Lady Lazarus at the Crossroads

The Mortuary

A slit of light
Rasped as the door opened.
It rolled over and the whiteness
Spiraled in contours.
Cold, with those weeds clinging on
Like relentless capillaries,
We let the light rust our blood.
Steel scraped sand.
Moss was uprooted.
“Come on now,” an echo blotted the
Silence – Let us trespass, let us unshroud.
Webbed in white,
We unearthed.
To the mirages, yes go, let’s –
To those mirages where the earth grows.
To those mirroring mirages
Where light will become sight,
Where dust will become clay.
Let us go where the violent whiteness
Will become – a bit less – transparent.

And what a lavish desert awaits.

I
Sedimentary as stages,
These stones, grain by grain,
Diffuse into dust.
And then, as each mountain
Rumbles down, as pebbles that slip,
Stumbling down, each rock
Roams idly till it reaches
Its own valley. The mandrakes are quiet. All quiet.
Drops of dust descend.
They mortar these valleys
That travel across fumbling distances.
A quiver and even the
Valleys collapse.
The dust deepens.
Each stoned passage is
The excavated. One by one
Dissected.
But dry bones only rattle when disturbed.
As each finger unwinds its gauzy touch,
The rocks powder powerlessly
Into molten loam.

II
That luckless drop of dust is
Comforted by cobweb walls that slip, that stream
Like uncertain tributaries delivering
Charity across etherized shores.
Floating flotsam – these glass bottles –
Carry mangrove waters.
A cosmos is shrouded in a plastic cup.
A cosmos voyaging on a straw raft –
Tipping stealthily over the shoulders of
This murky, opaque sea.
The surge summons.
It drags – how it lingers –
Postponing adventures into delirious delays.
A thorn of a crown
Rises like an ivory horn.
The raft rushes to grasp.
No wings will carry
Across these gyrate blues.
The moon is a broken slab of ice.
The shoulder shrugs
Till the horn swoons with a simmer of smoke.

III
A spark shocks.
Blood broils and bubbles,
Toils and troubles
Till its loudness becomes a shy copper.
A thud, a lash, a guffaw,
As this lava is swallowed down.
A serpent slithers down these blackened cellars.
It reels, rises, then shrivels back
On the blind ground.
The smoke hisses.
Its golden fork chafes the lips.
Splintering drops flake and frost
As blood, like uninvited shoots, mine
The garden.
What fireworks plunge to plunder this dome.
And then, with a gasp of an excited matchstick, are
Choked into an ashen silence.
Lightning incises the blackness.
No bolts. No strikes.
Just chiseling with a blinding precision
Over cowering horizons.

IV
Is there where all vanishing points surrender
Their delirium?
What mirror is this that unveils no shadows.
This whiteness that islands these images
Just looks back,
Unquestioning, as transparent as time.
Those sparkles that blind,
That ribbon across these dunes
Wreathe the end of the gyre.
Perhaps from here the
Lyre looms light, from where
The Wind carries tired voices
Tossing them through empty passages, from where
Cosmoses breathe, turn, and
The retreat again
To hunger –
From here the spiral begins
Its tedium –
As the horizons color themselves
In flickering twilights.
Its largess is lofty, its restraint repentless.

The Requiem

The consummation of vital capacities
Kindles each soul as it comforts its skin
And ebbs and flows baptizing
Footprints stenciling the stride through muck and mire.

Does the light travel
Through the shadow of the prism
That enwombs all color.
And we like eager listeners, eavesdrop
As the mirages beckon.
And should we wade through
This mirror,
Or row and sculpt each ray.
The desert echoes no answer.

