AISHWARYA IYER

Door: Seven Poems

Door

Outside the door
is a goat that stares
at the tide of wind

Beside the door’s appearance
a window prepares itself

When the door will close
unlike when nervous curtains flap shut
a room shall acquire body
and sustenance

Before the door yawns shut
haste spawns a shadow in the room
Many nights will now be pregnant with cold moons

Footsteps, waking, eyes
Water’s mirror
in the teething of flesh
and a passing train’s horn-arc
—weather door-drawn time

[x]

The room’s subtle cave, choked
by the clock’s beat—
habitation is a compromise,
a promise against negation.
Worthier deeds, like gerunds,
round the limits of the room.
They exist: in passing,
as ephemera haunt matter.
The room: resting place, stasis,
hibernarium.
The winter is always here,
outside you,
naked winter of wind’s harmonies.

[x]

A clatter of cups, brown-rimmed
with leftover tea,
stands wide-eyed in the receding sky
of the room, where
my passing has carved
no terrain, no wonderment; other
passings having left no record,
here-to-there, now-to-then:
how to invite one’s chorus all at once?
how to watch this room unbind—
            how to emplace the empty time of the room
its not-yet-terrain
the cups bloom like bulbs of muddied tulip

the ground is too much to bear 

dream-forge

The window’s maker dreamt a fugitive view

The observer’s gaze is the poem’s rind

The street passes through day’s end

The journey’s origin pulls a boat out of water

The window is a mouth organ, where winds
are tasted as dew

The observer turns her hooked back away
from tasting the poem’s fruit

The streetlight is a doorknob incarnate

The boatman looks at the sky’s horse grazing
at the window

[x]

Even if the sky is not as deep
as deep can be
clouds war with dust
over the line of garbage hills
and small lights disperse
the great silence

The flapping wing of a bird
carries its echo
The sky is its mouth organ

[x]

Every night
somewhere in the city
a man opens a window

I step up
hackles raised
I clamber out of
language

Inside the word
the rumour is bright
The paths are narrow
The air tight

In those moments
when the breeze flows in
the man can think of sleep

Winter

This is the way of winter
We carry the bud of warmth:
a little dense fire
among wayward winds

We carry a bloom-in-passing
holding its hieratic sky
It is cold in the kitchen
The fire in the stove sleeps

We long to flower, as the fire
longs to sleep, as water
longs to remain seated, immiscible
negating the way of flow

It is winter, when birds beg
to dream in frosty air, the dew
grows laggard and languishes
on a yellow leaf, about to fall

Time is beginning to rest
Its emptiness is all of waiting
The hesitant crow knows a fear
too large to be cawed

Aishwarya Iyer's first book of poems, The Grasp of Things, is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions in the US and Canada, and from Copper Coin in the rest of the world. Her poems, fiction and critical prose have appeared in journals such as The Bombay Literary Magazine, Humanities Underground, Almost Island, Muse India, Pratik, Berfrois and Poetry at Sangam, among others. Her drawings have appeared most recently in Aainanagar and are forthcoming in Jalsa. She teaches at O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, and is working on a book of short stories. She won the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize in 2015.