Somewhere a sort of coherence has been lost, and now
all I remember is the meal we spoke of, and the butterfly
that settled on my shirt. There were monkeys in the trees
and in your dream a poet stood upon a podium, and did
not speak. But there was something else that almost
escaped the cracks
of afternoon, and is not yet lost but needs to be approached
with concentration. Not in the first memory of it, but in
the truer recollection, no, collection, of what was said.
For things were said, and this time there were no spaces
between the words, no silences of meaning. All meaning
was in the words, and you and I were merely witnesses,
present and conscious, capable of testifying to the facts.
As when two former lovers meet on sober ground,
a wedding or reunion, a solemn consecration, and bear
witness to what had taken place, is taking place. Not
mere ceremony, then, but a rite of formal if unspoken
cognisance. And between our steps this unspoken mo-
ment hesitated before coming into being, like applause
in a silent hall that lingers on the first loud clap, and
then suffers through a few timorous ripples, before the
flood confidently asserting the rightness of the gesture,
the strong, full-bodied clamour, the validation not
of the players but of he who through the act of clapping
participates. And as that now clearer moment shaped
itself
we lingered in the early summer sun, while each
version of the real jostled with its neighbour, claiming
to represent the truest picture of events.
Surely
something more than the afternoon play of leaves and
branches was en jeu, something to be sifted, sheaves
to be untied and spread out on the grass. More wine,
perhaps, is needed, and with the wine a clearer sense
of music. For the afternoon itself was music, by which
I mean not melody, nor rhythm, but something else, the
way the music fills the spaces of the rooms, while you
wash the soap from your hands and walk, refreshed,
back to your desk. A playlist, then, carefully selected,
organised to match the moment and its needs. As with
an early morning call to prayer, stirring your lover in
your arms, not rousing you from sleep but reminding
you of its impossibility. And in this wakefulness you
and I have vanished into afternoon, its dappled shell.
We are contained within it, can never emerge from it.
(The music is like dust visible in a column of sunlight.)
And through our presence there we may appear.
Arun Sagar’s first collection of poems, Anamnesia, was published by Poetrywala (Mumbai) in 2013. He lives and works in Sonipat.