Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
In the morning the gold crumpled mylar sea horizonless
And then one day awoke. The streets long. In that time when cities had already become like malls. Or simply were. The edge of fall. Below a building a small heap of clothes, wet with night. Beside them, brushed bronze and blaze, a square stone. They asked, So what did you do with your freedom? A kind of blackout, he said, I did what one does. I anesthetized it. That’s: me. Tubes along the roads like cannulae and a bridge named after a painter. Railways in morning’s ruddy light.
Where once coin-driven cabins more new hotels. Walls of liquid crystal now, the modern city’s symbol still a wall, rooms constellated like stars across time and space, caesarean-scarred, ageless, in the end the money’s still the same.
(And then one day awoke, looking toward the door.)
The cold silence of the stations like the ultimate one to come. Out at the city’s edges, night already close to frosting. The woods there, hiding, the rails, shivering. Granulated air. Brick. Cold water ripple, barbed-wire hand.
A wonder we’re even here at all.
What seest thou else in the dark backward and abyss of time?
Over one thousand views of the moon. Obsession. A wall-and-mirror silhouette. A desk. A backpack. A rug.
As if you might sneak out the window of your life, was it? Or call back up?
And again under evening’s skinned-knee sky, flakes of light falling through all the in-betweens. The blue-hued whorls of the heart. Quiet again, the late day’s light mostly unseen from where he sits, brick once again halved into bright and dark, far sky paling out. Too many. And no talismans left. Auguries gone. But bells again. And blue. Another day fading. Where did they all go so soon? Inner courtyard blank. Windows blank. A light goes on in the stairwell but no one moves. A collection of postcards on a windowsill. Here is a border. Beyond this point. Countries disappearing. Exile’s bottle of despair. Blake’s death mask by Bacon. Dutch still-life. A room of wax. A river. Expulsion.
A collection of snapshots to the side.
Coming back across a border the inner border what is an inner border he had no idea and from where it was he came little either now.
The jacket your father gave you no longer fits.
Around the corner there, the lights would of course be on, as would the gloom, the dark neon of neverending night.
A distant story, but recurrent. It would be one of escape.
*(It.) Fragment; shard; splinter
Excerpted from Triptych: The Little Light That Escaped, Alexander Booth.