Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 5, Number 1. May 2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
Poetic Octet
I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so
placid and self-contain’d,
…Not one is respectable
or unhappy over the whole earth.
– Walt
Whitman
 |
| Image: Bulbul Courtesy: bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com |
1.
Two Loves
Love – do I
love?
Until now, flesh against flesh
Has been flesh pressed against fur or
feather:
Here today, the same tomorrow.
But now: flesh against flesh
Is flesh parting from flesh upon
awakening,
And mind against mind
Makes a fresh reckoning each day,
As if newly
met.
This communion of the flesh
Has, of necessity,
To be transmuted into a new language,
Of tempering different temperaments
In an unknown fire
That blows now hot, now cold.
Is this forging of a common tongue,
Renewed each
day, worth the struggle?
Being with animals and birds was so
different:
Our seamless lives together
Had no
beginning nor end.
Why can we not live as peacefully
together
As animals or birds?
Our ends are
much the same:
It is the living that counts,
This precious taking-for-granted of
love.
Humans always
want more, or something else.
I think I shall give up flesh against
flesh
For flesh against feather or fur
And live as they do, together or
apart.
2.
The Black Bull
Rounding a corner in a dazzle of
green,
Hit basalt.
Not ten yards away he stands,
Oblivious.
An immense lump of rock thrown up
Through veinings of root and mud
As if heaved from the bowels of the
earth,
Shining.
Carved from silence,
He humps his back to the sky,
Uncomplaining,
Shouldering his burden of mountains,
Black king and priest in one.
3.
Bliss
Curled up, an apricot muff on the tea
tray,
He unrolls himself to stretch
voluptuously,
His face
bisected by a yawn.
The salmon pink tongue unfurls,
Licking the last bit of honey from
his dreams
Off his
whiskers.
Tea-time is past but he stays there,
Warming his flanks on the teapot.
The furry smell of fish drifts past
And his nose twitches:
Right; dinner
will be on time.
It is good to live in the body,
With the mind free to butterfly;
It is good to feel the sun soak into
supine flesh like a drug,
So the bones
dissolve in a bath of pleasure.
A full belly
An empty mind
And slaves in
the kitchen.
A cat would be crazy to ask for more.
4.
Taking Lessons from a Bulbul
Mind as blank as the stone step I sit
on,
I look blindly at the garden,
Soporific
with sun.
My eyes begin to close,
But my ears start ringing
To a paean of
triumph.
Not two feet away, a bulbul slides
down a slant of light
To land foursquare on a log,
Head cocked, crest flicking rapidly
from left to right,
Red bottom
flashing in defiance at the world.
In his beak, he holds a swirl of dead
grass.
Above him, on the house-wall, a pair
of sparrows are nesting
In a mud cup
abandoned by the swallows.
This bulbul, arrogant in his pied
beauty,
Suddenly
seems shifty.
Swooping up, he drops his token into
the nest and veers off,
In a skirl of
melody.
The mud cup is vibrating
– Excited exclamations over this
bounty,
Dropped from heaven on their heads –
And I start
to laugh.
In a twirl, he is beside me again,
And his liquid
eye fixes mine.
“So!” it says,
“And would you do the same for someone
who isn’t like you?”
5.
Billy the Kid
O Billy, Billy, Billy
You wild, crazed boy;
With one blue eye
And one eye
brown.
Billy Bilbao with the corkscrew tail,
Bathed in
colour of milk which is only slightly sooty.
Billy Budd,
Born in the hedgerow,
You cheeped to me outside my kitchen
window;
Strange
fledgeling, open-mouthed with need.
I had to give you away at five weeks,
To someone on the other side of the
village,
Because my
own cats were jealous.
You escaped
And let your
pink nose guide you home.
The thread of my love
Pulled you across roads like rivers;
Over hills that must have seemed mountains
to you;
Through acres of high grass
And
battlefields of forests.
You soldiered on,
– Tiny white mouse,
Little bird,
Little Billy –
Until, three days later,
You leapt into the light of my kitchen
And into my astonished arms
– Your thunderous purr in my ear
Was every love-song I had ever heard
In one triumphant shout.
6.
The Rescued Dog
We know that he came to us
From a place that was unkind to him –
It cannot be called a family,
Because he was outside their circle.
