The hibiscus

Poetry written in March 2-15

A.J.Rao

1

Ekphrasis

(Ha! As I thought – the first picture with no (human) characters – I’mincluding the puppets as honorary people. Given you heart, but Ilove your views of folk going about their fascinating lives-Acomment on one of my pictures in a photo-blog)

Ah the first one with no humans-Characters that people my story.“No problem” boat has character.It is not a bluest of boats in riverNor what structures blue space .

Just a blip someone notices blue-An empty boat in a shaking windAnd water shaking so obliginglyTo the passing wind under a sky,A colorable exercise about blue.

But our humans are everywhereIn blue boats with empty promiseOf Eden with no snakes in trees,Lush on this side of foremother.At times they are mere puppetsLying outside box before a show.

(A poem describing a photographic journey)

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2

Dying confession

Known largely as the undyeingNow about to die,a head of hairA self-confessed undying headMakes confession on deathbed.

This wind is a source of chimesAnd I make confession to birth,A swaddle cloth smelling childDoing reference work on a sin,Like Sexton born without sexTrying to confess others ‘ sins.

We will not paint sinful headsIn a wind that will quickly die.Being alloted births in a train,Sex is tricky on upper berthsAnd yet we confess our births.

(Reference Anne Sexton’s poem “With Mercy For The Greedy“)

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3

Take care

Between us two and common lossIs tree with potential red flowers.Take care ,you perpetual woman.You and I shall listen to this tree,Its bark ravaged by time like faceLetting the big petal drops fallingAs tears from leaves,drop by drop.I pour its red flowers in your palm.Take care , you perpetual womanAs you take care of boat in GangaAnd its gentle ripples on our shore.

(I watched this beautiful Bengali movie Bhalo Theko yesterday)

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4

Next

We are in a hurry to knowThe next, curious to know.Our nows ask who is next.This woman is a lightbulbAnd her light is in a pocketAnd shows through blouse.

Brother is a wind in treesGently passing old woods.He had a next after yearsOf his brother’s early next.(His bulb had quite a lightNow softly passing trees.)

We are in a hurry to knowThe next, curious to know.The woman is still her bulbWith no next sign to light.She will be happy to knowThe next, curious to know.

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5

Uncle

Uncle is now idea, on green carpetAnd a house beside two coconuts,As we see a fire rage in a kitchen,And pigtails quiver with fire chants.

Last time, a year ago, he was thingOn way to be mere idea in my mind.The thing is now an abstract thing,An argument away from a sarcasm.

Uncle is an idea together with dadAnd a mom of the far mango tree.The ideas vanish when I turn idea,An argument with neat conclusion.

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6

Annunciation

I, though, am the treeThe angel annunciates.Our God is far from allEnclosed in high gates.This day is 25 of MarchAnd no more is floating,A fixed library in spaceAnd space makes dizzy.

Now I am a small treeRooted in a plastic potAnd angels do not callBalcony after nightfall.God is in His high gatesI am a tree in a balconyNot crossed a parapetTo all that dizzy space.I am rooted in a plasticAnd angels do not callBalcony after nightfall.

Taking off on Rilke’s poem Annunciation(1)

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7

Awaking

Awaking is moving away from blissSleeping on dreams of not awaking.City drags itself awake on subways,An old black poet’s poetry awaking.

Here are no subways to awake a sunJust cattle filled roads swishing tailsLate night drivers bleary with sleep,An old brown poet’s poem awaking.

(Referring to Maya Angelow’s poem Awaking in New York)

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9

Spring break

Time to think of a spring break,As assortment of green leavesWith new tamarind and jaggery,Wee nipple size cuckoo mangosWith fall of mango flower mist.

Let the autumn await its wailing,Raising dog snouts of a midnight ,Speaking a blank verse of shame,As a yellow leaf awaiting its windIts sarcasm lost to a youthful sky.Let us pass yellow autumn poemsAnd ironies for this spring thing.

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10

Selfie stick

You look nice ,as the deceasedIn selfie composed as an elegy.Your bloat gone,you are so baldAnd beautiful in a glass casket,A glass content of selfie -worth.

You are not yet dead to worldAnd while you are still around,You enjoy making selfie elegyLike a camera selfie with stickAchieved in ghoulish likeness,A way of anesthetic distancing.