23 April 2006.

Diffusion

Sometimes air holds itself back. Sometimes, it seems that it waits for someone to reach out. Answer it – to see if it’s still there, serving. A long pause, that lies within parentheses, searches. Yes, it’s clueless. Yes, there are no more answers. No more phrases. No more fumbling uncertainties. Ambiguities rotted into comfortable ambivalences till both became faceless. Nothing followed nothing.
The night only carries stars pinned onto it, tiny cactuses intruding a desert’s infinitude. Trace each one, each stammering shine, till distances become delirious. It’s then when it’s stark. When miles and miles linger on, persuasively, yet still undiscovered. Uncelebrated. Unaffirmed. Then it’s pure and absolute – of being nothing more, nothing less than a smote in the iris of the universe. Of not being persistent, enough.
One room. One light. An unquestioned cell. A few phone calls. A familiar voice in the same familiar room. Echoes – an asymmetric oneness. Conversations are confabulations. They are stretched. A thread twitches. Then snaps. Silence again.
Cold, cold, caustic silence. Like having platinum around your finger. Just metal. Slippery. Shiny. Somber. Still.
Resilient.
So much knits itself deeper. Inside. So much is needed to defend. Yet, nothingness is unwilling to help. Justifications, humiliated, warm like matchsticks – those gasping sparks. Then darkness again. Capture that laughter in that matchbox. Clasp it.
A dipping sun has a strangely warm mellowness in its retiring glow. It gazes upon crowded streets, through blinds, diffusing in, falling modestly on the table, on human skin, fingers that gesture, then fold back. Locked. Yet an open territory still lies out-of-bounds. Few refer to roadmaps. Fewer bother to measure distance. A corridor. A highway. An auricle. A breath – or just the miles of travel that goes into that single copper ray reaching dust – yet still melting into shadows.
Deeper. Deeper. Rattling bones will bother no one but the dust that grasps them. How trapped. Tampered. Bound. Bonded.
Yet relentless in steeled solitude. Some noise now. Some voice. A crash of glass, a gust of wind, a discordant wail, a ceaseless laugh. Anything – anything that could travel from above and into this universe Held together by paper forceps.

Onion Rings

It’s about bandaging
Sacrament – about
Taking apologies then
Wreathing them with restraint, a remorse,
A ramification
Till the very content
Is subsumed by substitutes.

A dive of a natural love
Can unravel a whole race.
An organic unity that
Holds the entire world,
Worthless as an unfound pearl,
In its untarnished fingers
That long to possess.

A sip has its drops
Divided into controlled decimals
As they round off into
Careful calorific intakes.
An exhausted eye with an iris
Wrung like a traveled globe
Questions quietly.

And then a thorn
That connects as needles do –
Bleeding through threads,
Measuring each error,
Each phrase as it lingers in the air
That we share, when bonded.
We remain so calm otherwise.

I see them –
spiraling into ribbons
of violet warm to the sight
but cold as the possession deepens.
I see the rind of a rainbow
Coiled in those layers,
like unposted letters
that silently rest in stamped envelopes,
clasped like eyelids
that have been kissed – not questioned.

I see them –
horizons locked in those webs,
smoking up as wisps of diffused color
that dims in delirious degrees
till sight becomes blind
and only specks trouble and itch.
That knife decimates the unity –
as an autopsied globe being spread into a map
that stretches over a miles and miles
yet still lies undiscovered.

Only the knife
Consummates it
As it unlocks
Those tiny radii calculating their fall,
As its infinite oneness realizes its
Concentric being
And then dislocates itself from its
Armoring shadows.
It measures certainty in coherent approximations,
As it distributes and delivers.

These tears are sprung by chemicals.
They know no emotion.
They sense only smell.

An uprooted lily wails, somewhere,
Over its severed soul.
Its sliced skin.

24 February 2006

Lost in Translation

I hear a melting crystal.
Loam hardens
under tired feet
that drag along corridors
of a beach with
windows frosted
with an amber sun.
I hear copper waters
simmering the sand
till they square
horizons struggling to
clasp vanishing points
into some unity.

And how we float –
how you row me through.
These temperate waters
carried Miracles in wicker
that made mountains Burn
and Bleed.
Can an iceberg
become a chosen cave
from which shadows lurk
to become light?
Can chilblains heal
to become clotted blood
that inks these white, crystal walls?

Lo what calligraphic
Graffiti stains this marrow.
What whiteness armors these rattling bones
as I continue to rock, and float,
being towed by these lingering reddened
waters.

It sinks, yet stands
rooted. Not waving. Not drowning.
Just afloat.
What drives these laden chalices,
I wonder, to roam
rippling, as they write unheard scripts
in warmed blood.

I run my hand through it all –
the broken glass pauses,
and then becomes plain again.
The ice stiffens each ligament
till posture becomes nature.

And drop by drop
it loiters. It lilts –
Like a sure fingertip grazing over a Braille score.

30 January 2006

Algebra

Across an inked ocean
A bony feather
Trespasses the quiet.
A robin, she said,
Bleeds the snow.
And tiny, wordless shoots
Locked in their seeds
Watch, exiled.
We all watch –
Cactuses in clay pots
Rooted behind
Bolted windows.

