How We Turn Vulnerable

The deepest, sweetest truths come to us on 
						   June nights

Warm air from the ceiling fan runs its broad
						   mammalian
tongue over them, leaving them sweaty and
							soothed  

I let you lift from my mind like an 
				      air bubble

I begin to believe there is more to songs than
							  syllables
more to stars than 
	     smallness		more to smoke than
							   spectres		more to wrecks than 
													      disuse

I employ me my own scrivener and write 
on walls 
in shadows
on brass
on amaltas
in dust
on swallows
 
wherever I see the shape of 
				wonder 

At Lansdowne

There is a star stitched, becomes your dimple.
I count. A random number of birdsongs
in your cigarette smoke. Unintelligible
murmur of my heart. Satisfying and chewy
as food. Between us.

Ticketless in our love, we alter.
Swift garbs. Daylight sharpens
its watch on us. To tell our scratch
from precipice. Goes on. For whom
does one reality suffice?

“O black swan, your black the slick
of a common umbrella, bring me
the choicest worms to eat.

“Ah mist! Eavesdrop on my yearnings.
Come down. Hold me.

Thing is deodars, eloquence, summer.
They say. Is troubled as glittering water.
Flamboyant as comic strip. Endures
tricks.

What is lit up is not what
we remember. Point breathe.
Toes step on flatness – five leaves
on moist ground – clench –
but they can’t go back.

The Daughter Said

The red-lipped daughter of the Mother Dairy owner
   next to our house,
with a scythe for a neck and scimitars
for eyes,
walked on her two scissor legs.

Conversations with her were difficult.

As she met your eyes, she turned
asudden into
   your reflection.
You were left staring at yourself.

One morning I carried
a rufous stone bowl to the shop
and —
amidst the onions, chillies, leafy spinach —
tumbled water into it,

slid next to the daughter as she
bent to take out frozen peas,

and saw her reflected
eyes snared and swirling black.

She told me this:

      Walk straighter than an assegai.
      Kill faster than a scythe.
      Paint lips red, wear
         war paint on the heart.
      Glow eyes coal at the millionth
         second,
         at the merest effrontery.

      Apartness is yours. Claim solitude.
      The dark is yours. Possess the night.

Saying this, she straightened, smiled,
and ebbed from my sight.

Diptych

Desire to become one with perfection
territorial in me
I live my life in diptych

The first panel coursing with the primary
of intensity

In the second, I hold my breath
so it does not blot

It is not like being torn into two
or the waiting before birth
(push)

At times I find my shade drifting
in unknown territory

*

Into the sequent pane I want to bleed
my five taut fingers
names for all thoughts

but its warping slinking wood strangles all
to fleeing or unreal

I wish my tongue would encircle
less-ness-fear

Black goddess sits with her eye
glued to this tongue waiting
for it to sing

Under the two lives sits a man
with catgut string, tuning