The young cartographer

You speak
like a voice in a dream.
My ancient mariner's compass
guiding me
under the wicked paths of the stars.

My eyes are on the road ahead,
navigating the car in a sea of darkness.
We're going somewhere,
purpose is an afterthought.

Outside our windows,

cars and hours rush past,
like other people's dreams.

In the dark of your windowed silhouette
I imagine your beauty
like a cartographer at work
on the mysteries of the universe.

The hushed smile, the inkwell eyes
the warm circle of your arms
tender feet and fistfuls of grace
draped in the earth of your skin

the margins of your infinity
tracing their electric outlines
on the map of a young man's heart.

For the man who gave me Asterix

You would be in your armchair
steel tea glass in hand, a book or two on the armrest,
legs crossed in dayless leisure.
I would arrive,
smelling of chalk dust and skipped homework,
clutching an Asterix adventure,

yet another disappointment.

It had happened again.
My Caesar was great,
but Gaul was greater.
Druids in white, fat men in stripes,
valour in a droopy moustache,
what could a poor emperor do?

Oh how it must have amused you,
the rigid disbelief of this brash schoolboy
who worshipped Caesar just because
lines from a school play rippled in his blood,

"Friends, Romans, Countrymen..."

You would commiserate

and generously hand over the next volume,
impishly fostering hope.
Perhaps this time, I would say, perhaps,
and you would grin.

And the cycle would repeat itself.

The truth found its way to me, eventually,
far away from your armchair
yet your wisdom stays with me,

an old man's mischief.

***

I heard yesterday

that you had passed away.

I wanted to come back to you
and borrow books from you again,

to walk past the tree in your front yard
that grew fearlessly across the stairs,

to sit silently waiting for you to look up from your page,
to sneak greedy glances at your library
until the book finally came out of the shelf 

accompanied by the magic words
(delivered with a faux sternness and a wagging forefinger)
"No food or milk near it, no creases."

That was it, our secret adventure,
the life inside of us we can never lose

all those evenings

our foreheads pressed up against
the window of childhood,

I, in a hurry to leave mine behind,
you, eagerly reaching out for yours.

Footnotes II

[The first instalment is here.]

Beauty is the stillness
of mirrors; Religion is a signpost
in an open desert; Goodbye
is the weight of a rose on a headstone;
Travel is a means of forgetting; Photography
is the currency of impermanence; Hope is
a stranger's smile seen through one's tears;

Novels are second hand dreams; Parenthood
is a long, slow education in letting go;
Regret is curiosity gone astray; Sadness is
an abandoned parasol in the monsoon;
Poetry is the imperfection of dusk; Distance
is the shared loneliness of railway tracks.

Resurrection

Tuesday evening in your pyjamas,
the apple juice is drinking nicely
as yellow light bounces off yellow walls.

The slow-motion machinery of the evening
rolls on.
The dry socks, the fallen cushions,
the router's blinks, the air conditioner's hum,
scratches on the surface of life.

You see the blank pages on your desk
and think to yourself,
maybe poetry is the language of elsewhere,
of the hereafter.

Just as you do, as if on cue
the past gathers itself into a huge wave.
All of the twenty nine years,
all of them.

Plummet

I was too young when it happened.
Or so it seemed.

They brought you home
with a crown of stitches on your forehead
and cotton choking your nostrils.

The room appeared to shrink around you,
as did those who loved you.
They said it was no place for a seven year old
so they took me away
speaking carefully in hushed tones, as if not to wake you.

Strangers with puffy eyes tried to feed me
and encouraged me to play carroms with the cousins.
Someone even got me comics.

Clearly, I had lost something,

I just wasn't being told what it was.

Then they carried you through the streets
but I was excused again,
you were too heavy for a seven year old's shoulders.

When my part finally came to be, the eldest son's calling,

I was obediently brave,

swallowing my childish fear of flames.

From the distant mountaintop of adulthood
every June
I look back on that seven year old boy in white.

That morning
he was asleep in a bed far away
as you lay dying.

Perhaps he still is.

La Poste

First there was that letter sent from Paris
for a long lost friend in a gardened city,
blue ink wrapped in cheap French stationery
with a bookmark, a street flyer with a copied recipe
and excess postage, just to be sure.
Undelivered.

Then that postcard sent from Madrid
for the girl who loved dusty shelves and tall bridges,
drippy spanish verses scribbled behind
an image of a full-mooned night by the Gran Vía
posted on a half-mooned night by the Gran Vía.
Undelivered.

Then there was that letter from Delhi
addressed to an ashen avenue in Strasbourg,
musing on Mallarmé's swan and Iberian sands,
violins, baguettes and the ironies of horology,
the nightly reveries of a wintry summer.
Undelivered.

***

It never goes away,
the inky grief of an undelivered letter,
like a lost pet from childhood.

It lingers like an unrecallable dream,

the shadow of all those lost words

huddled somewhere in unwilling silence,

perhaps
gathering dust in an office crevice,
or in a stranger's shoebox,
or crumpled behind a dumpster
or floating out at sea, the moist ink slowly fraying

like blue veins hurtling into heartless oblivion.

Caravan

New born moments flounder into one another
like revolving doors

and you know
the days you knew
are no more.

Time has ended
and begun from its own ashes
again

the walls are different now,
the breeze speaks a different tongue
and the land has a new face

but
memory is defined
by the places it never visited.

The world gets stranger as you go
oceans rise taller and skies plumb deeper,
names become things and things become names,
and memory teaches you to forget.

