THE BODY AND I

* Child
Seeing is yours in my words. Seeing is a water not spilling from a child’s hands clasping the glass with both hands, feet in slow measured motion.

Or his squatting on the floor drawing feet together to cry,opening and closing his feet like tentacles,in beach sand on their way back to the sea.

* Thinking sculptures
Here in the Dalhousie town ,  snows are gathered up on the roads as weird sculptures of  thinking. The wind  goes angry on  green roofs,. in a shadow of strength , with  pines dancing  to eerie winds.

Dalhousie’s doctrine lapsed a baby’s rights on the royal back of a  fierce queen.A cold wind blew on his white empire.

Everything  lapses and a white rule.  A chill crafts the thinking sculpture that melts by a fierce night wind.

* Snow
The old  would make snow jokes at the bodies, leaving bawdy ones to souls on way  to see Shiva in his snow.

The snow failed to whiten  crows on the electric wire, perched like old bodies hanging on souls.

In the mountains please feel free but hold on tight, Mary, they said.There was no Mary but old body.

The old male body hurled its snow by fistfuls at the old  female body and the laughter cracked an old snow.

* Truth and a half
In the soft night rain on our ears we would take a  first baby  step towards verisimilitude.

We began with first two red ants we had seen crawling  on a sink.How near  truth they were.

The next step was a leap into  the dark.We beat a moving away from truth to it, by clipping a third line.

We made  art imitate life by going only thus far and no farther and beat a hasty retreat.

We have achieved truth and a half  as Roerich did with Himalayas ,going over their edge.

(After viewing the beautiful paintings  series of Roerich on the Himalayas)

* Gold on the peak
There is a  pot of gold on the peak we would go after  in greed.We will grab fistfuls of white stuff and hurl them at us as in pictures.

There is  cold in  bones of flesh, greed in our eyes leaving them red. The old cheeks sagged in apple shame (Apples are bereft  of a deep snow).

We could  have climbed  hilltop where monkeys  snatch spectacles.We  have to get them back from a man  for thirty rupees of hard persuasion.

Horses have us upon them in behinds
but they do not laugh loud for snow.
We hold on to their backs for our life.
They take us where we  hurl snows.

On the bridge we met a dog at  our pantleg. But we were afraid for bones in the leg .We  would shoo him away in superior fright and the old bridge shook in laughter.

* A garden of rocks
Rocks are men  missing souls,in forms and shapes designed to make living in water and air below an empty sky of nothing.

They have  body  shapes,absurd forms of our lives in the night rain, in  the frogs croaks.Some are  turbaned noblemen who do nothing except nobility, absorb nothing of weather with the smoothly rounded cheeks round with unintended laughs.

They are funny laughing faces , their torsos hard as mountains and splutter with their laughter into  broken porcelain epidermis.

They are patchwork  porcelain . In the outside complexion  they break into honeycombs with inside humming bee nothings.

(After a visit to the fantasy rock garden created by Nekchand in Chandigarh)

* Wardrobe
His highness’ wardrobe stretched end to end ,for seven hundred coats to hang.

There were seven hundred dresses. But the body seems somehow missing. Here are shirts and no body in them.

(The erstwhile Hyderabad ruler’s wardrobe was 167 feet long and could accommodate 700 dresses end to end, two for each day of the year)

* Dad’s face
In words it is my deal in silence, an agreement with electric fan,a stillness breathing night air.

Sixty six years of dad’s still face was as if it was an electric fan whirring in a room’s midnight.

Wipe the dust off the fan’s face to experience death’s stillness ,still a running proxy for away.

* World is a purty place
Dorothy’s poem speaks from a low falutin view from a winder. World ,it says,is purty place to live in. In fact it is purty place from everyone’s winder.

Our own falutin is a low window, in our world wide view. A neighbor does not get our goat all the time. Nobody gets his goat either . Except what is hanging with its tail up on a butchers window . A butcher’s window is low falutin and everybody gets his goat.

For the goat’s hanging carcass ,world is not such a purty place. You cannot appreciate beauty from an essentially hanging position.

* School
School had no brick and mortar walls and gave us a holiday during rain. All around us was the foot -high plinth wall, delightfully extending to the bluest of skies.

The sky was at times pale white ,not blue with amoebas of clouds.Class had no walls ,only borders marked out by beginnings of walls.Between the plinth and the asbestos roof was where the infinity of our sky began.

* Enema
Her kneecap is not working to climb the stairs and the lift is not working sadly, temporarily out of power. It is sadness she is reluctant to own. She passes it over to me, nursing my own sadness cumulated in my blood as mankind’s sulking sadness .

Sadness is not hers but actually the enema technician’s. The commotion in the arse will be mankind’s, not hers.

** Enigma
It was an enema ,successfully carried out, a powerful volcanic flow from the nether region. It may be called magma by some kind of a geological analogy but is certainly not an enigma.

We have called it enigma out of politeness.

* After we are words and come to pass
We memorize 60000 words of Paradise Lost and face evil head on, a storm on black sky.

We are justifying ways of God to men.
We try to find some romantic ways of black storms.

God’s words will teach us not to ask questions.We are old man Job.We shall analyse words in our ashes.

But to whom do we justify God’s ways
after we are words and come to pass?

* On my mother’s eighth death anniversary
There was not even  rain and the sun plops down with the fire and the ash.The smoke blurs my eyes over sticks and camphor, a smoky memory of mom.

Words are ash in mouth. My origin recedes to a blur defined by a ball of rice .

** Three balls of rice
In August we will offer rice balls to crows of our ancestors .It was in August eight years ago when mom turned ancestor from a mom. Ancestors come down on our compound walls as crows every year to eat our rice balls.

