Poetry at Sangam

Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.

To Defy Gravity

                  For Karen Hernandez Montinola

 
Heavyhearted I remember
the sad indigo on your arms

how I glanced in silence
at the painful flowering of a bruise

beneath the hem of a summer skirt
or the buttonhole of a sleeve,

like the life of the soft-petalled iris,
easily torn,

as it ran pain’s rainbow of
red to blue, but edged in aubergine

or a blush that meant not shyness
but a million hidden wounds.

I remember thinking of porcelain
when you showed me how your nails

had started to chip, how I hurried
to shorten the gaps between our words

as we spoke of a birthday in Hokkaido
or what your daughters dreamed

and what you wished for them in turn.
Oh how your body weighed your

own dreaming down.

It was like one sunny day:
I was watching through the window
of an elevated room —

one cloud plump,
almost purple with rain

wending its slow
its billowing way

across the skin of a blue-
blind sky.

The rain will come,
I thought,

the rain will come.
And as if from our eyes

it began to fall.

I heard your voice
sudden like a flash of —

Was it lightning?
Was it wings? —

as if you had found your true self
and learned to fly.

• .