Conversation With a Woodchuck

he was this goo-green or perhaps it was my imagination because I saw him glide over a gherkin-green lawn with that uncanny shadow cast overhead from an eager cloud not so eager to participate in our conversation
I said hello to my furry friend who was not in a hurry and closed in while he examined my not so woodchuck-like face, which was neither-bird-nor-ant – not ants that crawled very close on the belly of the earth, close enough for him to sniff them whenever there was a shifting sunlight that took all of us from place to place in search of food fuel shelter or things like warm hands or soothing sights – my face
not bird-like because I had stopped shaping my mouth into a beak since long and cooed lesser than usual for I was distraught that winter could still creep in soon like army ants on their strong bellies and shove me indoors
only, I’d stay inside my hay-baled walls, he residing beneath the floorboards of my snap-together pre-fabricated housing unit. Truthfully enough, we had already spent some winters together, I baking my potatoes in a smelly electric oven cautiously dripping drops of olive oil on their curled up skins while he (possibly) enjoying the aroma and munching on seeds he stole the previous spring from my fancy plastic lantern porch bird feeder
no, that’s fine, I tell him I’m not upset because the seeds are taken by you dear woodchuck and are not in the bellies of fickle-minded birds who might have considered hunting grasshoppers by the creek. Of course, the grasshoppers were all extinct because some grass got pulled out by mistake with the predator weed this last summer when school kids invaded the creek
the woodchuck smooths his coat counts his furs while listening to me, nodding and smiling like an otter that eyes flighty fish in front of him, sleepy sunlight shining like rare fish in this hemisphere where we were still allowed to run about for it really was spring
if you wish, do come and sun your back on my porch I tell him because I too am interested in counting his pollen-like furs or the number of times his tail flaps. No I’m fine he says, living beneath your wooden floor during my off hours, he assures me, although your invitation is tempting… he thinks, then
see, right now I’m coiling inside your half-open and unused cauldron of a barbecue grill, rubbing my back on charcoal remnants and eyeing an interfering chickadee that got off the group in order to put a tab on me. I’m showing her my gooey back – oh now you may think it is goo-like with all that charcoal soot – and waiting for her to know I prefer my own company
well, I am so happy, I say. You and I to that effect can now roll on the ground and sniff the grass and tell the world we’re talking, talking, in between I’m throwing sunflower seeds in my mouth as well as towards you. We are talking woodchuck, although I don’t speak in bird trill or have antennas like communicative restless ants. I do understand though that all we love is a pizza-hot sun and blowing away of the dandelion flakes that get inside our nostrils making us both sneezy, and now we’re talking … Yes, we are talking, we are, says the woodchuck, turns his snoozy belly up to the warmth dripping like syrup from the afternoon sky, waiting for me to throw him the sunflowers seeds and roll over to sleep with the words while I keep throwing words towards him on the lawn … one two three.

(poem in progress... Visual from the Internet, LT Cartoons)

IN PERSPECTIVE -- poem re-print in Shalla Magazine

Shalla Magazine has re-printed my poem "In Perspective" in their Spring 2009 issue (http://www.shallamagazine.com/issues/winter_blooms_issue/Spring_Issue_poetry.php#inPerspective). The poem was first published in The Cartier Street Review. I am pasting the poem below again for all to read.


in Perspective


by Nabina Das


Earlier it was mile-long street-corner speeches

Popcorn peppered with stinging remarks

Holding hands standing close behind the bustle

Listening to arguments acrid as boiling oil

Partying after elders went home to sleep

Smoking, rehearsing lines for street plays

Riding a rickety bike through the outskirts of

Towns seen on TV - now cindered, broken

Lovemaking endlessly, sleeping in, sharing

News and rumors about paramilitary in town

How they called after lonely girls, after school

Clicked their guns, exhibited silly manliness

Before the cameras and boom mikes it was nice

Every one called every one a friend, at least once

Nagaon, Baramullah, Imphal had weekend markets

Veggies, flowers, knick-knacks people loved

Before insurgency, every one got happy and drunk

Now they have closed tea-shops fearing bombs

Clothes dried in the sun before threats were heard,

No one walks or plays in those courtyards now

Newspapers quote: ‘Things seemed calmer before’

And we wonder if they’re still stunned like the dead.


This was a bit of nice surprise. I heard about Shalla from poet Nikesh Murali whose poem was nominated for the Pushcart prize a couple of years ago. Although I submitted this poem -- Shalla publishes only previously published work -- to them, I wasn't sure what was going to happen to it.


