it is the sea under the microscope
amoeba turning into a murderous whale
to remind us of our self-devouring afflictions
there are places where pain is statured as the mother of poetry
who is constantly smearing on us
its tender poultice of mud
and life goes on and that is progress
and I shall have no need for other forms of literature
than this poetry of mud
there is a bridge in the painting
arched over white lilies
we think of them with such intensity
that new memories can form
and the vase can discharge its red lilacs
it’s an ancient bridge rusty
painted according to ancient principles
with a color that is now detritus
dust to dust ashes to ashes
the little chicken bore a littler chic
an egg buoys up in between
upon which I stand
and separate son from mother
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as a child, I was always scared of human beings stuck to other humans. and not just humans – chameleons atop chameleons, dogs attached to dogs in late summer. years later I got the logic and logos of the natural phenomenon of affixation. of white feathers to a swan, the nib to sacred papery white, fingers to the keyboard etc. the same message gradually spoke out with greater plural strength accumulated from each event. the same finger that knows the sticky touch of gum, sends warm imagination to the cold core of life’s dead stars. every search reveals a want for familiarity. For something that’s accomplished, felt, dense, scaly, warm, unspoken, open, empty, smooth and silvery. succus or blood. oreic and oneiric. clove-like and love-like. constantly brushing against the other. ceaselessly intersecting.
not yet dusk.
backdrop of a cornered tree
a stream of black eyes cut-out from the sky
without any visible crease left by the scissors
wondrous unseen of a cloud's scribe
and beyond the unseen crickets hum
a not seen longtime breeze
of mindful sea
smothered star fish following a dragged dinghy
staggering
breaded in a sand zone
of miniscular time
many of your letters lay open here
like eyes of dead fish
crabs lettering in Brownian motion
my words for you on yellow sandpaper
replying to an ancient note
any flashing countenance still missing
despite an electronic vocabulary
all silvery sheen rubbed out
I used your face like wine
keeping it fluid with age
reflected afar.
minimalist salt of pithy text
smeared on the brim of rolling waves.
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anima is the inner side of a mask. persona, its outer. but the puppeteer has no mask. he is without a face, without a figure. we observe that absence. from where the wire descends and then appears the floaty spider. the art of weaving is all about an understanding of this buoyancy. of staying afloat.
I have at times likened the puppeteer to a ventriloquist, sometimes a magician. one day, he wondered if the puppet-hands could grow longer, longer than life; if by habitual error, they narrated the stories behind the stage; if the doll quietly stood before the mountains, and when she stood; if two monstrous muddy hands came down and squelched her into earth, clay and stone to remind us of the origins of life.
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Michael, you spoke with so much elegance that morning
all that humor and icing
but that it was borrowed speech
we realized decades later
a language was inhaled in silence
while we thought about its mechanics
as a kiss
the labor-pain of speech born between jostling muscles
saliva and lava
you provide lip service to my song
and the audience can tell it is immiscible
aligns but doesn’t unite disproportional shadows
man walking his dog
Michael! Michael! the tall sisters lean over you
– why doesn't he talk now ?
– he is asleep, my little darlings
the ventriloquist said.
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what is complex is pure
and purity is most complex of all
water wind and stone are its axes
the barely visible red thread on the beach
and the locus of trembling gulls
define the equation of utmost visibility
of impossible and impure
mathematics
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poetry remains close to lament or is a lament’s wick
and lament is not necessarily related to loss
before we are taught to make flowers, lizards or the human teat
with blue and red plasticine
won’t you show us how to make a plasticine lump
with plasticine lumps?
could you separate colors from mutilated bodies?
