by Sreyash Sarkar
The Macrame of Carnal Waves
”Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.”
– Sylvia Plath
Below the highway darkness turns the heath
To ancient shapes, to where the wind trots on hooves,
The mist acloak swirling, or further back
To that with eyes and claws and scales and beak.
She grips the wheel, following dotted lines:
No traffic and yet she keeps to the lane.
A tick could throw her lighted world out of gear,
The earth erupts into all that has been there.
As burnt stars fill the night,
I remember her like imprints of a swan’s feet left on sand
Drenched in lunar ecstasy,
That she rushed in like July ebbs,
And returned with receding flows
While by the river side rests a shattered boat,
its worn-out sails
Awaits a dreamer’s touch, like the gush of torrential winds with impending motion to transcend the silence of oars…
I anticipate, alone, grasping her morose clay
As the norms go before cremating- so dark and detached.
While the bond between living fingers and deceased dull eyes
Dream of galloping across meadows-
March days return with their covert light,and huge fishes swim through the sky,vague earthly vapours progress in secret,things slip to silence one by one.
Through fortuity, at this crisis of errant skies,
She reunites the lives of the sea to that of fire,grey lurchings of the ship of winter,to the form that love carved in the guitar.
As seen in fantasy and observed in facts
We evolve to humanity from mere human beings.
As I dispose all of her that remained
And witness how waves wash away burnt stars
And how the neon beacons on masked sails, distressed…
The Cage
It was the day that
The bird flew away to a horizon
Unknown, beyond reach
Incapable of childish marriages and fluid births,
Setting out a cry, distinct in its screech, the retaining tone
It scratched the earth, untill colourless blood oozed out of it
Drop, by drop, and then a flood….
I did not remember anything
I was still taking the fragrance of the smothered rice bowl
Empty of its contents
And stripped of its identity
But I did ask, and further asked myself in the dark,
About the shiver down my spine
The shiver had turned into a
Stirring
Something was being churned in the granary
A small grain, a jinx
Wafted about in the sick air
I did not remember anything
I was still taking the fragrance
Of the smothered rice, bowl
Empty of its contents
Stripped of its identity
Something was being cooked
Inside me
Persistently in frivolous extents
That ensnared my instincts
Cooked and cooked
Till scarlet,
Fresh from my blood.
Malaise
“Our indiscretion sometimes serve us well, when our dear plots do pall…”- Hamlet, 5.2.7, Shakespeare.
‘The dawn has descended upon us’, said the Elder ,
Let us hurry, or be hunted
Let us conjecture, or be battered
Let us herald, or be outwitted
..”
The little girl, inebriated in the beauty of the words,
Is lost in an ineluctable void
Not a dream, not a nightmare..
The panoply of the setting sun
A Subliminal enticement
An Enervate mind
The poke, the stirring
The unavoidable voice from within..
Mendacious..
The lost one is lost again
The discovered one is extinct
The unfathomable is ethereal
Out came the menorah
Of realization
Not a dream, not a nightmare..
The harlot smiled;
The moonstruck man laughed
The ineligible bride rejoiced
And the enlightened, jocund
Not a dream, not a nightmare..
The girl stood.
A jiffy, jeopardized with happiness..
Blossomed and faded
Blossomed and faded
Enshrined and faded
Captured and faded
Faded and faded..
Blasé. Blemished.
Not a dream, not a nightmare…