Shalla Magazine's e-mail read thus (you don't really have to read this):


"Congratulations, your submission is now featured on SHALLA Magazine!
See it at SHALLA Magazine: http://www.shallamagazine.com/
Congratulations again—oh, and did I tell you? You are in now in the running for being nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. There will be 6 winning writers chosen in 2009—please check SHALLA Magazine sometime in December when we start posting those results.
Will you be nominated for the Pushcart Prize? Good luck!
Shalla DeGuzman
Editor & Publisher"


Apparently, work submitted to Shalla Magazine is first scanned by an acquiring editors, if it passes that phase, it goes to the guest assistant editors, if it passes that phase, it goes to one of the guest editors, if it passes that it goes to one of the editors, then to Shalla DeGuzman. Whew! Reason to feel good I guess!

Neurosis

I live in a lost house with four-winged rooms and a ghost cat I hate
Also, my she-shadow lives here. Unsung

Don’t chide my cell phone’s ring after all, it’s my full-time Raga, a wake-up call
Or my sleep meditation: Om Shantih Om

I turn on my flat-chested TV – my mailman, my unsmiling shrink, my alter ego’s voice
Friendship is not my neighbour anymore

The only humanness rises from an old bandhani rug that held your warmth one night. Memories match your eyes, they’re distant –

Remote as my cold dinner plate, like the puja thaali I’d forgotten. Thrown out petals of
Staid beliefs. Sandal paste of my sweat and all

Walking the dark corridors I fly like accidental leaves blown in by nightly dust storms. My void and I, slipping into a stupor

MY GRANDMOTHER’S DRIED GREEN MANGOES

I plan to derive a completely different poem from this prose poem I wrote two years ago. Thought of retaining the original version here.

My Grandmother's Dried Green Mangoes

There goes my grandmother again, for the umpteenth time tucking her sari at the waist carrying a woven bamboo tray with a sheet of oil paper -- a resting base for little green mango slices to be dried and stored. I see her in my dream clearly, as though she was there, like she used to be
doing her little ritual of mango drying right from the word get go as soon as herds of mangoes tumbled down from bulging shopping bags at her dry tree-root feet.

She pretended there were just too many of them, (what a waste of time) to feel them and peel them and wash them and then size them up before she settled down with her shining
floor-blade, the scary boti, we kids dreaded so much.

She hemmed and hawed and said with feigned irritation: “O Amal, Kajal, Manjul, my sons, don’t you get to buy lesser amounts of these hopeless fruits? My granddaughter is hopefully eyeing their sour flesh. Her saliva can’t wait to drip till I finish slicing them!”

My father, uncles, ignored her distraught calls. She loved the fuss, loved the chore of squatting on the floor and running her hand over the cool firm green bodies in a sort of amorous gesture all afternoon while captivated, I looked on.

Green breasts detached from snappy tree bodies, tempting surely, stuff to vie for. The old woman wasn’t endowed any more so she probably was a tad jealous of all that skin aroma texture my grandmother could die for but could never possess again in this life. And how would I know, a puny child with flat-rib frame, not touched at all by youth’s caressing hands why she kept sighing over those impudent men-luring women-teasing orbs held firm by tight green bodices, bulbous yet soft!?

Before starting, grandma made sure the house was stumped by slumber induced by gentle helpful summer after curries and lentils were eaten bellyful on a Saturday or a Sunday. Tying her sari end at the waist she’d pick the first victim.
She made it seem the mango was a willing volunteer. Willing to sacrifice a darn mango life at her cutting blade, fall in tender slices, soft and seeking of all that
she chose to do with them. Passionate chopping ensued all afternoon and I always correctly guessed she’d put away a few chosen ones for her personal use, to eat them later like an errant child, sour mangoes tingling her teeth. How she loved that, simply relished the act little realizing I cannot be left behind in joining her.

My old grandmother, really bold but white in the head, and quite sleek like the house cat who no one really noticed snickering around the kitchen, picked up a few fruits and quickly slid them into the big wooden box where rice was kept stored. The rice box made the fruits soft, they said, made them surrender and yield easily to my grandmother’s lust when later she would peel them quietly
no one watching, aided by the sleepy noon’s heat, eat them happily toothless – one by one.

