A line from a poem
A line
From a poem
Came to me in dream
In two versions:
Almost like a legal document
I did not know if
It was a verb
Or a mood
I had to change
Or perhaps,
A whole person
Broken up, fragmented
In need of flight and
Root,
At the same time.
A branch breaking off in perfect
Calm
To travel a safe distance
Before disappearing
From the bound of memory
Forever.
A philosopher meets his match
I never asked
For the moon
But she
Arrived at my door
One stolen evening
Just like a summer storm
Drenched and asking
To be in
Carrying the past as if
It was only yesterday
A baby in her arms
Hers.
My door is always open, I say,
Come in.
The past is a forgotten – extinct – species.
At that time, I was wrapped in philosophy,
On the beginning of zero,
Whether we were one or two,
If the monads and the nomads were indeed one.
I had no need for time
Or time for need
A tattered white shirt, coffee-hued bell-bottomed trousers, tailor-stitched
Was all I wore – to college
Spectacles on a rhino nose
And a heart as large as the moon I coveted
But never found.
It was between pages that our love met
And blossomed like a spring flower
Me adept in the minefield of Lacan and Jung
She another creature from the forest of
Darkness – more Blake, less Shelley.
When we had parted, it was more for
Want of a future, the lack of means
To find a way to live, the roof over head
The food on table, the future, the future,
Which I felt was just another necessity.
And she was married off, to another man,
Of business, who knew the ways of the world,
Better than I did- or rather, I knew the ways
Of Spinoza better than he did.
But he knew how to conduct affairs of the coin
Knew how to keep bread on the table.
This, I was told, was important.
More important than the question I was after that night:
Which was:
If the plural conditions of being were to dissolve in a battleground
In a spirit of Brownian sentiment,
Would we still survive, and be one
Species?
We agreed that night, forever, if ever,
Our ways met, or she had to come this way,
My door, my broken storm-tossed
Thatched door that mended no fires in the
Heart, would always be open.
And so it was that day,
When she came, storm-tossed,
Of her own will, back to the grinding
Heart of the matter, a prayer
A goddess in disguise, or simply,
Mala.
She said – nothing.
I found a bed for her, let her baby rest
A huddled mass that knew no sleep.
Opened the neighbourhood shop – pulled up the shutters – of the cloud of Brownian sediment-
Milk that had never seen my house before.
That night I found some answers to my questions.
A post-colonial love story
Words slip from the roof of my tongue,
Thatched and buried,
Waiting for a hatching.
Without changing meaning like seasons.
They juggle in freshly cooked dreams, steaming from the cooker,
I let them sizzle,
Fill my heart with the absence of words.
I know
The reader is dreaming in another language.