Ancestors understand only Sanscrit .Our priest will act the interpreter because we don’t follow Sanscrit .

We offer three rice balls one for mom ,one for her mother-in-law and the last one for mother-in-law’s mother-in-law.Only mother-in-laws qualify as our ancestors .

* Narrow eyes
With two narrow windows on either side, the door is only ajar with the man who froze in the path somewhere near the hillock. Above the hillock were cloudlets frozen and they cannot rain their monsoon because the man should reach waiting eyes in the window anytime.

Woman’s eyes were faint behind the rusted window rails.The birds in their v’ s are however frozen in their skies in the West. The palm beside the hillock is heavy with fruit in its frond.

There is no relief for the woman’s eyes. In such stillness how can there be any respite?

But the iron rails have not stopped rusting.

* Spoken words
Spoken words were a poetry in themselves , in the spaces in between and after. We speak in slices of a night’s silence , with the wind battering the trees and trying to capture our moments.

We address our minds to the cuckoo that has just got up from its mango sleep. A wind will hurl down raw mangoes yet to fully ripen for our eating.

But there is always background noise in all our spaces, a noise of falling bodies like mangoes . The wind will fill the spaces between them.

* Jhamsingh and breaking
He was the princely cavalry man with a fine mustache and keen sense of humor . He went to buy horses and used the money to build a house for God. What a fine sense of humor! God had come to him in a dream under the banyan and he would make a temple instead. God would be hard granite and wear a pencil thin mustache in the new built temple .We are all a soft fine clay.

Surprising, God needed a house and the Sultan needed horses . It was He who had made him, us all, horses and Sultans in our original molecules. Didn’t He ?Why would He need a house in a figment of a dream under the banyan?

Was all this a horse play? Isn’t everything made of soft fine earth , waiting to be broken ?If not why are those funny terra cotta horses laughing at the end of their long necks?

** Terra cotta horses
We were amused by Bankura’s Terra Cotta horses. Why do they always wear amused expressions at the end of their long decorated necks? Apparently these Terra Cotta horses were amused to see us on our short undecorated necks.

In a one-up situation ,we wear a satirical expression on top of our short necks.

** Jhamsingh was in a jam
He went out to buy horses but made a home for his God instead. Sultan had other Gods and would like to pray Westwards. His God lived that way .And he wanted the horses more. Jhamsingh was in a sticky jam.

It was Sultan’s prime minister who got Jhamsingh’s neck out of the jam.As recompense ,it was agreed he would make a house for the Sultan’s God too. Thank God, now everyone’s God has a home.

* Cumins and goins
He the poet of the lower case keeps coming and going. “In just” has just cumin with a lame goat balloon man. Like in the ads new stocks are just in. The balloons are high up to the spring.

Here in our basement there are comings and goings. Basement girls come out for the ice cream man , who pulls out his punches from the basement of his trolley where the cones were sleeping . Our girl tongues come out from their mouths where they were sleeping. It is such a fine spring to watch the comings and goings of girl tongues softly over ice cream cones.

(Reference to e.e.cumins poem “In Just”)

* Poetry is a river in Mandsaur
Poetry is a breeze rustling in the tree after the temple tank’s mossy stillness.On our consciousness had luminously arrived a phallus God, in His stone beauty- hues.

The cyclical eight faced God stone is ,in turns, tranquil-white and angry-red in eyes.A washer man had used it in rhythmic beats beating laundry.

We have our myths, carefully polished over Time’s washed stones of the dry riverbed, our cumulated minds enormously meshed as haystack of a shared consciousness.Our gods have uneasily existed all these days with spirits who have to be driven out from darkly lonely houses and fearful men.

On the hillock pallid ghosts come haunting in moonlit houses amid systolic blood-chants .You know our god is fear ,not rain’s beauty or lonely jungles with the fall of cascades I keep thinking, while my glass eye twitches for brown beauty and pixelated praise.

** Poem is a river
A midnight’s poem flows over the smooth round stones like a river and reaches its Bay of Bengal.

Some night poems do not reach the sea but enter other rivers on their way to the sea.Like pilgrims walking in the jungle join other pilgrims and journey to their hill Gods.

* The lower case
Cumins the lower case poet keeps coming and going. “In just” has just cumin with a lame goat balloon man. Like in the ads new stocks are just in. The balloons are high up to the spring.

Here in our lower case there are comings and goings. Basement girls come out for the ice cream man , who pulls out his punches from the basement of his trolley where the cones were sleeping . Our girl tongues come out from their mouths where they were sleeping. It is such a fine spring to watch the comings and goings of girl tongues softly over ice cream cones.

(Reference to e.e.cumins poem “In Just”)

* Drowsy old man infant
The drowsy old man-infant is now squinting at the ruddy sun. He is a new infant amid his several antique acceptances, enfant terrible , whose eyes are whole pearls opaque with incomplete questions . Those are pearls that were his infant eyes. Nothing of his eyes doth suffer a sky- change into something rich and strange.

Drowsy old men ask too many questions.
They are incomplete like their antic suns
Drowsy old men are bib drooling infants,
Their questions incomplete, not remarks,
Leaving all of them for afterlife solutions.
Drowsy men are no eyes for real red sun.
They ask incomplete questions of mothers
Who they were when they were ,and why.

(After reading Questions Are Remarks , a poem by Wallace Stevens)

Drowsy old man walks on his fours. He has a rich Himalayan fur against the winter cold. He writes his antique poetry full of questions that ask nothing and are no remarks . His questions are best left to the after life. They are wholly incomplete.