i want to continue writing about bridges. there has already been a number written
not yet strung into a narrative
an arch that, too, is a bridge itself.
road to leaving and going and returning.
a passing through the timeless times
of day: sunrise and sunset
simultaneous end and beginning.
this small city has too many bridges
steel, cold, restrained. letting you
leave and then calling you back to stay.
 |
| photo by Alvin Pang |
At the time before letters, what the moon says
to the lovers is whispered to the breeze.
When the letters came, the poets wrote.
And the lovers read what the moon says.
The phones lines stretched and what the moon
says the lovers hear on each other's voices.
Now the moon looks at its virtual self on the Net
and what it says
is whispered long and quiet on email.
Restraint. One of the first things taught
one of the most enduring things practiced:
never speak too loud, or talk too fast
or eat too much, or want too much.
A golden mean for everything.
In poetry, the practice is not speaking
what you mean to say. To say it
in another way. To let you sense
want and desire, need and a kind of
emptiness to be filled, but does not
speak of it under the light of day.
Someone takes a photo of the Ganges River. And only because it tells it is sunrise do we know. Otherwise, skies look the same in too many angles and too many ways. Who can tell.
India has a lot of things to say. Too many they carved them in stone. So that long after the storytellers and instructors are gone, the ways remain: bodies of labyrinthine desires. How men and women cannot live in love alone.
Add desire. Add hunger for the body.
Is it possible to know what we want?
Don't we still get ahead of ourselves
not at all unlike
a five-year-old child who thinks it knows
what it wants, if only for a moment
an hour, a minute
before it finds itself wanting something else
yet again. How we spent years trying
exactitude. I think I know
as I've been taught, and learned:
to envision the map, to draw it carefully
as a CV, a bio, a folder of
accomplishments, works in progress and
downplayed failures, silent emptinesses.
And when the map
is finally done and we stand right at mark
the middle of X, we find ourselves:
the audacious asking:
do you really know what you want?
The wind chime hangs under blue summer sky.
Its silvery sounds catching breeze.
Already the middle of May and the strings
still haven't let me go. I arrive only to leave again.
How the secretary calls. Something always urgent.
In the meantime, I resist. Sitting down
and reading poetry from another place.
Elsewhere, someone walks the courthouse steps.
she is always a different woman.
changing between tides,
keeping resemblances.
this time her hair is short.
in another, brown.
not a long time ago, so
very very dark.
sometimes i know her,
sometimes i do not.
when i look at her at the light
of morning, i look for the familiar
face a long, long time ago.
what does one bear?
maybe no more or no less
than many others who, too
have their own stories.
i look at the dark night sky
the stars too far apart
from each other.
distances, of course,being
arbitrary. she is
on the far side of the bed
on an island up north
continents away.
my mind's ear hears
an airplane. also
a conjured memory
the audacity of its being.
because i do not want to
explain in many words
what words cannot explain.
the many, many kinds of
this
because i am always
at a loss in the middle
of nuances, even though.
because a poem is always
both obscure and clear.
because when i am alone...
summer here hits 38 to 40 degrees celsius.
the asphalt roads make mirages.
dogs not meant for the climate, suffer. and
people make homages where the ACs are.
still, everyone is warm
even though most dream less.
many retire to their fate.
and while all TVs here show melodrama
and people easily laugh, cry and curse
the sunny weather does not
tolerate stories of a particular kind.
if you were here, sitting across me
we will break open a bright conversation.
and will have to wait for brightness to somber
before telling stories of a dark, quiet kind.
so much has been said about silence, its many ways
of being and through being. one truth is
it is difficult now: to find it in between many things.
the world does not leave, no matter
how one keeps away. something always calls:
a task, a calendar, a message, an urgency.
the book i promised myself to read continues to wait.
the plane arrives. the plane leaves again.
the music does not stop.
but do we really want it to?
