Horned Lark
The “horns” are two little tufts of black feathers on the head.
– birdweb.org
A bird with horns is propaganda.
It is a tall tale like equations,
the slap of cycles, smell
of old cats. I want to hear undulating
owl hoots, but only a weak lisp emerges
from the clumps of grass.
He is the first creature I see after
a night of snow at Tso Kar.
The night had iced everything,
the Milky Way was just a fingertouch
away, the stars
all coins of hammered flash.
As I held in memories, gloved hands, and pee,
I dreamt of boats that night.
My dream is close to my chest, the quilts not enough,
not quite enough for breath and love.
A hybrid thing, fake
like a poem
sings in the morning.
He migrates colour and mountains, melts
the white away after the Wild Asses honk
and disappear. Nomadic
like me, hunting
for seeds, he consumes altitude,
inhabits fiction.
Indian Grey Hornbill
(i)
Margin
On my beak, a hell.
An all-seeing arrow.
Doubled. Trebled, once.
An ambitious grey.
A weight.
I destroy the heart’s hollow
with my claws.
I am hornbill.
Austere like space. My wings
devour courage.
I am hornbill.
Horned with anger. Horned backwards
into the skies. Horned with bridges.
On edge. Always.
(ii)
This Love
This love strays whole.
My love.
Her eyes, red.
Red: overturned suns.
Eyelashes: noisy circles.
My love,
grey like my mother.
Her casque
so small, so unlike mine.
Her tail skirts and
unskirts me. A fullblown orthodoxy.
Her eyes skinned red.
My love.
This love walks a distance.
Flies an interlude of wings.
I am never alone.
My beak (serrated with war)
closes the world.
My love.
I feed her my fruits, my ashes, my all.
Pink-browed Rosefinch
Or, Short Notes on Sexual Dichromatism
1.
I stumbled upon a theory. Grown
weary now, I confess to anyone who listens:
my pink is better than yours.
2.
You and I are in flux. Unlike
the ducks in the neighbourhood,
we can liquefy into each other.
3.
What is pink’s correlation to dull?
Not a lull in the
hum of water.
4.
“Exaggerated ornamental traits are used
predominantly in the competition over mates.”
Nobody cares, really, about such
inglorious fates.
5.
Will this conflict construct a poem?
Does it instruct us about life, etc? Not at all.
Not at all.
6.
Are there synonyms for pink? There is a
kink in the rites
of pleasure and separation.
7.
Sometimes naming is an exercise
in redundancy. At other times a compromise
is all it takes.
8.
What is a brow’s correlation to rose? Browse
through that book
and you’ll know.
9.
And then, pink is a humdrum
elsewhere. Do not presume; do not
despair.
10.
A Finch. No, a Rose
finch is only a detail. It’s a folktale
gone awry in a block of sky.
11.
It’s time to grow
older. On her shoulder, is a
streak of grey.
Nitoo Das is a birder, caricaturist and poet. Her first collection of poetry, Boki, was published in 2008, and her second, Cyborg Proverbs, was brought out by Poetrywala in September 2017. She teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi.