Girl, when you
blow your boy,
or boy, when
you go down
on her, or when
both of you use
a toy, and all the
world’s a blur,
I know it feels
like heaven, you
too violate 377.
Moments before she died
(December, 2012)
It is the night of foreboding
her skin is again
translucent
and all the past is a story
without a moral
this night refuses to rest
on little promises
recalling again the promise
the coral stone of a world
very different from the one we live in
this night remains
like shell-shock
lies like a fetter –
this waiting for bad to get worse
for it to get better
this night hangs in the air
like the deserter
who has seen through the war,
his world is now refusal
(that night, the first thing she asked
when she was conscious again
was whether they had been caught)
she lived each moment she died
each
and this night remains
because she has offered her sleeve to hold
but we are not bold enough
to reach.
Kiss
tr. from Mangalesh Dabral’s Hindi prose-poem ‘चुंबन‘
The history of the kiss is as old as mankind but it is usually nothing more than dry descriptions or adverts of the famous, or the longest or the shortest kisses. A kiss always happens outside history. In that false world, the incandescent lips of two people come so close to each other that you can hear them tremble. All the blood from the body runs to the lips, all thoughts already gather on the lips, softly the heart reaches there and the soul finds there, a home. This is that moment when a flower blooms small bird takes flight stars shine somewhere from under the earth you hear the water flowing but each of these usual events occur in a way that shakes the ground you stand on. At last, the blood returns and the heart resumes its old role of pushing it through the entire body. Thoughts come back to mind and the soul returns to the wilderness. Now everything is ordinary again. We have narrowly escaped a storm, or a fire. We are alive and have returned to history, and are heaving a sigh of relief.
Painting By Georgia O’ Keeffe (Public Domain)
