Notes From The Underground

The wind is cold and the wind burns. The wind is cold and the wind is acid. On the Bar counter ice and amber swirl in thick gleaming glasses; in the Bar the ash of small talk, the smoke of ruminations. Light purrs on a bare shoulder, her feet are hidden in the drooping hem of her sari; ice and amber swirling I sit here between betweens, to the left of voices to the right of memory. Thought floats into the slow silence of air currents; the hours squat with me as I snap connections in autumn leaf detachment. 2 Nowhere to say this no one to say this to except to the typewriter (the computer would store it in its chip-memory and that could be embarrassing) as she pulled out he turned into a dead crab beach when the sea pulls out 3 Were the sea to pull out sea birds would pull out and the breeze; shells would turn brittle under crackling boot; fish and fishermen would be sucked into the great ebb and our traders would turn the white sea bed into 'The Salt Crystal Shopping Arcade', selling grounded oil tankers, ocean liners dredged out of the mud and whales flaked in salt. You could buy goldfish though as they circle the belly of a water jar. 4 You didn't come with me to the mountains this time, but as you know when you climb mountains the stars get nearer; don't ask me why this happens or how this happens but it happens - when constellations smile death drops your catch. but often the stars go about their office routine in the night sky like glum bureaucrats - this astral bureaucracy is even more baffling in its ways than our central ministries. In auto mode Rahu gets into the act; So does the moon debris that swirls around Saturn and forms its rings. Then what has to happen, happens. That's what happened to you. 5 The almond tree flowers white; beside it the peach flowers, as only peach can with its own interpretation of pink; and further in the lofty rear, winter has left its brown imprint on mountain and crag. Perhaps with the rains green may return to the slopes, a little moss here, a little grass there; you never know though, the rains may never come or life may run out before the rains - the almond blossom, each petal soft as an eyelid, will also not see the rain. They are divided by a scimitar: parched landscapes and rain, parched lips and love. 6 Watching the wind-ruffled down on bird-breast I think for no particular reason of wind through quivering paddy in the Nepal terai. 7 I think I am at peace now, he said, for my dreams move like the thinnest veil of mist over water. Awareness of absences, of what is right with me or wrong with me is also like the perception of a veil of mist over a perception of water. My troubles start when I think of hope, that thin smoke of mist over the iron-grey waters of dawn, icy waters, he said. But you are with me always like a spring of underground water like the murmur of a spring of underground water. I didn't for the life of me know whether he was addressing poetry (he had lost his touch lately) or his beloved. Forty years with you and I am a better man, he said, awash in forty years of cleansing waters and forty years of light. The trouble was She couldn't hear him.