A poem comes from there,
and life ends there –
a dark space that holds death
and words like dear sisters.
Eyes focus in darkness,
probe corners where shapes
like dull carbon whisper,
time in their veins. When
I write a poem I check my chair –
if there are four legs, the pest
has bored in leaving me hollow:
teeth turn into powder. Across
the bar of white sand I move,
levitate when going is tough,
up up till the iridescent light,
a volcano in the cornea blinds me.
The breeze stirs his grey beard,
it parts like grass on a windy evening;
follicles fall and grow – trope of death-life.
There are relationships that he peeled away:
new and shining like a snake smoothly
weaving its path in dust, dusty in no time.
His hair is wet with water he spilled the previous day,
he feels for the scar on his daughter’s scalp:
fingers comb the tresses she shed to remove the tumour.
When they set in motion the first beginning of speech, giving names,
their most pure and perfectly guarded secret was revealed through love
The Rig Veda , 10.71
(translated by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty)
Vastness of the sky
expands his heart and
clears the fear
pooled in silence there;
cradled alongside
are doubts,
hundred muted questions –
is fire born in water
as lightning in a cloud ?
is earth born in water
as a golden embryo in deep ocean?
is speech born out of thought
as an action out of desire?
between fire and water,
between earth and ocean
flows a river of stories,
like love that marries word to thought.
The point of birth happens at the precise moment
a dew falls from the leaf. Flower is the window
to the heavens,
but the filaments are curled limp
displaying no eagerness to rise on wings of light.
She steps out of the nightrobe scented with sleep,
her mind is miles ahead, desire of the body
singes the path that she knows
as end of life:
moving is better than staying.
My Garden 