Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
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It is an edge of the street, a sort of climax, a hint. Square windows gaze like pupils into the street. They overlook the mist which pours forth from yellow bulbs and seethes around shapes entering their vapours. If you see two lovers then, gazing at a pool to find that final reflection in eyes, locked within two facing walls which fortify the couple all at once into the room of eternity—so much seems to have passed and formed on the dust that their footsteps rouse, so much gathered like shuddering lilies in a pool; but, now you turn to look at the flash in the sky and remember to wait for the thunder. The cicada ululates through the night air.
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Another day, the morning light spreads across the antipodal windows, morning unfurls like a Chinese fan, and two pairs of eyelids fritter away their dreams—one sighs, another swallows fire—as at the coming of death, at exactly the same rate; the eyelids open, goblets of sleep, and how already morning has drenched the bodies! Rub, rub your beady eyes, O lovers, you’ll see in deep whites again, on such mornings when the last newness arises from the heart like musk, and the soul is fresh again, wilting flower…
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The afternoon is but a churning of wines, which foam at the slightest trace of sun. The sun has conveniently locked the world in the tightest of shadow-frames; the worlds of afternoons are perhaps the most immovable. An afternoon, windless, pipes through the street, from wall to wall, hoarding to hoarding and the gigantic letters amass shapes around themselves and press through the bright air. And then, the shapes too disappear. In the afternoons appear those singular moments that must be surpassed with the languor of fading shadows.
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But who has not noticed the lengthening of such and so afternoons into the intermediacy of evening, when shadows have assumed the mobility of dancers who flash their exuberant wares around walls and windows? The clouds, if present, are bound to go berserk at the slightest rupture into darkness, and a nervousness envelops the firmament. While the eye is thus engaged in closing upon the caprice travelling forth, one simply misses the final kiss of the crepuscule, and is brought face to face with the trenchant closed mouth of night. Crows agonize over the falling colours and quake the air with their wonted cries; people let their minds float higher than trees, and the din rises to where the light had once issued from.
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[On the afternoon streets, that freshness of morning, which deluded one, begins to wear. I feel ache, repentance that time must pass so listlessly: two angels staring face-to-face till eternity. The walls are black holes of black holes, and the streets shrink, people merge into walls: some elixir glitters in the distance: a pool of refuse becomes the seat of my reflection. I dry up like the street. Mornings and evenings are when the river’s up to brim and the street then drowns many, but now the bedrock has broken apart, scarabs crawl over the roads and carry me…]
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The clouds wavered like threadbare sheets of dust. They blew like glass-winged kites with the fragile flutter of weathervanes; like nameless pieces of cloth. My fingers grew longer; our shadows danced in sheer mockery. The wind curled like waves about her body.
What proximity the walkers felt with the voluptuous trunks of trees. She saw one which, swaying like a designing witch in meditation of a prophecy, threw skeletal shadows on the wall. Her drooping twigs of leaves hung like ancient locks of hair and, with unimaginably long, lithe fingers, gestured to the passers-by their individual fates.
The sky had expanded its outer limit, or it was just that the clouds had intervened between the stars and us. The bald white moon stood witness to man, her, and the witch-trunks.
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