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11

Small arguments

These flowers are small argumentsEnding up somewhere, on sidewalkTo smell anonymously from baskets.The arguments start in small hours.

Bees might have flirted with them,In small arguments by themselvesWhen they were still on branches,Only to disappear in a bigger sky.

Just what occurs to small arguments.Like a one day moth on window-sill,A small argument against a big rainAbout tantalising light in our room.

We are a slightly bigger argumentUnder a magnificent solipsistic sun.Ours shall go poof in the same wayAnd by the same earth and its dust.

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12

Blue absences

We look for their stacked up absences,The shadows overlaid with day’s sun.The mountains are now a color of blueAnd now we believe they are in them.

Since mountains are a blue and northAnd no one can sleep in them for ever,They must be behind them, endlesslyStacking up to a sky’s translucent blue.

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13

We are not first stuff

(There’s always an aleatory multiplicity that rumbles beneath anyApollinian order. There is no being, no thought, no theory that isn’tcobbled together from the materials one finds in her garage: Fromthe blog Larval Subjects)

We all add up to new creatureA DNA thing or idea on canvasBy grunge or a random splash,Way we were born , mothered.

We are an aleatory bricolageAn amoeba with its false feetTentative in its fetal darknessWhere new shadows formed.

Shadows are real in a garage.It is where we are assembledAnd take on shape,new idea,A bricolage cobbled together.We are not all original stuff.

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14

Ennui

We look into your eyes boredWhere we often see ourselvesEntirely emptied of meaning.We flutter our eyes in activityVaguely asking for a meaning .

Our eyes flutter as butterflies.Our words suffuse daydreamsLike afternoon street walking.They trail off to the day’s edgeAnd we both reach a deadend.

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15

Fort

We went into the fort of nothingAn exaggerated way of a defenceA bunch of shrubs weeping sun.Where are the men who neededAll the defences against others?A stone gate opened wilderness,Defences dropping everyday sun.Pray, what are others against?

A farmer standing in green cowWas he a defence against dust?Not so ancient man drops a sunAs we stand here in green rice.We are our defenceless ogglersOf beauty to drop our own suns,Just trying to fortify our bodiesAgainst dust by a fortwall of art.

(on a visit to the ruins of the Rachakonda fort)

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16

Thief in the street

When all the others were asleepEponymously ,mom and I wereOne to one with a thief in streetWho was making a hole in wall.

Her voice returned hole quicklyAcross sleep’s weighty silence, To the thief who broke soundsIn our sleeps waking our fears.

Mother and thief are now holesIn a vast silence of their nights.We are waiting to be our holes.

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17

Faith

I jostle with men to glimpse GodAs ants of men to smiling stoneWhere He is spread out in silver,Camphor fragrance and flowers.I jostle within ignorance and war.

It is like clash of ignorant armiesBy night, in eighteen day old warWhen god stood by man to fight.This a darkling plain where a seaWithdraws due to climate change.

Reference Dover Beach, a poem by Mathew Arnold

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18

Sound and flurry

Let us now go,you gentle reader,Into abyss of cricket’s darkness,Auditory to just your private ears.Hope you do not fear a screetch.Poet’s words are a cricket’s song.Just follow them by strike soundsAnd you may end up tactile rich.

The lexical import is immaterialWhen they strike ears in aplomb.You may look for gentle lyricismJust below their sound and flurryThat tingles like morning breeze.

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19

Burr

You fond of taking detours ,eh?I have all the time in the worldAnd mind and feet to take them.

I hate to walk the paths in grassWorn by short cut seekers before.I love to catch burr on a pant leg.

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20

Losing propositions

Poet aunty has made an art of losingAnd leafing through we have lost her.What great artists we were, what joy.

Like her we lose an entire continentAnd we drift away in techtonic shiftAnd we have a cold mountain risen.

We keep losing our mothers to treesLike bird chicks lose theirs to skies,Feathers to strange new landscapes.

What great losers we were, what art.In a final losing we would not knowWhat consummate artists we were.

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21

Golconda

Yesterday’s Golconda was the rhyzomeThat would make it a new green verse,From a poem lost in transient memory.

The shepherd’s mountain hosted ghostsOver matchstick sounds across bushes.Today it is back again dreaming out of.

We better exorcise female ghosts from it.They are a flesh turned stone with men.Their sleeping tombs are cold with past.