some people can’t find them
are never comfortable in melting pots
rather they prefer to follow isocontour lines on maps
alongside their holiday trains
at the end of elongating summer
when under the salty gull’s feet
our meager waves have shallowed
to their best transparencies
as recall becomes the second nature of
underwater photography
I can better figure out submerged coral islands at times
an unconscious within which the litmus changes
phases move in and out
smoke rising from the tribal tents
and songs
that continually shrink into a singular being
inside my receding window
I prefer landscape drawings
that have thought about bone structure
the anatomy of geography
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so much of our writing technique
comes from the philosophy and adaptations
of a maskmaker
an understanding of obscurity can come
from the study of its construction
the two white lizards living behind the wall-photo
know how to become
perfect guardians of poetry
know where the rainbow will rise
the length of its service
and if that day comes when
I can find out more about the rainbow
like how much wet it is
I’ll have to say –
bye bye poetry
CODA
the error norm bears proof of how deviant is the spiral. its shape, from the ideal. how the springleaf of return is altered. a part will prove in the least through the results of dimensional analysis or in the lines of its underleaf that differ from individual to assembly like human palmlines.
not all members of the Goldsmith family are made out of gold. some become soccer stars, some preachers. a network of such spiral variations cover ground upto a virgin point not reached by railroads. pheromones are immediately released to influence all collective patterns of wrong returns – misleading the community to vestal islands – a newfoundland of odor - of every sense so to speak. the ant-tribe of future strides alongside.
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persona absentia the dementia journal remains
part anonymous part fairy tale
half-evanesced the rest who knows
if reconstructed from the last Serbian film seen or
half-heartedly stretched by this winter’s
knitting service
a scroll as long as continuum
like the grocery printer
unrolling a whole year’s activity on New Year’s Eve
special order wollen socks for the garden ogre
asleep atop snow snoring
as seen from the kitchen window –
a buttery white like the light of our lives
she he whose absence we mourn this evening is ours
which includes you
she he who’s missing the subject of all morning prayers
everywhere
she he who didn’t do this marmoreal writing
we did it for you
this is one of the basic premises of aesthetics
to extract from void
a structure of itself
I remember the private times of writing letters those precisely instanced
environs
not because of ailment not the drugs
not medicare
windows of empty cabins flowered table-top vases
the romantics of power outage on the terrace
and moonshine on the office-plants
as we obsessively produced and consumed
the sound of our chattering keyboards
imagining spaces closer than our cubiculors
claustrophobic and aromatic
touchy and hairy
breathing while smooching
lust to lust
eyelashes to eyelashes
a defeating darkness all around us in
polygonal zones mazes
so boring with no corners
to reconceal unless it’s pitch dark again
and a wind sweeps across the desktop
a skinny tremor and hairy arousal
day-long snow showers for tomorrow’s forecast
with occasional couplets predicted on the
coffee table with a plan to destroy the
concept of conjugality
the idea of binary form
fundamental designs of beds slippers and gloves
won’t say anymore than that
such a pathologically extroverted country
this whole country
this ceaseless living in the present
this death of a living
no one found any trace of the bloody maple leaf
archived within the book
it has been unseen to me frankly
your boobs
I know
I know
I am not saying anything modern here even anything intelligible
just that it remains a fact and proves my eternally
low level seeing
the brass ring you wear on your rudimentary pinky toe
that’s how we’ve always conversed
with lowered eyelids looking down on onlooking
trying to build a taxonomy of human feet
remembering one fair morning when I found
a whole Miami beach
watermarked by footwear corporations
is love like cholera or malaria?
