BYOT

 

You know someday you'll have to go without

a certain backyard, a tree. Or a person.

Going on without is what it's mostly about. 

Deep in your bones, your heart, not a shred of doubt.

You too will have to step out from this garden -

you know someday you'll have to go without.

Life's mostly lived under some passing cloud,

you'll want to run but there's just no option.

Going on without is what it's mostly about.

The loneliest place's hidden in the crowds

millions strong around the world and nation.

You know someday you'll have to go without.

You cannot find relief, inside or out -

you can't breathe even when the window's open.

Going on without is what it's mostly about.

You can't fathom how it's ending, so throughout

you startle easy, but still get the job done.

You know someday you'll have to go without,

going on without is what it's mostly about.

BYOT is not 'bring your own tipple,' btw. It's 'bring your own title' because I am terrible at them, the title is the hardest part of a poem for me. I couldn't come up with a single word for this one. Leave me your suggestions in the comments please.

I'm on a megabinge of nonstop villanelles. This one was inspired by a contemporary Indian  historian I follow - he posted about his father's passing and wrote that post-bereavement his mother is his remaining connect to his childhood, but that thought is fraught with the knowledge that he will lose the comfort of her presence too someday. That loss is of course the most wrenching of all, but life's generally peppered with losses - from the smallest to the humongous and well, taking it into one's stride and carrying on. 

We had yet another untimely family bereavement last month. My families have changed drastically in the last three years. In my blood-family, there are now only a handful of people left who've known me as a child. In many gatherings I've become the eldest generation present. It takes some getting used to, but that can be done. What is impossibly difficult is the untimely passing of someone. It is crippling to have to see young people in their 30s have to deal with parental bereavement.

Someone recently left a  comment on a blog I visit, which essentially said blogging is an escape from reality. They come to blogs to have their mood lightened and not have problems present or past thrown at them. It made me think about what I should post here, if I should compartmentalise better. Poetry is after all fiction, I don't necessarily have to post something dark here just because my offline life has been rather sombre of late. I could easily dig up something from 5 years ago when things were slightly lighter and easy-breezy. That conflicts with my write-it-as-it-comes thumb-rule though, and it felt a bit dishonest somehow? - so in the end I didn't. 

Life's a bit messy right now and that will continue in the foreseeable future. Whatever shape and colour it is - dark, uncertain, hard to navigate...I'm still grateful, still celebrating the mess.  Hoping your week is a celebration, and also a bit tidier. Have a wonderful one. 

Post-Diwali

 

It’s happened before that I haven’t put up

lamps for Diwali. The winds, grief or love

have stopped the flames and the darkness has been

my deep solace and festival enough.

 

It’s an odd goddess that discriminates

and does not step in through unlit gates.

Does her omnipotence flail in the dark?

Does her third eye need lights to navigate?

 

Surely those who could not afford the oil,

the homes left dark by personal turmoil   

have the greatest need for the gods to step in,

lift faith and fortune rather than recoil.

 

I’ll continue to let emotions strike

the match, the gods too may step where they like. 

The Heft of Memory

 

I think of you at odd times, the templates

are not a convenient protocol –

and sometimes I don’t think of you at all

as the mind hardly differentiates

 

between the minute grains, the separate heft

of conscious and unconscious memory.

Every time I return to a story

you’re in it somewhere, to the right or left

 

of each chapter. And the city spools in

your laughter like an angler’s line, your face

a mirage of leaf shadows, just a faint trace

of your voice when the peak hour traffic thins.

 

In every courtyard I visit, every square,

in every vanished landmark - you’re there.

Afterwards

It feels like a slight; unbearable snub

that everything’s the same, not one bloom

from the vases has drooped, the garden shrub

you had planted is still upright, the room

just as it was before, the cushions rubbed

threadbare where you had sat.  The planet zooms

on its exact track, no change in pace or hub.

Only you are gone, even your perfumes

linger still in wardrobes and empty gloves.

Ashes to ashes. A deadpan earth subsumes

every flake till nothing is left above.

The house’s strangely unchanged. I resume,

but with shifts in meanings of loss and love.

For a grieving friend, with love, respect and wishes for strength and peace as she copes with her loss.

Sunbeam smiles

I will turn away from prying eyes

and screaming lines, and find a place -

may be a path that we walked once

the steps to friendship from acquaintance

and mourn alone that lost slow rise

of sunbeam smiles, shone onto my face.

In Memoriam

I know when I open the door

the rooms will be empty, and dusty.

Their dust has long been scattered, washed

from the river into the sea;

there’s just the photo on the wall.

I know that I must turn the key,

yet I stop and raise my hand to knock

as though someone still waits for me.

The streetlamp in front sputters and glows

unsteady in some Morse like code.

A car’s long hand on the horn

skims down from the end of road,

the silence inside screams once, and twice

and then goes into rustling mode.

I turn the knob, the portrait is there

just that it's a bit more yellowed.

The light’s a whisper of the dark -

the frizz of smoke blown from its lips.

Silk thin shadows their edges blurred,

a sunmoonstar in reversed eclipse;

the dust a plume of a lonely search

paused before some rambling scripts

and death’s life with its grim mouth pursed

drumming the silence with fingertips.

Loveweak III

love me as though you’ve loved and lost before -

unzip me along my backbone, undo

and smooth down the silk of flesh and sinew

love me as though you could not love me more

love me like it is your very first time

as though you’ve never loved, nor suffered loss

as if love does not fade, it only grows

untainted by grief, supreme and sublime

love me as if we’ve neither been heartsore

disrobe me of these outer skin membranes

splay me open and kiss the pulsing veins

school yourself for the scars you will ignore

or love me as if the wounds that were once mine

were meant as gifts for you, my valentine

Maybe you’d come back to me if I didn’t try so hard

to find you everywhere, in ribs of leaves,

in ruffles of afternoon petals, in the textured dark bark

of night, in the fuzzy days of windblown grass,

in the dim muddy alleys of my own grief.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9th of May

 

I.

