Ghazal
No story can redeem time or ensure memory —
these moments but children of one obscure memory.
Autumn’s anguish is a malaise of ochre mulch. I
dive through and find at lake’s bottom an ür memory.
Why do shers, like wails, gather in golden sheaves around
my heart? Soon they’ll form small piles to immure memory.
Look but don’t touch or dare place your palm on my heart.
Like Glauke my skin burns, swollen with pure memory.
White marigolds fall from my eyes when he takes my face
in his hands. Can sweet fabled love endure memory?
No child of midnight, I was sung to in orphan-time.
I blew out, eyes closed, candles of future memory.
The record skips then repeats the measure we must dance.
Radif of my soul! — No refrain can moor memory!
Keep talking or he’ll enter his world of dreams. Without
his brown eyes, who’ll be there to reassure memory?
I debark Ovid’s mute trees and hear denuded cries
for shelter. Even poor nature can’t cure memory.
His fingers in my hair. The light a translucent green.
Above warmly blankets us an azure memory.
Sometimes a braid unraveling or silk crumpling beneath
sleeping bodies — images alone lure memory.
Springtime. The lawn a stutter of cool, pinkish white hues.
Perennials return like wounds to fissure memory.
Preethi, I say, as if I sounded a memento
mori — no word, no image can suture memory.
⟐ ⟐ ⟐ ⟐
Rinsed Rice
Hands submerged in clouds
of starch-filled water, dimpled rings
across the brimming surface and light,
refracted from the swirling pool,
braiding its latticework on the ceiling.
Images stand like terse ideograms —
palpably sheer yet remote, a window
frame on which idly flare and float
lace curtains of pure feeling.
A moment from the past may,
like a photograph in shallow shelves
of water, slowly continue to develop
until it achieves a brilliant clarity but
what the dominant mood once was
the image describes, day by day
shifts, is annotated and reprised.
Today, for example, I think the mood
was of the darkening blue sky
above us that, on being shaken,
cast blond leaves on my mother’s head
and blanketed the book on my lap.
Tomorrow the mood will be
her vacant stare emptying
across our kitchen window sink —
the way her eyes pressed a crease
discerned on the line of drying linen.
It takes an image to describe the feeling
in another image; which is to say,
once I tore brittle leaves and hid them
in a book; which is to say,
whatever once lurked within
my honeycombed mind now evades
its reach, like grains of rice, glides past
a hand’s cupped sieve; which is to say,
though I can see my face ripple across
the polished surface of our kitchen table
under the altering light of a hunger then
as yet unknown to me, I will never know
what throng of cloistered thoughts
flickered in me and what they coveted
or if what I could have said and might have felt
alike, would ever be more concise
than the stiff, blank sheets that fluttered
toward her impassive face.
And yet, this also seems certain.
My posture was never one of reflection
but simple supplication and gaze.
Busy figure, turn to me. Be the felt.
Give to my frail and maundering thoughts
the pulse of wind whistling through linen.