Epiphany

You were my Ithaca
but alas, my love,
I was never your Odysseus.

Note to Self (circa 2011)

Forget the sinuousness
of this odyssey of life,
just remember this,

this moment
you were twenty six,
in love,
and in Paris.

All else shall fade.

Origin

Eyes like dark, deep forests.
Fingers like furious rivers.
Tongues like roving doves.
Lips like spinning echoes.

In chorus
they float, flame and flounder
through the mad night

arriving,
again, again and again,
at the tangled pathways of passion

at the ravenous hunger
that is the origin
of all origins.

Dreaming of Rainy Barcelona

"Estoy aquí, dije, con los perros románticos 

y aquí me voy a quedar."

"I'm here, I said, with the romantic dogs
and here I'm going to stay."

- Roberto Bolaño

The sun has disappeared 

down his carafe of daily forgetfulness

and I wander

like a vagrant in a lost myth.

Barcelona,
that womb of boundless freedom,
embraces me whole
like an ancient oath.

The dreamer becomes the dream
in the music of her unrepeatable geometry
as strings of pearls leap from the skies

rain drops,

the unfinished verses of poets.

Rapture descending,
each drop a revolution,
the beginning of a childhood.

The Curiosity of Strangers

An evening
talking to a morning,
adrift between the tenses.

Words ferried across silences
by the curiosity of the other.

The library of memory
ajar
to knowing, unknowing
and all the trifles in between.

Vulnerable mazes and bitter seas
from the restricted sections of adulthood.

Pointless passages no one ever read
in the storied clay of childhood.

Delirious earth and symmetric roses
from the periodicals of dreams.

Each dusty page a discovery
in the echoing intimacy of chance.

Now and then, a loud chuckle.
The sound of the universe
indulging itself.

The Call

Slow, soft words
like a voice from childhood
prying open my morning.

A hovering dream
like the eternity that comes before
and after.

Flutter

The window is aflutter
with the day's newborn rays,
envoys from the heavens
thrust

at the immensity of our existence.

The room fills up
in unhurried moments,
like a schoolboy's watercolour.

The cosmos surges

in fractions of coffee cups and childhoods

as eternity pounds away like a machined heart.

We are surrounded by movement

but we,

we do not move.

The Feast

They can't remember
where the evening began,
the boy
and the girl with the Russian name,

but they remember
where it ended up.

In poetry, as always.

***

Neruda offered his odes,
songs of blood, skin, earth
and the fire of youth.

Brodsky brought his friend Baryshnikov
who recreated
a dance for the ages.

Bukowski made an appearance,
doodles, half-burnt cigarettes,
typewriter and all.

Szymborska stood in the corner
gifting rhymes, nonchalant.

Armitage charmed his way in
with the nostalgia of childhood
and his butter-fingered verse.

Cavafy took them on an odyssey
on the ocean of life
with gods, monsters and wisdom.

Bolaño made an entrance in furious lyric,
strumming on the savagery of the heart.

Borges snuck in his doppelgänger,
mirrors, swords, hourglasses
and the infinite library of chance.

***

Through the pages they strolled the night,
under the high ceiling
that mimicked a constellation.

She closed her eyes,
the girl with the Russian name,
and let his voice fall on her

like rain.

The Makers

Men born with humility
instead of a face
their fingers reach out across the ages
to craft miracles,
the slow song of human ingenuity.

In the quiet corridors of oblivion
they chisel, they weave, they carve

daily
arriving at the truth
that no one can own
but belongs to everyone.

Epilogue

[For S. N. R.]

That was how he
rested his argument with the world.

At the first sunrise of a new year
as the rest of the world burst with optimism
and confetti still wafted on the streets

he succumbed to silence.

Time went on without him
as he slipped into the cradle of the past.
In an instant, he was.

Relinquishing his breath,
he embraced the air's stillness
and left his song behind for others to sing.

He didn't run out of music,
he ran out of time.

The Surrender

We knew so little of each other
yet I did it.

But
who said love was anything more than
a stone thrown at the stars.

The drive on the dark highway,
your playlist,
and the endless promise of that evening...

When I die,
I hope they take me back there.

The Murder of Actaeon

She stands there, her silver bow drawn taut,
back arched in furious grace.
Her nakedness gleams under the sun,
beauty so savage it echoes
through the quietude of the woods.
The flimsy human must pay.

He stands there, fear rippling through his veins,
ensnared 
in the pitiless stare of the eternal virgin.

The cavernous howl of divine arrogance
pierces through the wind's innocence
as his skin quivers,

that feeble garment of mortality.