Once I peeped into the room. There she was, reaching inside the cavernous rice box putting her mangoes away, thinking no one was witness to her stealthy act.
On seeing me “You saw it, you saw it,” she yelled. “O what a devil of a little girl she is, my spoilt granddaughter!”

Wailing and screaming she never let up flailing arms, hollering and gesticulating, while the whole house descended on the scene of stashed mangoes, all hers, while I had nothing to do them. “I was running after the cat grandma, really,” I pleaded, truthfully.

“The little fiend won’t let me work in peace,” The old widow bawled on and on.
Upset, I ran away to the backyard where I had recently planted my own saplings, mango of course, in the hope they’d grow up faster than did I, so I could eat them before I’m old like her.

That evening, grandma came seeking me out among tall garden grasses
singing to rainbow flowers dragonflies and teaching my dolls and toys not to speak ever to my older family members for being chased away as was I, in utter ignominy.

“Sweetie, come here!”

“Come here,” she called, her white ocean hair flying like a kindly halo of surf,
hands calloused from slicing dozens of mangoes, blackened from delivering their souls. “My dear, I too wasn’t allowed sour mangoes as a kid, I did cry. That’s what I reenacted, depriving you this afternoon. But you and I, young and old, know what it is when you love something utterly so – mango slices, broken dolls, unpicked fluffy grass flowers – they all gladden our senses so much that we can take any trouble for all that unreasonable stuff that holds our feeble fickle hearts.

‘So, I take back my words,” grandma told me. Really? Glad, my eyes grew very wide. I was no longer the pesky little delinquent. Also, she appointed me her assistant in the great task she had set about of drying mango slices. An activity she conducted all summer, filling her precious pickle jars.

For the peace we made, we got to share in all fairness, the treasure from the rice box, three softened pulpy fruits. She slurped her tongue over their creamy flesh, taking in with salt and tang, eyes tightly shut, in an ecstasy probably unparalleled by anything she had known.

“Ah, nature still provides an old widow things of seamless lust,” she blurted almost rakishly and startled me, barely ten. “Yes, you’ll understand the day you become like me, with fruits flowers and flight of time making my night and day!” Her brown wrinkles sighed.

“Once we spice and rub our mangoes with oil lovingly, we will put them in the waiting sun,” she declared after stolen pleasures were appropriated by more slurps. “Now go to sleep.” She prayed to her lord above, stared on long with glassy moist eyes, lying still on bed as I tiptoed out.

Next day, paprika, mustard, turmeric tumbled. Rubbed all over, the slices went sunbathing. Neatly lumped on bamboo trays lying side by side in the sunny courtyard. My job was to shoo away a crow or our inquisitive vegetarian house cat and other creeping invaders.

I dangled my thin legs on the verandah. Uncles joked because I had been redeemed to become my grandma’s accomplice, from being the obstructing greedy child that I was. (That still I am, and it’s the truth; I helped myself to a slice every other day, as special reward.

A guard’s job is not without rewards – that’s how I reasoned. Not telling
my grandmother of the ethical compromise I easily made in my mind.
She’d be heartbroken and I wanted to see her happiness unsullied from our
little joint venture.)

So, the sun came daily, baked the courtyard into split faces – dusty chunks. The green slices curled up with the white heat, lost the fragrant verdant skin, as though their backbones did not hold and they fell, soldiers on a parched battlefield. Shockingly shrunken and stiff.

Sometimes they looked like dancers, fair bodies smoking in the heat. Ballerinas
dancing their final dance, twisting and turning, browned and choking from drinking salt that my grandmother sprinkled daily between her steadfast prayers and assorted household chores.

Deformed and lying on a steaming platform, the mango slices changed shapes –
bats, leaves, shells, shadow-tales – as stronger grew pungent paprika and golden mustard oil. Every evening we picked up the precious trays put them in their pen under grandma’s sparse bed.

My wicked mind wondered if she secretly ate mangoes at night with an extra dash of spice smacking her tongue in her lonely room, where no one would hear her ecstatic squeal. The thought made me guilty. I counted slices daily
in anxious protectiveness to make sure my conjecture was wrong.

The day arrived. “We have to jar them now.” Grandma determined the next course of action – pack ‘em before the slices went too hard. Tucking my tongue in, holding my saliva, I helped. Bottled, dark slices met more red peppers, crafty cumin, fenugreek, fennel, mustard and other venerable spicy folks.