Bodies were covered in a male darknessAnd their stomachs homes to male egos.Now they are in the same stone as men.

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22

Sounds of space

A matter of clearing, a single soundA vast journey in space, a wedding.Its sound journeys to my eager earsA locus in a space graph of listening.A soundless night makes it possible.Geographer’s poem is very journey,A moving away of a chunk of spaceOr invisible space vastly stretching.

The wedding is space of a drumbeat,A clearing in jungle of night’s silenceSome humans make wedding sounds.Sleeping dogs are making no clearingAnd no patrolmen sticktap this night.Our space enters here,in the window.Curtains are mute spectators to windAnd trees carry space back and forth.

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23

Afterlife

Now that poet Rilke has broken the wallAnd no more hears a neighborhood godI wonder if I could cross all his diameterTo find his circumpherence by geometry,My afterlife to intersect with his old self.

Which means my after-life will meet his.We may talk common neighborhood godA god we threw out when a wife’s cancer.For old times sake we may discuss bodiesBut behind glass we cannot hear a soundOnly lips trembling with lack of meaning.

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24

Strike a memory

A word is a memory of talcum dust,A wind bestirring a creeper’s moon,A fragrance remembered of flowersA love imagined, a self-love passing.Strike the word to bring them back.

Smell is in a word white of memoryA nose ‘s way of remembering a joyA strip of old sky smelling jasmines,A blouse’s back spreading it all out.Strike the word to bring them back.

Sound is in a word touching crackleOf a dry firewood in pre-dawn firesA fire ‘s tongues licking a darkness,A hot bathwater in copper cauldronIts bottom black like moonless sky.Strike the word to bring them back.

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25

Seeing

Seeing brims over our thingsFills our teacups, anchorages,Closets ,balconies for a night,Sunlight’s spaces in tall treesCorners where a mom meetsA shadow,a lizard on the wall.

Seeing is yours in my words.Seeing is a water not spillingFrom a child’s hands claspingThe glass with both his handsFeet in slow measured motion

Or his squatting on the floorDrawing feet together to cryOpening and closing his feetLike tentacles,in beach sandOn their way back to the sea.

Seeing is yours for my words.Old woman is emitting a lightA camera’s laughing at death.Seeing is her skin’s wrinkledCloud drained of future rain.Seeing is a word on keyboard.

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26

Photographing an old woman

This body is what thinks as mindTo tell you tone of what is unsaidFilling the spaces between words,The very body we seek to uncover.

Let me uncover crickets in bushesAnd potholes of yesterday’s roadsAmid painful silences behind lightGoing out, growing less in the eyes.

Camera turns body about a room,On engagements of linear bodies,Wondering what may set the toneFor picture of body defying death.

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27

Handrail

(Poetry —but what is poetry.There have already beenseveral shaky answersto this question.But I don’t know and I don’t know and I hold on to thislike a saving hand-rail.Wislawa Szymborska)

Old poetess found answers shakyTo questions about what poetry is.She found it her saving handrail.

You aspired to be the spring poetNot gloriously dying but lookingTo flutter in a fine spring breeze?

Now you are shaking with winter.Handrails in turn become creaky .Better not answer shaky questions.

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28

Veiled innocence

Her innocence is a veiled brideIn a marble veil cold for groom.Its layered purity is joy to eyes.We are steeped in arid deserts,Our innocence buried in bigotry.She will lift her cold veil for usTo let innocence restore beauty.

(Veiled Rebecca, in the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad is asculpture created by Italian sculptor Giovanni Benzoni depictingRebecca , the bride of Isaac)

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8

Confession

A beating of a poem for meaningWill leave some residue of soundAround lips, in the very whiskers,A torture for intimate confession.

We look it against a colored lightOr grope for light switch in roomTrying to find our own confessionReclining in a dark room’s corner.

We are readers of others poemsTo discover our own confessionsTortured out of us ,for meaningExceeding aggregate intentions.

(Reference Billy Collins poem Introduction to Poetry)

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29

Ghosts

In her mom’s belly, mom would layHer eyes closed for general comfortAgainst ghosts living in tamarinds.

We would do the same in our momAs we snuggled up to her soft bellyFor our comfort against city ghosts.

Both mom and her mom are ghosts.Wonder what mom snuggles up toFor comfort against the other ghosts.

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