A wind flattened the cool wood one night.
They arrived next morning, men sprouting from soils past,
a horde of buffaloes, huddling, marching without shirts:
the last stampede that irons a civilization out, sun still about.
Plucking the charcoal-emerald mess for its best,
they carried half a trunk at rest on their muscular, bruised shoulders.
Carting brown carcasses to the workshop,
singing all the way to their lorries.
If they had heart, they’d chivvy up a hull,
well shaved, and carved to a stop.
Think Caillebotte’s floor scrapers. Men with no faces, no worry.
All glisten and shine and sweat and dignity.
Throwing one nude arm of wood, then another into the shaver, then cutter.
Pile after pile, of door and table. Door upon door exquisitely fit
in the future - a row of houses lining a sunlit street.
Watch water rub rock to boulder, time cook wood to coal.
Families in homes sutured together. One hears an old door
creak against its hinges. Something is born between all that’s known
and not, when in its rasp, one hears an infant’s cry.
There is a world zipping itself up.
A sky made of ice, the ground beneath your feet turning into water.
Thales points to the nature of things - body, mind, vegetable, flower, all go into water.
There is a leopard born in the Savannah, and a cathedral crumbling down in a sinner’s dream.
There is a woman lighting a candle on her mantle, to prepare for a seance.
A village is quietly going about its day, cattle and kine huddling together in the winter.
A writer is noticing all his favourite stories have the sun in them.
There is a crow perched on the back of a cow grazing among the plastics behind a mandir.
There is an empty nest brushed by the breeze on a deodar branch.
By the kiss of a Sumerian God there is dew that is turning to honey.
There is a row of gulmohars made of quartz lining a Delhi street.
There is a man, and there is a woman. In five minutes they will hold hands for the first time.
There is a boy whose family has gone to work, he’s shutting the windows against the storm.
An adivasi group dances in the forest when no one is watching.
A year is passing, and another, and another, all at once, folded into a triangle, becoming a napkin.
Who was that man scavenging for orange peels in the garbage?
Some mornings women looked through him, men gathering their children away
from that mad fool, as they said. He saw a hole in the fabric of space and time
and no one quite believed him. What obsession does to us all is well known and shunned,
but Dr. Physics here was a good professor, they said, family man. Handsome too, by a certain standard. What did he see peering through that hole?
That it’s no coincidence insaniyat and insanity are phonetically close.
The destruction of art is also art, the sun combing the earth’s gardens
and my sister thinks it’s too much, and too much light is not the right kind.
My newest and brightest friend is a yogini, out to release her vivid consciousness
like an arrow to the point of knowing. It’s Raza’s bindu. It’s Husain’s half made horses
carrying me from dream to dream, until one turns up at my door. It was my mother’s best friend
in Canada who trained horses for the Olympics, sent them to me from an afterlife. In these dreams,
she’s galloping into the distance, her auburn hair trailing as she hurtles away to a point
in the dark. I think of her wrists, beads of sweat gathering on them. I draw a wrist and never finish
the hand. Cacography, an old typewriter given to my mother by her father on my table. The first
letter I ever loved: from auntie Francesca who lived in Montreal, her horses near her still. Many
years ago, there was the year of no internet and night long tempests
when my mother’s family gathered - four brothers, two sisters. They lay on the wet beach,
strewn across a country rich with oil and no war (not yet), not knowing
which house were to wear her curtains next.
Notes:
Insaniyat: Urdu word for humanity
Medha Singh is a poet, editor and translator. She took her M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and Sciences Po, Paris. She has authored two books. Her first collection of poems is Ecdysis (2017, Paperwall). The second is a work of translation from the French, I Will Bring My Time: Love Letters by S.H. Raza (Vadehra Art Gallery, 2020). She was nominated for the Toto Funds the Arts award in 2019. She has published widely between India, US, UK and Europe. She is on the editorial board at Freigeist Verlag, Berlin. She has also delivered a TEDx talk on effective arguing. She tweets @medhawrites.