In a world of shopkeepers setting up shop amidst the rubble of relationship, this soul trips from time to time. I tear my knees on a triangle of broken glass, a window through which the sky is held aloft with the outstretched fingers of a kind of green. I tear my right kneecap, on a shard of time, who knows from where, and I pick up the moment like a postcard of a place I once knew. But in that brief moment, of sweet pain, I feel, again, the chipped heartbeats of comrades unseen, a crumbling monument of surprise, a Babel of earthly squeals that you might mistake for delight. I know that I must rise, it is not a question of fear.
What epiphany is there in that wound. It is a strange kind of inconvenience, this disdain for something that lingers in your mind, that births curiosity. What is there but this piece of myself, I can offer you, even a stranger, with scraps of breathing reverberating across the three worlds. Is this community?
It is a conspiracy, this audacious heist - to snatch under the very eyes of experience, a gaze that lives in the gut of every soul. Sometimes in the city you find again, that which you forgot you had grown accustomed to - you perceive for a moment, that glint of foxglove, that murmurration of street that is a vein you want to open. The sound of digging, and of the local MP canvassing, sits besides the miracle of the stray coming to you at sunrise, and nuzzling against your thigh, at the same time, everyday, for his biscuit.
There are so many windows, and when one opens, and the wind throws a flower into the vacant room of the heart, the smell is momentary. This tender, fragile thing (a poem, is always flickering. And so it is that I have to throw it back into the crowd, with the knowledge of betrayal. I know you will proclaim spring too, and we will jeer.
Is that what makes us human? That we can’t stand the things we love, and we are the better for it?
why not?
I’ve taken to bookending poems with a question. The question brings the future into the present. The question mark is actually a comma in disguise, simply because its sole purpose is to not look back. The question drags, with steadfast temper, the sentence from one finality, to another. The question doesn’t even need the question mark, It lives in the inevitability of ascent. When there is a question, it implies a beginning not an end.
This anxiety of hope is deeper even, than the cloying of an open parenthesis.
The pulse of Robert Creeley’s poems lives in the breath. His philosophy of meaning-making dwelt in the rhythms of breathing, how it is a shared secret rarely observed. Not metaphor or simile, but what air does in the cities of our bodies. His poems are letters with not a single syllable out of place, even in emotion, or conjecture. In this way the concentrate the effort of the time it has taken for the word to reach the page, for perception to blunt into language, and still in that foggy image, lives the seed of insight, of knowledge. His poems are marked by a deep concern with our relationship to others, to those we love, to nature, to people from other worlds, to this shared experience of strangeness.
I want to share with you, also, a poem by Mary Ruefle, that is connected to this idea. There is one line in this poem that slew me, honestly. But she also uses the phrase “empty intimacy”, that is uttered with her characteristic boldness of the certainty, of mystery of difficult questions. What is fascinating for me in Ruefle’s poem, is the way it weaves a dynamic of journeying through time, and space, without really appearing to move. She does this, not with the stilted breathwork of Creeley’s existential scroll, but with the practiced tenderness of a returning wave. Each sentence is a swoop that encircles the entire world, from the perch of self.
The past has trudged to this one spot/ with a flashlight in its mouth/ and falls into the stream.
If the poetry, and the commentary, resonate with you, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.
If the portal isn’t working. Please write to me - poetly@pm.me
(Matlab, if you can’t, that’s also fine, obviously. This will always be a free newsletter)
Note: Those, not in India, who’d like to support the work I do at Poetly, do write to me - poetly@pm.me. (Paypal seems to have left the building, still figuring it out)
You can write to me, waise bhi, if you feel like it :)
Thanks for reading Poetly! Do subscribe if you are not reading this in your inbox. Cheers!