On reality, and the music of sight
Reality is rarely enough. I seek out words, I cull them from the surface of vacant visions; visions that soar from the liminal silence between reverie and dawn, the way a whatsapp notification is birthed in the silence of your phone. You have been waiting for a message, that you do not know has reached you. The poem is a dream that you will write when you wake up. It waits, fully composed at the threshold of the day. The question is - will you write it? Will the message reach its home? Do I dare disturb the universe?
Between cinnamon tea that coaxed just the right amount of rain on a Koompally morning, and Mysore Bajji, I think of dead people. I often do. Don’t you? How nice it would be to eat jeera rice and karela ghosht (he claimed this was his favourite dish in an interview) with the qawwali legend, Nusrat.
I wouldn’t ask him for music though. I would just sit and listen, together, with him to all the sounds. I want to ask him if he had lost his sense of smell during Covid, would he have continued his riyaz?
Perhaps, we’d meet at a restaurant which gave the illusion of sitting down on the ground - you know those japanese places which have a hidden chamber for your feet, and a low table where you can eat edamame (I think we both have trouble sitting cross-legged on the ground for long periods). Did you know that that is what immature soybeans are called?
I would ask him also about his prisons, and whether he broke free. I would like to think he did, I would like to believe that a window that betrayed freedom was more than enough for him to find song. Did he find a silence in which he could plant his questions? Was there vantage enough for for him to see them grow without worrying about how they turned light into meaning? Did he smile after he rolled the boulder right to the top? Was reality enough for him. Was his song an ode? or a forest?
Sometimes words crowd around an image, clamouring to be released.
With the din of that chorus in my ears, I surrender.
When I read these two Andrea Cohen poems today, this is what I felt. These are the winds she wraps around a forest. These are the apples she picks up from deserted orchards we have all visited. But she knew better than to leave them lying there.
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