You shall wait on the wind and its numberless eyes,
decipher the secret music of the stone
slip into the cracks of the watery glass of the river
and soar with invisible wings over sandy shores,

for
long after you’ve died with the sun,
cried with the feathers,
sung with the waves,
and lived with the stars,

when the wisdom you’ve gleaned
suddenly seems useless
and the endless truth no longer seems endless
and you realise
life’s stories are narrated in sand and water,
you shall return
to the impossible patience of home

like a crumpled old postcard
that has known strange lands
yet retains the soul of the picture that is
burnt into its slender heart.

[4:57 pm | 11th July, 2009]

To a pencil

Past midnight, last day of the summer
the shore unraveled in gentle echoes
under the half-mooned sky
as campfires throbbed
like amorous young hearts in longing.

Eager to untangle my sandy numbness
I scrambled some wood and stole some fire,
fervidly dreaming of poetry
("Past midnight, last day of the summer...")
only to realise that it was no longer mine.
The evening must have swallowed it
somewhere along the way.

Waves hummed at strangers, stars squabbled
and fires crackled till dawn
but the night never recovered,
silenced by the clumsiness of fate.

Morning arrived
and another eventually took its place,
younger, shinier, crisper.
(It even came armed for exigencies,
an eraser for errors.)

Together we travelled far and wide
crumbling streets and solitudes into words,
conjuring and consuming existences
but every line scribbled since
has been like a tune played in the wrong hand,
a vague exertion in recalling
something that can never be recalled.

Poetry had forked that night, irrevocably,
and with it had vanished an unbegotten future,
a campfire's porous whispers
and the unclaimed desires of a lovelorn summer.

Between every thought and its word
lies a fleeting destiny, a forever carved of wood.
Mine frays on an Iberian shore,
an exile warped in an unfinished summer,
befriending a sand crab, perhaps.

On Mark Ruffalo's "Hulk"

Nothing survives.
Not the scarred memory of love,
not silence, or the promise of amnesty,
or secrets, or fenced kindness,
or the absurdity of fear,
or freedom encased in lead.

All that remains
is the thawed distance
between the furrowed brow
and delicate reason,

just the darkness that is green,
nothing more.

Spool

"I adore imperfections," she went on, "that odd crooked tooth, that mustard stained page in the magazine, the creak of an old closet, petty jealousies for strangers' shoes, that scratched DVD that always freezes after 14 minutes, the cracked tile behind the handwash, that typo in the exam paper, the pear-shaped scar behind the ear, the static that accompanies old tapes, that needless lie on the application form, that awkward boy in the class picture, those "R"s at the end of foreigners' words that always loiter on the tongue too long... It is there that beauty hides, in our inadequacies, the incompleteness of moments, our life's errata. Yet we spend so much of our lives insulting them, striking them down. How can it be that we're taught to reject the romance of imperfection for the boring predictability of perfection?"

The street was mostly empty, save for the occasional shape staggering out of the big red door by the bend. We were seated on the pavement, legs stretched out with our backs to a beige wall. Neither of our feet could reach the edge of the pavement, we weren't tall enough. Ahead of us, the street unfurled in waves of rectangles, the shapes grooved on the wall behind us uniformly flowing into the road and marching up the wall on the other side. If anybody was on the terrace above looking down onto the street, its creases making for a perfectly ruled notebook page, I suppose our parallel shapes would have made an ornate "H" inscribed in an old english font, the slender poster rolls bridging our knees.

"Yeah, I know. This is the night talking. The empty street, the river's faint murmur beyond that circular square, the evening's sugar and, of course, all those poor exsanguinated grapes. When the sun comes up in a few hours, I know, everything will be normal again. Shamelessly we will chase ghosts again, the perfect answer, the perfect love, the perfect memory, the perfect score, the perfect outfit, the perfect smile, the perfect car, the perfect riposte, the perfect job, the perfect son, the perfect house, the perfect future, the perfect death even... It's just what we are. And along the way, unknowingly, we will lapse further into ordinariness, becoming what we were always destined to become - someone's forgotten classmate, someone's slack employee, someone's unsent letter, someone's shared cab-ride, someone's thoughtful gift, someone's chronic disappointment, someone's annoying neighbour, someone's smear of lipstick, someone's grumpy customer, someone's anonymous sandprint..."

The words trailed away. She sighed feebly and fell back onto the wall, staring ahead. By the time she slowly turned her head towards me, we were both smiling. She leant closer, letting out a slow whisper, "I've never heard myself talk this way, ever. Will you at least remember?"

Bubblewrap

"Be careful"
they said every time
our hands reached out for the doorknob.

A thousand sundays later
here we are
lingering at thresholds
lest we are not "careful" enough.

An education

[To Wislawa Szymborska]

Under a bridge in Trzebinia
there is a wooden bench
whose planks are no longer parallel.
They lean into each other
the way sundays do into mondays,
reluctantly.

The view looks out on a silence
whose throat has long dried up.
Top left corner: a steeple clambers up the sky
desperate to escape its inhumanity.
Elsewhere, saggy electricity cables argue
like old men over newsprint.
On tired railway wagons, time frays.
Unshaken, dry heather sways
like postmen's yawns.

It was there
that you sat me down and unfurled life
as things came tumbling out,
"chairs and sorrows, scissors,
tenderness, transistors, violins,
teacups, dams and quips."
It was almost as if
good old Prometheus had
taunted the gods once again.

At night, old dreams return
like cats to spilled milk.
In the unwitnessed quiet of a windowsill,
that stolen flame still cradled
in my grateful heart,
I remember.

[4:43 am | 3rd February, 2012]