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Girl sits snug in her painted corner
And I sit here in midnight on draft.

I think on what Mr. Matisse means,
By a girl looking with slant at book,

Whether reading is subject or vase
& why do classics always show up.

We and the poet slow down to chase
A transience before it leaves our lives.

We share transience with the statues,
Poets overgrown by tallest of weeds

With squirrel holding its nuts in them.
We share transience with the squirrel.

The algae lie peacefully with a yogic ibis
Its one leg on the rock, its white double

In waters, doing its penance for the day.
The boatman scoops up algae into boat

From the ripple breaking him into pieces.
A dappled lake is all that we are looking

Smoke curls beyond shore are not thing
Not a high point when a sun plays hooky

Shore trees look inward,the eyes closed.
Smoke disappears to turn an empty sky.

I shall now wait for not being there
To become habit, ship for the land

Standing in the sea to hold a secret
When I will turn just other to others

An epitome of a secret life in death
A ship for a land, a haven for a ship.

My not being there will turn a habit
As death will turn a habit, a red sun

On broad plains of eternity, a night
That has fled time, a habit of death

To the world and the stars to flicker
With my not being , in my absence.

(Echoing Rilke in “You are the future the great sunrise red” from the Book of Hours)

At 3 AM stars shine brightest
And then you return to sleep

Overwhelmed by the starlight
The body may fall on its belly

Searching words in its depths
And a sea thinks vastly in sky.

Soon you’ll hear sun’s sound.
Now a body has all the words.

Statue lost ‘I” to night of confusion.
There are no dead sounds in night.

Darkness marks out the disc moon
Like a Frisbee lost in the vague sky.

The “I”s seem lost in the confusion,
Having forgot their souls on bones.

(Inspired by Rilke’s poem “People at night”)

When wife goes, other goes.
When oldness survives wife

A home survives the old age
For notyetold to take to ICU.

Man’s oldness is existential,
His wife his existential other.

Do not sleep over last of fragments.
The fragments will come in dreams.

I am fragment of this opaque night
Having come here from other night

When sea was my world fragment
In its friendly neighborhood banter.

The reader is fragment of big other.
His world space is other geography.

God would start his workings
In the strict regimen of ritual.

In gold and finery he smiled
And worked at our problems.

We wanted to find & waiting
On new God in a bowl of hills.

We stood in queue of waiting
As problems fluttered in eyes

Soon lost their original shape
Like rainmoths freed of wings

And valley is filled with wings
As a windowsill of rain moths.

The masts move slow to wind,
Fish not being ready to die yet,

Butterflies not flying creatures
Flitting in brilliant spring colors

But hopeful boats swarming in
Yellow blouse draped on them

With hopes held high to catch
The fish deaths in living hopes.

Feeling comes first on a cloud
Shaped as cats and elephants

After a sun in sunflower shape
On vast fields of cotton clouds

To be out any time on our back
A warm presence in our collars.