Grandma seemed happy, her work done. Green mangoes spiced, dried and stored while I wondered if the tantalizing product could be tested soon. Her white hair read my furrowed mind. Yes, I may, sample them through my summer holidays, post-lunch, a bit at a time.

And I did under her supervision so as not to deplete her precious collection of
pickled mango – black gold in three heavy jars. Anyway how much would a ten-year-old eat? “There’d be more,” she assured. Back next vacation I could do it from the scratch again, not to be left out. Yes, we could. I was now a veteran at the trade. Only I wasn’t sure, even with a child’s mind, if she could peel and slice the green multitude again next summer, months away, for she was growing older, her veined hands shaky over her sharp floor-blade, which I'd never try handle on my own.

Perhaps she understood my unsaid concern, promised the jars would be mostly full when I’d return next break. After all how much spicy pickle can a wiry old woman eat? And she'd let me do a few fresh trays. “Sweetie, don’t be late or you will miss the fun of carrying bamboo trays in your arms full of fresh green tang.”

But it was my grandma who went missing blatantly from the scene of our promised activity.

Come next year, I found rather dismayed, she had taken a never-ending break. Passed away. Gone someplace where dried mangoes were not desired or needed anymore. The jars stood on her shelf, slices dead swimmers, the bamboo trays lay idle beneath her bed, the cat licking up old oil.

I dreamed her that night. Dream her even now, among green mangoes cooing like a forlorn beloved, the widowed head bobbing as she perfects the slices, speaking softly to her chopping blade, as crows, the cat and I watch her wipe an oily hand on her spotless white sari; she’d ignore those yellow turmeric marks on her immaculate robe and step out hiding little treasures, tastes, memories, dreams, where the sun had slept to be awakened soon. Between shadow and light, she took her footsteps about.

I still follow those old footsteps, down our forgotten wildflower garden to where
the naughty house cat stretches its idle paws and thinks we’re foolish – boring – not to play our old game of watching over grandma’s mangoes to see them wilt and bend in the heat of time, roasting and resting.

Serendipity, Allow Me a Dream

Wrote this poem at some one's request on the theme of "weaving dreams"... As the year closes on, probably dream weaving is something I will indeed try do in earnest! This one is a rather melancholy poem although the given topic is supposed to generate hope, also a little lost and deeply coiled within, like a lot of my obscure thoughts. Nevertheless, for my friends:

I do this often, immerse my face in
The drifting melody of speed,
Throbbing, expecting
Pushing towards a pool of unknownness that sails slowly
Like a lost boat come home after tidal winds are dead.

Leaf falls and yesteryears do
Make up some of its urgency,
Nagging, irritating fly
That snaps its sticky wings and revisits doorsteps of a house
Called memory, its driveway almost always messy.

My dream hovers above meandering
Pessimism, a mountain,
Like an elephant gone to die
In peace and relative grandeur where motions kneel down
Aware that the wind takes scraps away to its bare-wall den

I wonder if then you hear songs
With birds sitting on thorns,
Bloodied to their core,
And while caravans lose paths in the swirling sea-sands
Nights pass taking stones with names inscribed and hewn

Tell me then why we need to belt
And buckle to our seats
For a fur-flung destiny
And hold our hands when verses wither off like ink or seeds
No raccoon would eat, only this planet would dream in bits

I sieve those dreams when everything’s
Gone to a dusk of rest
Beyond a highway run
Where your guns and sheep come bleating for a final kill.
I’m someone with a question still slung on her breast

Perhaps there’s a new sea rising
Over your brazen hand
I see its dazzle at night
Serendipity, let me weave a dream that creates boats and homes –
A web of hopefulness we wake up to in blossom-smelling lands.

Photo from Internet

My Poems in Lit Up Magazine

Got word recently from editor Mike Covey that two of my new poems are published in Lit Up Magazine. Follow the link http://litupmagazine.wordpress.com/new/. Lit Up Magazine is a cool journal of poetry, fiction and art. Check it out.

For all those lazy people out there :-), I am pasting the poems below:

Othello’s Path
Butterflies dropped dead from branches

Where they never grew

Dewdrops of nights that stifled dawns

Lay on your path
Or were they tiny handkerchiefs

Outlining a long sorrowful track?

White of course

Black with guile
Wordsmiths called

It green, envy

But when the foliage died

No one was left to pry
So, don’t walk that path dear Othello

Don’t wipe your eyes with

Those thunderstruck fingers, they’ll teach

You rage and us a loss forever to linger.

