}} Flames of Musk |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Flames of Musk

tell me now, the fire that’s born, is it male or female,
O Ramanatha?
                                      ―Devara Dasimayya, 11th Century AD

 
At about midnight, when he was touched in the places of the body
where raw musk resides, a gust of goddess rose in smoke, the tremor

of a current plunged as he lay watching both his bearer and himself in
hymnal resonance. Before he gathered himself to return the favour,

he felt his chest uplifted in shame, burning in a way only truth can,
gripping him in its séance. He wondered if the fire in his guts would

change colour if the nature of his crotch were to change. Pleasure
of the bone, too glorious, too liminal to be assigned a gender.

Pleasure, the beak of a soaring bird liberated from the spanning
sanctuary of wings. His grandmother in her last years sang a song,

the origin unknown, the ending line in which meant: in love’s electric act
what is male, what is female. She who survived wars, a stillborn, outliving

her husband by forty years, inching her way past three generations.
This grandson embarrassed but happy to think of her today, looks

at his body now, tin ash and temporal, crowned in acceptance of life’s
beautiful searing to come, now beginning to know why desire is so

devastatingly redeeming. Like teeth without tongue. Like tongue without
mouth. His body lying silent. A just bitten fruit. Salivating forever.

 
 
 
← Satya Dash