The chaps crowning his elbows
Showed he had slept on hard floors;
A bald patch on his back bore witness
To a wound that was still raw in the
mind,
But his great, soft, sad face changed,
So, his eyes
were full of melting hope.
Trustfully, he submitted to a bath,
Shedding dead hair with bad memories.
Revealed in a coat of rust and black,
He is a prince coming into his
kingdom.
Fed and warmed by more than food,
He places his huge head on any available
lap.
At any sudden or unexpected sound,
He circles the house and barks to the
sky,
Showing us, he is doing his best to
repay:
To protect us all who now protect
him.
7.
To A Baby Crow
Little fat black boy,
You never
learned to fly.
A heavy-eyed Buddha,
You bulged
over the low branch of the pink oleander tree.
We put fruit on a plate for you
everyday
And balanced
it in the fork beside you.
You looked down at the birdbath,
Watching the
other crows splashing.
What were you thinking, so absorbed
in your fatness,
As the world
sat beside you?
After three days, your perch was
empty:
The morning found you at the foot of
the tree,
In the
birdbath, a floating offering.
We gave you a burial by fire;
Scattered
around the first fruits of the cashew apple.
Eat in peace,
Little fat black boy.
Grow in joy,
Learning to fly at last.
8.
For Joshua
I
I roll over and turn
To face my purloined pillow
With a black
head on it.
I open my eyes
And he opens his,
Milky colour
of raven’s wing.
We lie in silence,
Eyeball to eyeball,
Exchanging
breath.
He can still almost fit into my hand
But his gaze
holds the whole world in its orbit.
Reaching out a baby paw,
He touches my palm,
To put the seal
On another day together,
Another step into that second
paradise
That Paracelsus
Called the search for wisdom:
He the
teacher, I the pupil.
II
What is this
wildness and this wet?
As he gallops to the sea,
The dazzle of reflections everywhere
Shine his
eyes to twin suns.
His bark echoes the crash of the
waves;
The muscles of the water become his
own,
His veins
stream with salt.
Pounding along the mirror of the clouds
On the sands, he writes his joy,
Better poems
than I ever wrote…
Flushing the seagulls from their
sleep in the dunes,
He chases them along the pastures of
the sky,
Tongue waving
like a flag.
All the new morning
A new body is born of new knowledge
And grows and grows,
Until he hears me calling
And is lassoed back to himself,
Happy to be ordinary again,
But more than that,
So eager to share what he has learned,
Breaking the mirror and making new
poems
To show me,
Again and again,
At each
lovely leap.
III
The air is as still as the black and
white dog
Lying on his
back on the grey stone floor.
Propped against the wall,
Paws crossed on his silky white
chest,
He dreams without
a sound.
In his sleep he leans against the
pigs
Standing like stones in the field
next door
Follows the squirrels slipping
between the leaves
Rises with
the owl testing its wings on the roof above.
The scent released by the late
flowering jasmine
Trickles into his nostrils;
He sneezes once, turns and settles
again,
His chin on his paws now,
Off on
another journey I want to follow.
I lie beside him and put an arm
around
This comforting barrel of beauty.
Who can do so
much more than I can?
He sighs and
settles closer.
Rocked by the same love,
We sail away
together into the gentle night.
IV
Ritual of the morning cleansing
Wet tissues to the clouded eyes
Touching sight; hoping light again
Blocked nostrils opened, blowing
Passage of air into tired lungs
Coat brushed tenderly,
Like an ancient,
Much loved jacket, now grey with long
use
The wear and tear of the years have
stretched
This joyous rope of flesh and bone to
breaking point
Each breakfast time, we gently roll
it between our palms
As if to compact life.
Believe the bowl lifted to toothless muzzle
Contains some magic elixir to swell vein and pump heart and live.
Live longer,
Live another day,
Dear heart,
With us.
V
Joshua
Transformed
Part of this rosebush
Is the boy I knew,
Knew and loved
His short life through
The sturdy trunk
Grew from his sinews
The eager shoots,
His shout of
welcome.
In the glossy leaves
I see the shine of his coat,
In the hearts of the flowers
The richness
of his eyes.
Whenever I forget to greet him,
His thorns
prick me to remembrance.
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