**
Bouquets
In very hot weather

Flowers wilt like bouquets

As do kneeling gardeners

But no one hears them.
It is fashionable for us to

Take bouquets - not words -

To happy or sad rituals where

No one deciphers the flowers.
We can shade the buds

But that may deter buzzing bees

Heavy with the delusion of summer

And the ensuing calm.

DEAD COUSIN

This is a very personal poem... I feel infinitely better having it posted for my blog readers. Death, dying, decay etc. have occupied a portion of my mind lately. Hope to derive strength from my readers' supportive reading, so please do comment:

You shirt flutters in the afternoon air
On a clothesline in the yard, sweat evaporating as
You sit under the toiling rotating fan under a humid roof
In your undershirt, smiling.
From you boots (Ma allowed you to keep them on) drop
Dust and grey grass, scatter in the musty breeze
On our living room rug.
Ma couldn't stop exclaiming: boots in this heat, you must be crazy!

You must be crazy, I reflect now,
To take your own life.

We are your little cousins who stare in bubbling adoration
As you tap your boots and strum a lonely guitar
Sing with eyes eying the wooden beams above that define
Our human menagerie, outline the ceiling.

Similar wooden beams where
One day you would sling your shirt in a loop.

Or was it the bright scarf you wore one placid winter
Working on tomatoes in your precious patch?
We giggled around ecstatic in touching the red round forms
And squished ourselves with blood of fruits while you sung.
The tunes stutter in my ears
As though they were butterfly wings broken and stuck
Still throbbing with the music of life that wished to live.
So young, yet you sing of pain! Ma had exclaimed.

You must have been pained
To die while we still hummed your song.

You let me play the strings once
You let me touch your colors that kept you busy through night
I marveled at your sculptures so lifelike
Perhaps life was elsewhere for you, I think.

Love is everything, it’s all up there, you had said winking
Before you were gone that summer day, waving at us kids,
Shirt back on. We practiced the springy steps you taught
And howled to see you go, Hawaiian guitar and all.

‘It’s all up there’ meant nothing to us then
Until we heard you were dead, my dead cousin.

They had brought your body down, flower dangling from a twig
Laid you beside your friendless guitar
Ma told us after many years the meaning of your songs –
He was a child of another world, she said, shy and alone.

THE WEATHER IN MY TOWN

I finally, admit it. But don't hate me for thinking this way, please! I have been slow in putting up poems on my blog because I didn't feel very comfortable about it always. Perhaps because I am technically a new blogger. It's not just random people picking up my random thoughts and lines that I am scared of, but it's also something to do with my allegiance to the paper form of my writing, an old habit nurtured too long. Anyway, I'll try to be more forthcoming as time passes. Now, I wrote this poem up realizing I sorely miss the warm and humid weather of India -- the years I spent in Delhi, and before that my hometown Guwahati. Both the places I'll see soon. Ithaca has summers like Delhi autumns and winters like the North Pole...!! Hence this musing about the weather!

It’s musty in my town --
Not frosty
It’s a bit hasty
Like here it is gusty
It tweaks open buds early morning
Makes my shingled heart tremble
With it’s rippled caress every dawn.
It can be dry as rolled oats
With sand flowing under the nails
After rivers go for a sleep-full rest
Never to come back again

Like lost pets.
**
It’s musty
And not frosty
It rains as if the sky had forgotten
Something stirred its tears
Kicking up spiral mud where
Our ankles twist and slip playfully
And our guard drops like water
That wipes our dusty faces
Tired from running life’s errands –

Same jokes, same wasted tests.
**
It’s musty
Not frosty at all
Although winter can hoodwink
You into bundling up in
Hats socks and scarves entwining
As though we were trapped inside
Thermal rainbows, fuzzy and bright
Watching the mist roll up its
Car windows, slowly passing by –

A short-term guest.
**
It certainly is musty
Never frosty there
A bit lusty with bodies shining
In sweat and warm diurnal light
Gliding through the sun and moon’s
Humid corridors to where
The town heaves everyday

Without repose or rest.

Writing Ruba'i

Of late I've been reading and practising writing "rubaiyat" (plural), an adapted form of the classical Persian quatrain, each derivative quatrain or four-lined verse called a "ruba'i". In Persian I'm told, the ruba'i is only 2 lines long...

