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.

On reading Homer

Tonight I got in a cab after work,
went straight home

and read Homer at my desk.

The last flight out 

was never taken.

A window seat was not chosen.

A "just landed" text
was never sent.
No smiles were involved.

A cab outside an airport
was never hailed.
No addresses were given.

A late night doorbell 

was never rung.

No hugs were shared.

A midnight dinner
was never cooked.
No dishes were done.

Elsewhere

Someone did not discover a star.

Someone did not get groceries.

Someone did not start a war.

Someone did not visit the dentist.

Someone did not light a fire.

Seven billion worlds never came to be.

There's only one for us all,
and that's all there ever will be.

Tell Me

Tell me beginnings matter.
Tell me hugs can be awkward.
Tell me postmen will survive.
Tell me great questions can have simple answers.
Tell me childhood is a place we can go to.
Tell me pride can forgive and be forgiven.

Tell me spontaneity is overrated.
Tell me there are things even nightmares are afraid of.
Tell me happiness is a language we can learn.
Tell me there's more to love than just a young man's poetry.
Tell me home is not what you leave behind, but what you bring back.
Tell me silence is only a manner of speaking.
Tell me highways have memories.
Tell me a story with a happy ending.
Tell me, tell me again.

Anthem

Morning.

Sunlight sinks its fangs into glass.

Thoughts bend to laws. Refraction, reflection.

Distant presences intruding on an absence.

You are not here.

Noon.

The shadow devours itself into a dot.

The hot air screams into itself. Shattered silences.

Dusty tears burning up a lonely countryside.

You are not here.

Evening.

The wet Earth deepens into a chasm. 

Sky-high lines drip into circles. Drops dropping into drops.

Miniscule worlds making themselves up, splitting apart.

You are not here.

Night.

Darkness drips onto land, ink from the heavens.

Bundles of black piled upon one another. Invisible walls.

A wordless heart echoing a bursting anthem.

You are not here.

You are not here.

You are not here.

WiFi History

In my left pocket,
protected by glass, silicone and passphrases,
is a list, forever safe,

of all those visits
I made to the web of our collective consciousness,
a history of somedays and somewheres.

That friend's house where I spent thursdays listening to Greek piano.
That surf shop in the Portuguese village which was once the end of the world.

That sunrise viewed over a bedecked window by the Ganga.
That Parisian library I first discovered Brodsky in.
That common room in Rome where I failed to console a tearful stranger.
That yellow bistro by the North Sea on a winter afternoon.
That Venetian streetlamp that bore a letter to a three year old.
That stormy night spent in a four poster bed in Pondicherry.
That Viennese apartment with old German books and fraying wallpaper.
That sleepless night in Firenze spent in anticipation of the Uffizi.
That room in Hyderabad that reeks of my tenacious youth.

That Bruges hostel where a housekeeper slipped me a note on Szymborska.
That breezy evening spent alone in a pool by the Vembanad lake.
That long railway dream through an Andalusian landscape.
That rainy day spent in London's streets dreaming of Turner's seascapes.
That Bangalore house where my poetry breathes quietly in a shelf corner.
That kind stranger in Coimbra who left her network open.
That blissful night spent on the Aegean Sea in a floating room.
That friendly old bookseller in Madrid who loved Tennyson.

All those homes, momentary and sedentary,
rains, chuckles, beginnings, cafés, chances,
horizons, friendships, errors, names, airports,
conversations, burdens, faces, absences, choices

reduced to a list narrated in circuitry and code,
a composition that can never comprehend its own beauty
but will, by design, relentlessly pursue its own future,
growing longer, longer and longer
until it no longer can

just like life
just like life itself.

Sunday

This is how the universe begins.

Light bulbs in our hearts
flickering to life

circular waves of our light
unfurling
into cities, continents, hemispheres, orbits, galaxies.

This day, love,
we burn.
We grow old
between these sheets.

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.