My Garden - Uma Gowrishankar

I am moving from here. ‘My Garden’ keeps its name though. You can find me
at http://umagowrishankar.wordpress.com/
If I am on your Blogroll kindly make corrections in the link to reflect my changed URL.

A poem comes from there,
and life ends there -
a dark space that holds death
and words like dear sisters.

Eyes focus in darkness,
probe corners where shapes
like dull carbon whisper,
time in their veins. When

the bar of white sand I move,
levitate when going is tough,
up up till the iridescent light,
a volcano in the cornea blinds me.
   

The breeze stirs his grey beard,
it parts like grass on a windy evening;
follicles fall and grow - trope of death-life.

Poetic Asides

When they set in motion the first beginning of speech, giving names,
their most pure and perfectly guarded secret was revealed through love
                                                  The Rig Veda , 10.71
                                                  (translated by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty)
Vastness of the sky
expands his heart and

is speech born out of thought
as an action out of desire?

flows a river of stories,
like love that marries word to thought.

Poetic Asides - write an epigraph poem

The point of birth happens at the precise moment
a dew falls from the leaf. Flower is the window
to the heavens,

but the filaments are curled limp
displaying no eagerness to rise on wings of light.

She steps out of the nightrobe scented with sleep,
her mind is miles ahead, desire of the body
singes the path that she knows

as end of life:
moving is better than staying.

Poetic Asides: write a procrastination poem

The scales stuck to my hands glistening
like silver coins, the fish naked
lay vulnerable on the grassy bank.

Feet pulled up my grandmother sat
on chair, rolling beads of prayer, soft flesh
of inner thigh quivered like scaleless fish.

She smeared the walls with camphor
to blot the smell of fish cooked in a mud pot
under the mango tree yards from the doorway

rubbed bright with vermilion - the red mother wore
on her forehead, red of chilli from Hyderabad
that she ground and stuffed in bloodless fish.

Bony fingers poked through grains of rice one by one picking stones smooth like hardened snot, moved one bead after another, feeling the smoothness between fingers, name of god in the chest framed by fleeting luminescence.

She threaded a day to another,
placed the heap as offering
before assuming a dying posture.

How might we otherwise forget the years, dregs from past refusing to go?

The marble on the granite floor warm with afternoon sun flashes a wisp of distant cloud, a whorl of coral from deep seas, sometimes even a bird flying backward chest facing the sky.

This crystal of universe cool in her fingers, she thrust up his nose as he grabbed her in that dark corner of the house.

The journal is washed clean of words, the contours of body inked thin: the earth with its axis has tilted just so the light over the ocean can catch the lines. The air gathers foam from waves and pins the dress in bands between the legs.

I have to turn away from your eyes not to drown there, the salt in the breeze settles on my skin where your tongue draws lines. There’s nothing the coiled serpent will not  lick - the brown mountains, the fuzz of dried grass that catches fire as it lays eggs in the insides of me.

The morning is muddy when I take it from the clothesline.

Love is that.