Where the wilderness is now, a house once was

Look there— where the branches are twisted
Together like arms of a contortionist
You’d think it was the shade of
Two trees instead of one
Until you look closer and follow the roots
Right there— at the towering branches 
Was a window and a boy looked out of it.
His life passes now. Time washes over youth.
And it has cut a canyon through his heart
Which deepens year after year.
Soon the water will disappear into the ground
And time will wash his youth away.
Over there— across the prairie you can also count
One, two, perhaps, three trees he used to climb 
Walk there—
And you can ask each leaf and blade of grass
On the way home 
To tell you his name.  




A Love Poem

After John Ashbery

And they were right to have said it.
We just need a little love, and when the little 
Things fall as soft, salt, sobs on your lips 
Does it taste, how it does, at the start 
Of a kiss? (Maybe not the first, but surely the last) 
They say, you think each time it happens 

Again and again, how it thrills the twist 
And turn of your thoughts, how it reflects 
In long hmms and self- neurosis. Considering this 
And that, slowly probing the what ifs and nots.
There is no escape for me, from it. I think 
I mean, the thought of you—
 
With me is so quite a new dream, is 
Itself the night and the body and the 
Body in the night, the dreaming of you;
Intimate as a touch which I feel 
As it feels me, this is how it works 
Just like this, very see-saw like. 




Note for the previous tenant 

Thank you for the things disowned: 
The roll of toilet paper, the bar of soap
The straw-broom and the floor mop. 

I tried to scrub the floor clean as a face!
Found it to be undoable,
And realised you had tried, too. 

The landlord says you lived here
For years. But nobody had seen your face. 
You were like a stranger’s name read from 

An envelope. Like those birthdates of people 
Carved on park benches and trees, who I know 
So little about as do I of my own past. 

So, the black hair in the sink
Gives a clue to… what? Were you 
A man or woman? The question persists… what?

This handprint on the knob. Whose is it?
Did someone sit outside the door, 
Waiting for you to return from work.

Made the bed. Then dreamt next to you.
Only to wake in the night and say—
“But dear, I’m not sleepy at all” 

How often did you dance on the floor?
The place was done and broomed. Your life
As it were, a sudden wind that had swept away. 



September

The day we discovered love was the
The day it had also been there all along,
Waiting to be noticed in the background we
Recede into so heedlessly. In Delhi, everything 
And everyone is moving in the same direction. 
Notice, how the streets are overfull with people;
But their eyes are empty like tea cups.

In bookstores, like nascent flowers on wet days
Pages open with the thrill of new beginnings 
But in the gardens, we’ve got the butterflies 
Going at it; dancing in courtship before 

Our eyes like kissing teenagers 
In teeming metros, unembarrassed by PDA.
It must be autumn then, when what woos our 
Keatsian heart is in the air which consumes us with… what? 
What was it again… beauty? To rebreathe life 
Into what once was touched and identified here  

Before it went to cold sleep under a rock.
Too much with lovers and too little with love—
The world gives us just as much as one does to a beggar.
Here, take it. Now, go away. How much time until 
We find our other half is hard to say but, instant as 
The camera’s shutter when it imprisons reality 
Is how instant we’re going to have to capture the present.

As the canopy of overhanging trees reddens into the eye
Of a setting sun. A new season writes itself in the rain
Reminding us -life is ever wheeling, faster and faster 
With the air which stirs our world like memory. 
Like the future. Like history.