We all crave for
A possible desert.

Everyday now I
Pick up pieces
Littered over verbose pages,
Every moment now I
See waters cracking
Apart till glass
Leaves chilblains
On my fingers;
Jarring paper-cuts, banished star-points, squaring circles –
From where does my question begin
To grow and unseed
Itself into some possibility?

Where do I go now
When I see only a faint
Thread sharpening distance
As a metallic light, as a loamy darkness?
From where do I
Graze now when
Sand-dunes wash over
Every single excavation.

The sand struggles
More in possessive hands.

These lines – these defined compass points –
Narrate, yet subjugate.
A wind
That roams
From delirious directions
Swiftly effaces what
They speak.
Only fractured phrases
Linger as dust
That steadily sweeps,
Somehow readily creeps,
Even from my secured window.

And as the frost fumes
Over the glass,
As I trace mirages with
My gloved fingertips,
It is the dust that,
Like a frail skeleton,
Makes the water
Melt down and
Bleed the glass
As rude graffiti.

Come then, I say,
Let me wander and let my
Footprints be smoothed over
By a soaring stroke of this clay.
Let me swim through
Threads of rain
As it ripens
Quilted snow.

My boots are full of slush.
Naked feet should punctuate what the staff Beckons.

I feel this sand with a blind touch – an ashen white.

5 January 2006

And the Silence Suffered no Shadows

I

Shapes and surfaces
Now make me surrender.
This letter I write
Stumbles upon every
Punctuation mark
Till the page
Empties itself stark –
Each phrase fumbles
In fright
As postscripts
Warn to remember
What the content otherwise effaces.

Yes a postscript
That wraps up as Amens do.
They remind of how we
Package, bandage
Our summarized desires
Into endlessly stamped
Possibilities.
And then deliver them,
Let them wander on
Relentless seas
Trapped in inkbottles
That seal yet spill over continents.

II

I had always wanted
Circles gyring freely as
Ripples topple silences
Like mirrors that somehow
Speak and shiver.
I hated symmetry when
Squares would cage
Me into their equilibrium
And pin me down
Where seas and skies
Would toss and turn
And be delivered as broken violet slivers.

But a glass square
Floats over waters, a bit too clear,
And its shadows are
Careful, fearful arcs
That wrap me.
I sense a logical pain,
An ambiguous knock
That collides continents,
That overthrows seas
Till they crash into
Their skies
With a brusque certainty.

III

Why then is guilt
Stenciling need.
Yes there is graver
Responsibility as squares
Uproot and inscribe
Frightened circles.
The same constants
Command me, my skin,
To yield now.
Memory mocks, stalls my desire
To comfort, to care.
I wish to cube this square.

And we share a symmetrical
Silence. Angles, triangles, rectangles
All untangle into
Open, inviting spaces.
I see a steeple doming
Above and we coil
In crowded confusion.
Was it just skin? Or was it more?
Did I dare to collapse –
Or were vanishing points
Too far-reaching to converge?
Being became unbecoming.

IV

And what happens
Now we question?
I think the guilt
Will comfortably explore
And settle into solitude.
But no – I long to share –
I long to take care of
Pain (I now know, a bit too completely) –
To bandage it with comfort.
Too many opposites
Now fuse horizons
From lines to almost perfect circles.

And I have sealed
It. White blots black
As commas of two distant continents
Suddenly clash, and then, equally suddenly, coalesce.
I am selfish in my understanding –
Of what happens when darkened cosmoses
Still, somehow, manage to calm me
In chosen conformity.
Longer prayers are abbreviated into anagrams.
All inks clotted, somehow,
Create again. Unsurely.
Yet securely.

That shy star with its perfect compass points
Is sharp with its squared certainty.
Why then it disappears soon after
When violets retreat.


21 November 2005

7.6

New York Mining Disaster 1941

In the event of something happening to me, there is something I would like you all to see. It's just a photograph of someone that I knew. Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones? Do you know what it's like on the outside? Don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones. I keep straining my ears to hear a sound. Maybe someone is digging underground, or have they given up and all gone home to bed, thinking those who once existed must be dead. Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones? Do you know what it's like on the outside? Don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones. In the event of something happening to me, there is something I would like you all to see. It's just a photograph of someone that I knew. Have you seen my wife, Mr. Jones? Do you know what it's like on the outside? Don't go talking too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr. Jones.

– Bee Gees
…

May the Sheep safely Graze?