The most famous example of the adapted rubaiyat form in English is Edward FitzGerald's 1859 translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Another very popular form of this Persian quatrain is found in Robert Frost's 1922 poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". We've all read it, haven't we? Still one of my favorite poems.

Now each ruba'i that I've written below are only evolving ones, because I'm constantly changing them and re-working them. It is not as easy as it seems, but definitely fun, especially when the rhyme scheme has to contain a pithy idea. Here I use the AABA rhyme scheme:

Brutus Sings A Ruba'i

From behind O Caesar, when I saw your trusting head
I imagined homeless folks, kids hungry in bed
Democracy raped, chasms deep all around
That noble moment let my hand, remorseless, strike you dead.

Shakuntala Sings A Ruba'i

If a ring were everything, a face, an identity
I should call my luck all but serendipity!
Thus I too have learnt to take a passing fancy
At faces like talismans. There’re too many, O king, in your city!

(I don't like putting footnotes, so I'll let readers find out on their own about Shakuntala's story and the reference here...)

Mobocracy – a Ruba’i

This is where you took home millions
And nurtured your unworthy scions
Those that hardly cared for a ballot to come clean

Or reach out to lambs eaten by lions!

(Persian literature in translation has engaged me ever since I was a child. For more information we can go to A Brief History of Persian Literature, by the Iran Chamber Society. Feel free to add more ruba'i on the Comments section or on your respective blogs. Will be fun!)

CHANGE

I extend my newfound
hand to the clouds
I spread out my hair like the
light of the night
I step on a graveled
path that blooms

I give myself a name
That discounts all we knew so far in the name of peace and war

And the firmament splits

I am a tree, a border, a language

I take sides
I change.
This is called change.

All Souls Saved

My Halloween musings, in a poem:

The day splits open like a pumpkin
Orange and sunny

Seeds are birds
They peck on dark leftover clouds in the corners

Clouds or souls that pine to leave
With night, fog and disembodied leaves
Dropping one two three
From the great white oak on the lawn

It is still slender
Yet to grow in girth
Mimics the dreams and mysteries this day
May bring or night may savor –

Brief passion, eyes of amber, skin that sizzles
And masquerades to waltz with the wind

A crazy reveler who talks to the dead
In a tongue that lives, forever lives.

A Few Things of Remembrance

Okay, so there's a brothers and sisters festival coming up soon. It is observed mostly in the eastern part of India and is known by two or three different names. I had written the poem below not exactly addressing this sentimental occasion, but generally as a musing about my brother and me when we were kids, and above all, brats. The poem is an exercise in some kiddish recollections... but for a change I like it. Sometimes, a brief vacation from the adult world refreshes me. Hence this me-created nursery rhyme, edited a bit from the existing version on Sulekha.com...

A Few Things of Remembrance

He would always do
such nasty things,

My brother. He'd always upset me.
Once he had snuck open my sketchbook


And doodled a darn bird
That mocked my unruffled
sunrises and gregarious waterfalls


With that cock-a-doodle-doo trick.
Defiant, brash, energetic,

It showed me the lack of sound and movement in my art.

He had secretly scribed it in there with no one watching, not me.
A darn springy little chick.

I got hold of his toy train tracks,
vendetta of course!


And hammered it altogether
Just to make the point that I

did not need a plucky rooster
To animate the heart of my art
However immobile or inert.


I made sure his toy engine would
not puff and rush along like before


My hammer made sure it flattened them all,
a neat rejoinder
Against a scrappy bird mocking my part.

My brother stole my watercolor
tablets the next time

And soaked them well
In a plastic bucket; especially

his favorite ones – red and blue
So he could paint his tiny face
Usually cherubic and chaste.

He chose a droopy holiday
afternoon for the venture


Finding me tired doing those clock-time math
homework and sleepy,
He let the colors run without trace.

I coaxed him into acting in
my dance drama – a ploy –


He was made up as a girl.
Wearing pink frock and frills,

blue liners and painted ruby lips –
A fairy child framed on the walls
Of my Roman Catholic school.

Little did he know how I laughed with
my mischievous friends, called him names,


Punishing him for spoiling my watercolors,
have him dance and jig
Like a girly girl!

My incorrigible sibling stole my
new dolls, actually kidnapped them.


They were barely acquired.
Even before I opened the packing,

examined their tubby face and lace,
Georgette gown and pageboy hair,
Brother and sister –– an adorable pair,

He fed them gumdrops in captivity and
suddenly became a brother to them.


