conjugating you
you are a dream lying around
gathering significance like dust
on the cover of a book once held
in the gentle arms of adolescence
you are the face below my rushing
hair wide-eyed and volatile
spiralling the tenses in the
bed of my hyacinth head
you are a comforting circle
the grecian geometry of wholes
in the evening of life
lowered into a hungry ground
you are a violin playing me
candlesmoke in hand, tuning
my forgotten flesh into desire
i want you to come
closer. the joke about the nuns
on the cobblestones.
the length of this poem is how
long i have with you
and at three: three this February
morning i run out of words.
***
un-ruled book and poetry
For you
we sit on the edge
of the twelve o’clock sun
sipping on a conversation
of tea leaves and lime
you say “ignore,” I say “some more”
if “if's” could be “could be’s”
wouldn’t the world be full
of us, our possibility?
the day waves at the shores of our
consciousness and indulgently teases us
“The world isn’t your oyster, you know.”
We know, don’t we?
backpack and socks for winter, we know.
we walk into an older sun, the green from
the leaves of the canopies remind me of
a poem I once wrote for you
it had a tragic end you changed
when you changed those last lines you
changed fate lines that bound me to you.
now we slip into a quaint blue
room on the left, low roof, with a door
the size of a hobbit head.
you bend and enter another day: I enter
the whiteness of a page. We come out
un-ruled book and poetry
*this poem won the Poetry with Prakriti Contest in 2016. It has however never been published before.
***
Five Notes To Imroz,
Benares, February 2017
I
ganga does not meet
the horizon in February
the seagulls play go-between
to our charpoy love
II
burnt corpses howl in these ghats
i think about religion in the city
of your heart and sleep in the cemetery
under the pink bougainvillea dressed Fiat
III
you are on a boat away, Jeeti
towards the sun of my body
forging lost faith
on my skin and I turn believer
IV
we share a library, books
a chair, we dogear the
pages of each other
but never a room.
V
every poem I write
has a little of you running
through the
lines of me.
***
Rebecca Vedavathy teaches French at Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru and has just finished her PhD in Francophone Literature.
Support our literary endeavours by subscribing to the FREE Newsletter service of Bengaluru Review here. Reach out to us with any queries or ideas of your own at reviewbengaluru@gmail.com.