 

She slips into mind, every year, about this time

when spring hesitates to get to summer, dithers;
a dancing graph, light of dawn, in one straight line
from the sun over the water, she too shivers

 

just like that; the sunrise reflects on the man-made pond

like her smile, and I am more mindful, notice then
without knowing why.  They tell me some unnamed bond
ties me still, ties me fast, closer than tight apron

strings. I can’t believe in soul-aprons, dust and ash
the only ends, the cosmic chasm the last vessel.
They tell me she’s a better place, they know it’s trash -
the feel good chants, cosy hype, raised snug levels.

 

It doesn’t matter where she’s gone.  She was here.

That’s what counts. And that quiver.  This time of year.

 

II.

 

Did I tell you how soft she was? How soft her lap

and what she wore slung over her back? always white
but stained with my finger-marks, turmeric mishaps;
did I tell you that her smile was like the first sunlight

 

filtered through leaves, slanted on streams, dappled glee;

that taut peace of the needle when north is found?
the high-noon ice-cool solace of the filigree
shade of trees? that flock of birds overhead homeward bound?

 

Did I tell you how frail her arms, and yet how wide

their love, how strong their resolve, how tender their touch?
all floated into oceans now on countless tides,
whatever remained after the fire, and that’s not much.

 

As I can’t lay petals on cold tongues of headstones

I lay words here, writing blind, not knowing whereon.

 

 

III.

 

It’s no use now telling me that the earth still bends

magnetic lines from south to north as it always did
and if I held my compass up the needle ends
would still align; but there’s no peace left in the grid.

 

Never again the same refuge in an unstitched cloth,

never again her fingers on my hair and brow.
Let all needles point always to the axis north
what difference can it make to anyone now?

 

It’s a barefaced lie that I said she comes to mind

once a year, on occasion, when the seasons cusp;
I haven’t kept an exact count - how many times
I’ve thought of her since she turned to ashes and dust.

 

But still sunlight’s on the pond, a sudden flicker

about this time every year. When seasons dither.

 

 

IV.

 

One by one the reference points change their spots

from living homes to burning ghats and then nowhere;
not a cordoned off mourning zone, just nothing, nought!
just an immense gulf, a cosmic gulp of ash and air.

 

The deepest loneliness is born of crippling grief

the more they chant the placebos, the deeper it gets
a flicker of light on a wave brings little relief
from this music of lies the myths of light around death.

 

Where are the new cardinal points, where do I go?

now that those wrists have no more an earthly address
no coordinates to mourn at and pent-up sorrow
doesn’t light the way out of any loneliness.

 

Maybe this is all there is to navigate it with:

loneliness, and flickers of light; music and myth.








 

The eucalyptus cull

I.

 

Away morning, rented villa scented

with a lazydaisy sunlight

with past living beaten pleated into the dented

floor, the weight of unknown orchid-white

blossoms slow-brushed outside

 

you prepare breakfast, nothing fancy

nothing elaborate that the family love

heavy duty, painstaking butter-yellow-clarity

no, just a pouring from boxes into cups

a filling up and robotic portioning of unmindful, just enough.

 

There’s a staunch straight eucalyptus

in the courtyard back home, and today it must go

the municipality man has given final notice

and felling grown trees is unexpected sorrow

a life lost from life without the show

 

of mourning or closure. Not that it served a purpose

no low branches to climb, no swings

for young children, and eucalyptus

supposedly sucks out life from other growing things

even the grass a sporadic underling

 

but it’s stood there, for as long as your children can recall

silver spine upright, two tone leaves’ underside

strangely pale, drizzling sunlight in small,

finicky quanta; and generous strips of bark; can’t be right

that it’s going to suddenly topple the wall.

 

You dimly remember the planting, many years ago

on an unremarkable spring day after newly

moving in, bare new earth, many things still raw

without the patina of age, unruly

and reckless, the sheen that came too slowly

 

and so it has come finally to this

a quick getaway villa with an unmindful breakfast

in its belly. Will the tree fall quite soundless

when the saw goes through at last

as you the planter can’t bear to bear witness?

 

 

II.

 

Something sits terribly hushed about

the house as you drive back in

that grim gap, that raging mud-mouth

where once the slim trunk had been

commonplace suddenly turned obscene

 

the glass-faced windows blare

out their contents without the filigreed

darkness of leaves, the fluid flare

of shimmying limbs, shoots and roots and seed

strewn over the yard here and there.

 

You don’t sow and reap, no special

connection between growth and death

was in your mind. You planted a perennial

one spring, unthinking, on the blind faith

that trees are closer to the limits of eternal.

 

The man comes in with blunt

words, the talk is about so many clear feet

between the tree and the front

wall, the hazard to the public street

and he can’t do a thing, he really can’t.

 

Signals with an offhand cruelty

of vaguely overstepping allotted limits

the yard’s too small for even a stunted tree

forever forget trying to fit

hungry-rooted tall drizzly ones in it.

 

And so you start organising the cull

feeling just a little hard done by

who knew? that even a perennial

will stop being so once manmade rules apply

not even trees! nothing’s invincible.

 

The job’s done, and a quick trip out of town

to avoid the first cut of the ordeal

to grow something, and then to strike it down!

Abraham’s sacrifice made hauntingly real

and the blood still there gaping on the ground.

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