Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Every wedding anniversary, we behave like mountaineers,
and pretend to have conquered distance.
The summit is still a misty metaphor.
You make purchases and call them ‘presents’.
I recount obese details of a past that’s lost its congruence.
Anniversaries are wall paint, a smoothening of pores.
They bring colour to the skin of a marriage,
and hide cracks where parasites evade mores.
By the eleventh, we are exhausted.
Imagination has become a fixed deposit.
Your presents arrive together:
binoculars for me, a telescope for you.
You ask me to watch birds during the day so that
you can watch the stars at night.
‘Which is closer – the birds in your binoculars
or the stars in my telescope?’ you ask.
‘You,’ I say, singular. And late laughter.
The whisper is a parody of the night the anniversary commemorates.
‘Yes,’ you say, your smile a new reincarnation,
‘You are singular – from you begins my infinity’.
Until we were married,
I never bothered about the plural.
Singularity is better than singular,
you said the morning of our wedding.
The lineman disconnected the phone call.
All our troubles you blamed on a metaphor: age.
All our fights I blamed on the plural.
The birds in my binoculars settled in a cage.
We got our marriage certificate photocopied.
Your stars, middleclass to a fault, survive
on insurance policies. Our plural –
joint account, train compartments, trilogy –
gets thinner with each day.
The marriage becomes a metropolis –
you and I its anonymous citizens.
The singular buys a CCTV camera from ebay.
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