
mask the rumble of
the subway under this seat,
and the rumble in my heart,
I wonder how your eyes,
which are the greenish blue hue of water found at the mouth of certain river deltas, will look at me when they emerge from the underworld into this briny New York light,
Changed to my current vision by all that time I have spent wandering through those wintry cities, reminding myself of the lost Eden, and how Woman was Man's sister first, before her mouth, tasting of red apples, was kissed.
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