Then realizing something he surrendered to me
unconditionally,
Entire cache! How rare!

I would always do this to make
you understand, he mewed:


I thrive in your playthings.
So I took your dolls, rainbow

paintboxes, sketchbook and games
Tiny balls of clay dough clinging
Candy-coloured blocks for building

Our pools of friendship where I’d swim
like a busy fish, with you


In the waters of life that perhaps would
recede steadily everyday

Until our parting.

My brother and I indeed left our
home of tales and so it feels now


I can let him have it all,
Visit it at will with his perky doodles,

funny designs and secret doors
Through where we now travel

To a childhood untroubled,
Every now and then together following
trails that he or I uncannily left


After all fights and quarrels were done and
stolen moments came home
never to double.

Looking at the broken engine, one-legged
carts, dollhouses, cracked fishbowls,


I want to tell him how our silly kiddish
capers now make me smile,


Coming back like dreams
All of it really seems
Coloured leaves we gather as we go on

into a prolonged autumnal spell.

FREE WRITING -- A Poem

The atavistic life of ancient
Turks or for that matter, Romans, before that Scythians
and who knows who else, is a testimony to the fact that human beings have, time and again, perfected the art of lying,
deception and inflicting misery on others who they (or is it we)
saw
as
'others'. This is so much like a road

taken again and again
and very much like what I read in Kay Ryan's poem last night,
that a road NOT taken is a road closed to all, to paraphrase Ryan.
The road is here, there,

everywhere. To me it looms
like blue elephants, slow and majestic.
Or it also becomes dry flowers that usually fall in concentric
rings from trees that hardly care.
My pets, my books, my dear ones, are all strewn
along this road dusted with my little deceptions, obsessions and disharmony.
What is atavistic?
What does it mean?
I can't even remember because I don't have my dictionary
or my thesaurus with me. See, how I deceive myself too?
I'm always taking the aid of these tools,
and to a large extent, my computer -- the Internet.

I war

on my senses, my own
memory. I keep them gagged.
And we as humans have been doing this over
and over again until some roads -- especially those that are NOT
taken and those that WANT
to be taken by so many -- are forever closed.
War, deception, memory
linger on like sticky cheese on fingers, making
me sad. Sad because I wish it were different.
But to tell a secret, it also makes me happy, immensely, to note that rigor
is a name applied to anything and everything.
So, there's a chance!

My Sunday Reading -- Seamus Heaney

Apart from gathering old stories and articles (mostly written by me) I also read something refreshing every now and then. Poetry Foundation (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=182158) is a good place to go, and when I read Seamus Heaney, one of my favorites, the weekend seems quite good despite the gray sky and that nibble at the toes by a nagging about-to-descend autumn weather hovering outside my doors. Joshua Weiner writes an insightful article about Heaney's craft and how identity plays a role in shaping it...

Casualty

by Seamus Heaney
I
He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back.
Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes, on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.
But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.
II
It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.
But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.
He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?
‘Now, you’re supposed to be
An educated man,’
I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.’
III
I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse...
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond...
Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.

Eileen Moeller's "Vertical Footholds" in Kritya

Poet Eileen Moeller's "Vertical Footholds" appears in Kritya's September issue. An excellent visual poem that made me search out Eileen's blog so I can read her updates regularly. See http://eileenmoeller.blogspot.com/2008/09/my-poem-vertical-footholds.html

She is so kind to mention my contribution too. As Upstate New York 'neighbors', it was a pleasure to be published alongside her work.

A Sulekha poetry prize

I don't have the audacity to post the poem here, I really never thought it'd be getting a prize. But Sulekha.com, the gigantic website that is a jolly pastime for expats and residents Indians alike as well as a few 'outside' voices, took a poem of mine and declared it one of the winners in one of their ongoing contests. This was a poem about my brother and me, seen through a very puerile juvenile pair of eyes, but no, really, I won't post it here! I am happy but a little embarrassed.

A couple of my other Sulekha poems are presented in the form of hyperlinks on this site. So if you find the one in question while chasing those ones, good luck! In the meanwhile, I am twiddling my thumb and hoping for more news about writings I have been submitting here and there.

Wonders are many

Blink.
Spots fly
Before i can blink.
Through the ashen tree
A stream flows
Taking its heart.
Blink.
Spots.
May be blots.
I blink.