ANGELS WE ARE NOT

I

Trees stand upright, devoid of airs
Birds roam aimlessly
Clouds, one of their species,
Are afloat without wings
It is certain now that the time of rain’s begun
Horses are deep in their practice run,
With magic awhirl in their eyes
Like vines, the colour of rain has spread
On their drenched backs and streaked down
Unknown even to the rain, the scavenger is sinking
Along with the rain’s debris
There is no better season in which
To weave the body’s history

II

When the snow-body, molten
In the heat of breath,
Met the eye,
Life’s fount opened its lips and flowed
In the evening, when another time called,
The body wore, and wore again, those garlands
Of fire; was gutted
In the morning that greeted and spun you around
In the zones of breath, love itself
Was Death’s scented pollen
In the hard rain that lops your head
And flings it on the ground,
As wheels turning within a wheel,
Life’s eye shrinks to its essence

III

It was in that city deficient
In sperm count, through which
Burdensome nights passed, that I met her

In the groves that beckoned me to understand
The loneliness she had made familiar,
Sounds of falling fruit that birds chewed and spat out
Would stun me, like someone following furtively behind

Lean cats prowling in search of dried fish
And snakes racing now and again across the courtyard
Would drag her house bereft of electricity’s hues
Towards realms of magical fiction

Trimming the lamp’s wick, and casting
On the wall a gigantic shadow of her bare body,
She would tell me shadow tales spiked
With the milk of my forefathers

Only buds that are yet to flower
Wouldn’t have heard or known such tales

IV

She who obsessed over the body
Started a trade for its sale
After scraping clean the body’s slush
From her underclothes, and
Making the body whole,
She carried it, as in a lamp-lit
Procession at the temple festival


Wearing a radiance beyond the oppressive heat,
Everyone followed her
Like wet clothes hung up to dry,
They were worn out by lust’s torments
By and by, they pelted her with stones
Carrying her lamp, she fled down those streets
The city itself caught fire, burned

We now look on piteously
At the tents coated with the body’s ash
Firemen are still at their task
Of rescuing the body

V

As seedlings, several centuries ago,
Breasts sprouted in her body’s black soil
She forgets them sometimes, as they quiver
Among the straining bodies

As the sun goes down, they boom like conches —
Very close to her heart

A thread of rain enters her and unravels; then
Lust’s fangs rise all over her body

If those conches were to open their mouths,
They might speak of her body’s travails

VI

The day destroys the night’s holy processions
In the torment of being pregnant with a word
Untouched yet by anyone’s heart, finger and lip,
Her body yearns. Yearning is what it must do.
In this rainy season of lakes filled
With ashes falling from the sky, it lives
Like a virgin-seed battened with its own fruit
Patterns drawn by a child’s fingers, distinguishing
By touch the eyes, hair
And other organs of a flower,
Have strung her body together,
As the roots of a plant grip the soil tight

In the dimples of fleshy organs sits,
Cowering, her endless hurt
We who together sip our sweet drinks
From different glasses, savour
Our separate memories alone

VII

Standing alone in the woods and writhing
At the touch of the finger that stalks —
That continues still

When I return by the same path,
It lies there limp
Like a noose-rope broken

Flowers of the night
Are awake, like the lidless eyes
Of corpses

In the din of the body sprouting machines all over,
A child’s laughs weakly sputters
In the lash of the season’s rain.
The eye’s flame is dimmed; goes out

We are not angels, after all

ANGELS WE ARE NOT