Ferocious death is at hand,
shadows of its sprinting hooves
screaming through the moist earth like wildfire.
Nostrils flared, fangs bared,
the beasts are coming.

The awkward hug

Seat-belt firmly in place,
unmade conversations populating his thoughts
with a traffic policeman bearing down
on his windshield in a no-parking space

clusters of words jostling for attention
on the tongue’s inadequacy,
the lingering sadness of a goodbye
stealthily clambering up his back

halfway through the hug,
the lad froze

like a piece of parchment
choked by the weight of its own words.

[5:49 pm | 16th August, 2009]

The Poem

It was written

in another poem's margins

by a riverside one midsummer evening

after a long day's work.

It contained love

like a carafe filled to the brim,

too meagre for its destiny.

There it lay

until this morning

I stumbled upon it again.

After all these years

it still is inadequate.

The blue stretches on.

[For Natalia Molchanova]

The blue stretches on
like air, only heavier.

The blue stretches on

like language, the soul's anchorage.

The blue stretches on
like home, a vast starless womb.

The blue stretches on

in silence, bellowing through the veins.

The blue stretches on

into the awakening, pearly bubbles ascending

into the beyond.

Cergy Pontoise

A March evening.
Sunlight uncoils in the horizon,
darkness delicately devouring the day's wall of light.

Leaps of blue by the riverside
green tree tops, foamy white clouds
brown contemplative earth
and an enormous silence

pierced by a distant seagull's cry
as if from memory,
from a different evening, a different time.

One of those moments
life accumulates
like the bellows of an accordion
and the music rises up in your throat
like an ancestral song.

Others have dreamt this before you.
You are but a page
in a library of infinite pages.

The Cassette

There was no embrace at the end,
no gawky display of brotherly affection

just a turn of your head at the bend,
a brief glance before you disappeared
into the vast machinery of adulthood.

On my way home in the cab
I watched your departure streak through the sky
like a shooting star.

Back in the shade of my living room,
I muted the lights, shut the blinds
and gave in to the plain charity of sleep.

I dreamt of the time you cried as a little boy
when your favourite movie tape got tangled up
and stopped playing.

Nine years old, I was the only adult in the room
and your grief flew at me
like a flock of frightened birds.
I did not know what to do.

I snap awake.
This is a different room, a different time
and I am no longer the only adult between us

but
if I could gather that tangled tape,
somehow piece it all back together
and play that movie for you one more time,
I would. 

Whimsy

[For Mark Strand]

Reading early this morning
I stumbled upon your death in the pages
like an old bill I'd forgotten to pay.

April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014.
It has been nine months.
("Enough time for a new life",
I can almost hear you say.)

I confess I always felt
I would meet you someday.
No reason, just a whimsy
but I believed in it all the same.
Clearly, I underestimated death.
(Don't we all?)

You are gone now,
and we are separated
by this great dark ocean called life.

[27th August 2015 | New Delhi]

Cuddapah, 1995

The long corridor of life
is still at its beginning.
The darkness at the back looms large
but life, like time,
only knows linearity.

The road is paved with choices,
curious coincidences
and the distant sweetness of youth
but he can't see it yet.

Life's sly deceits,
the transparent burdens of adulthood,
they are yet to come.

No one has warned him
what he does not do
will matter
as much as what he does do.

Nor has he been advised
what he is and what he wants to be
will forever be opposite sides of a coin.

Perhaps he will learn to tell apart
dreams from memory,
guilt from regret, patience from cowardice
and pride from self-deception.

Someday he may grow old
and behold his fate in the intricacy of stars
with the happiness that comes
from having loved once.

But not yet.

Today
the five year old
has bigger things on his mind.
Life's unwavering linearity
is lost on him.

Watched over by startled air
as the fifty foot drop yawns below
he stands at the edge of the roof
grasping at the fluttering pigeon

hand outstretched into an inchoate future
unblinking glee on his face, naive as sunrise.

Three short poems

No matter how hard I try
I can never recall
the colour of your eyes.

It's almost as if
I want to see them for the first time
every time.

***

Remember that evening
we spent walking in the Père Lachaise?
Summer had just ended,
but the birds didn't seem to know it yet.

It was the first time
I saw tears in your eyes.

Night came down swiftly
like a vast, mute protest.
There were no stars to be seen.

***

My favourite picture of you
features only a part of your palm
in the backseat on a highway.

The evening falling
slowly, sadly
all over the windshield
as the picture is being clicked.

Every bit of it sublimely ordinary
except for the hand
caught at the edge of the frame

unaware of its own grace
like a poem about to take shape.