one doesn’t need to ask the author about it
tremors febrility vibration resonance
there’s always a way to measure them
as science has shown
the candle’s so transparent I can see your spine
and the writing progresses to zones without laws
where our blood hasn’t colluded
will never
from where an incongruous crimson-extracted dense foresty
prime part-pistachio part-pearly frills of literary embroidery
somehow always finding a way to
keep me in you
although never by comparing notes or journals
never weaving or restructuring genomes
just by drawing lines plain lines strange creases
that cross me you pick up apples from our basket
and hang them back on the tree
earrings
the storm in the photo the wind the airy hyper
and the proximity of human bodies wearing
all of this falsity like piano tunes
feel a need for self-reflection to become
my poememe
glass has its own light
to enable a self-seeing which actually ends up revealing
the otherness of others
it’s a desire to self-replicate and let be replicated
a cross-fertilization civil society maybe unaware of
it’s a desire I use to explain
variable pronouns in Ashberian poetics
and in this exchange moving things on the table
fuse with those from static past
it’s a light that emanates from all playful writing
desperately seeking a filament
to show itself so we may think of it as something real
like the glow inside an aquarium
where we sat on bean bags face to face
what we had said – let’s leave it to the poem
let go the rhombic design in the sky
let go the spool
let it be another quiet loss
if it became a fashion to face-off questions with questions
piling up like a human pyramid
which the last one carefully climbs up
to upturn the hanging pot
the world underneath would be beneficiary
how wonderful would it be to live in a space
without definitions
say of the word - pyramid
and statistics
a space where everyone’s past became singular
all famaleness and maleness reduced to a few
all bread taste the same
I had once worked for a while in the mint
of such a dumb boring world
where people ordered coins with faces on them
it takes a little more than doing lettering on cake
to print faces on metal
embossing – as it is called
a process meant to uniform and devalue money
displacing the marbles from so many homes
to a statelessness
on whose planes the very idea of face value
takes a jolting
how much walking a lifetime took
measure it on your lifeline
with shoe-laces
there was so much I forgot
reel number 6 – where we will come back and remarry
you’ll come so close to me
closer than my cup of Jasmine tea
as I put it up to my lips I get the smell
of a protracted comparative sentence a garland
sequenced with flowers from your eyes -
Iris that same white fragrance
fair sense and sequence a plastic opacity
stretched out over everything floating
fine unvarnished through which
the lines of exquisite detail show
above which our spaceship’s wingspan
giving a sense of the breadth of the prism that
confines it
boundary unknown
but I can make out the ground far below
by its color white in places groundcover in green rectangles
red tiles gray rivulets
chocolate cars shaped like a child’s nail
and a growing shadow over them
there is an opacity in everything
even in things blue
the blue glacier for example
the cloud-shape equated with intellect
until Binoy called it embodied water
and the nib was wet again
with a coursing black filling in and out
the listless violinist distraught at times
I remember
untamed facial hair in salt and pepper
reprimanding the stalking kids every now and then
sometimes even shadows
the violin opening up at the park’s corner
warm from a cup of stale tea
and our taut hidden faces resting on the fence grills
who knew?
those faces will reappear in reel number 8?
in between the paragraphs I screenwrote
paragraphs bringing rain over the bridge
and its watermarked episodes
the address first appearing in reel 2
a tiny hanging walkway beside the white picket fence
magnolias
as large as a woman’s breast
which in the first reel you refer to as dahlia-heart
that scene
where we first met you used to wear black frame glasses
and I struggled to remember
even my parents
that’s why they used a door in the film
you know? a door
planned as a metaphor of a hard separator
between destination and futurism
a door introduced
so a key could be hidden in an inner chest pocket
which I’d use to open the magnolia with
the door
and you’d call me by my pseudonym
the reprimanding violinist will return in that scene
playing vigorously until the world is torn of all goodness
bringing back memory to me
and the magnolias
magnolias larger than your breast
will fall on us
I mean a waterfall
returning falls hold a flowability
whose Reynold’s number borders on vorticity
non-laminar that is
if you have tracked the footprints you know
they went from one quicksand to another
we live more with the living memories of people we live with
and among these thoughts like dinosaurian waves
story defeats the visual image
upon which the door closes
and
writes –
FIN
The photographic art used has been contributed by Dhrittiman Chaterji, Santanu Bandopadhyay and the author.
Aryanil Mukherjee is a bilingual poet, essayist, translator, screenwriter and editor who has authored fourteen books of poetry and essays in two languages. Anthology appearances include: The Harper-Collins Book of Indian Poetry in English (2011), The Literary Review Indian Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2009); Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), La Pared de Agua, a Spanish anthology of contemporary Bengali poetry (Madrid: Olifante Press, 2011), etc. Aryanil edits Kaurab, a Bengali language e&m-zine of experimental poetry and poetics. A PhD in Aerospace Engineering, he works as an engineering mathematician in Cincinnati, USA.