Poetry | Sharpest at the End: A Cycle of Poems | Trina Nileena Banerjee

Surrealist Cemetery, Christian Satin 

             “It began like a caress and ended like a knife wound,

It rained sharply all night

That late monsoon.”

“Weather Report”: Epigraph.

       In my dream

In my dream

When we touch

It snows everywhere.

When I wake

The sun has flooded

Every heart with fire.

We place

A bowl of still water

Between us and wait.

      Hourglass

Some mornings

The sharp thread 

To the future 

Is wrapped tight

Around god's teeth.     

The universe spins like a lunatic

Doing a dance only the flies understand,

Flipping and twisting, 

Drunk on the sweetness of decay.

Time is a giant chewing on the famished night. 

Something grieves inside the ticking clock.

The gap through which you see the stars

Is closing fast.

       
Shipwrecks

When you fall into the water from that immense height,

Nothing remains a matter of choice.

Necessity delivers you to pain,

The spinning sky is not your friend.

Grief overtakes you as sure as love.

Words are bubbles suspended in the brutal air,

The mermaids sing: but not for you.

The crimson of this coral,

The purple of that murderous ice, 

All this is yours.

There is a whole field of drowned plastic

That your heart must negotiate.

Little landmines that will never explode 

In your lifetime.

A ship full of dead fish stands in your way,

Each as precious as a beating heart.

Tin cans fill up your stomach like factory lead.

When you fall into the water from the certainty of doom,

You take your whole city with you:

The million sweating faces, 

The jungles of smoke and cooking meat,

The hopeless prophecies of the market.

You leave on the shore a single lamp-lit table,

Where love fell like a word nobody understood.

This is your harbour, this is the resting place of ghosts.

The water drowns you like language,

Drowns you without hope.

      Impossible Cartographies

I have stood across the sea

From an island on the horizon,

And said it was mine:

Under my breath, 

Feeling my heartbeat quicken,

Knowing not a map in the world

Would tell me its coordinates, 

That no ship would take me there.

I have said to myself that it was mine

Holding your hand across the impossible waves,

Our fingers have felt its shape, 

The soaking greenery, the unstoppable rain,

The rivulets freezing into ice over the difficult winters.

Knowing neither of us knew the way

You have opened sealed bottles from the sea,

In anticipation of its appearance.

I have felt in my belly the slow weight of its blooming flora,

Years have passed in making sure

That insatiable dreams do not devour our waking hours.

There is an island in time that was ours

It gleams on the ocean where we cannot see it,

But the map of our bodies is already its terrain.

It owns us, while we wait for the sea to send us a boat.

Perhaps this year, the waters will be kind to us.

      
Not You

What my fingers touch is not you.

The burning tip of the cigarette,

Droplets on the side of the frozen bottle,

The ashes of consequence, years wasted,

The third sleeping pill, the last two glugs

Of shampoo, slime, bubbles, 

A knot of hair stuck in the drain,

Hot, cold, brittle, tough, crumbly, wet

There is a whole universe of textures 

Open to my fingers, I plunge my hands 

Into everything, all day

But everything, all day is not you

This freezing, burning, coagulating, condensing, sticky, fuzzy, elastic world…

I am free to go anywhere, touch anything.

I even touch the rain, I stick out my tongue

But it is not you

Nothing I taste is you

Sweet bitter rancid tart burning hot

It makes no difference

There is no difference

Everything speaks of a fatal sameness

Not you not you not you

       

Scheherazade

I put my eye next to the miniature tree on the vase that belonged to my grandmother,

I try to discern the shades that make up its indeterminate hue, over the transparent glass,

Blue green aquamarine, and a slapdash splash of gory pink,

Where the cherry blossom was meant to be.

I wonder if she ever saw a cherry blossom in her life, my grandmother,

With a smile as wide as the hills, and always mixing, burning, mixing her metaphors.

You see, this is how it is, I begin to write to you of love,

And I end by telling you a story, every time.

I tell you a story like a half-finished painting by someone I used to know,

A painting I found in the attic when I was barely eight,

A painting I treasured till I traveled beyond its strangeness to the indifferent landscapes of the world.

I tell you a story that has nothing to do with you or me or love or this shameless, soaking mess we find ourselves in.

We stay as long as we tell each other stories,

And if dawn breaks over love's muffled cries

We will take our story to another night, barely floating through the morose daylight that fills the space-in-between.

A thousand and one nights stand staring at us in this room, this moment,

Two prisoners waiting for an execution, or a prince desolate enough to stake his kingdom on one more tale, or

The wild horse in the stable tearing at his bit in the depth of the night, his blood more crimson than the sky boiling at dawn.

The branches of that imaginary tree are purple and iridescent, on each branch a bead of glass shaped like a teardrop,

The tree whispers endlessly when the stars are dimmed,

The soil around the glassy roots grows moist, 

The leaves glow in a humid heat,

Such is the fevered delirium of the night.

The tree spins love like a fragile thread,

Its branches coil and unfurl like fingers,

It spins stories like threads like roots like wrinkled time

She spins all night like my grandmother and her grandmother before her.

And so too, I must finish spinning you this one,

Must finish spinning you like yarn before dawn, 

For what is love but a fond tale we tell each other,

Twisting the ends of a moist, humid core, untangling messy, stubborn roots from seething soil,

Looking, as fools often do, for sense, for sequence, for reason, 

Tighten this yarn around your fingers before you go,

For what is love but a thousand teardrops gleaming, like drowned voices bursting forth from the darkness of the night.

     

 Music

There is music between us.

Your fingers are the string and bow

And I merely formless sound,

Liquid air that trembles as you leave,

Somewhere in between coming, and going,

And coming again, skin and skin

Have condensed like fevered drops on 

Broken window panes, waiting for the wind

Again to come alive, for the night 

To become a dark sea of immeasurable 

Waves, noiseless and vast as only love

Can be.

     Resilience

When you give your heart out it is like an opened flower any boot can crush,

When you take it back it looks a bit like a brick with cracks in it,

And saplings growing out of its fissures,

It is an old thing - a brick - damp and mossy,

Burnt red and a little charred at the edges,

But with a brick you can build a house

Or bolster the clay oven where you make 

Your daily bread.

Admit it, we each have bricks and flowers

And so many hearts broken and fresh 

That we have stopped counting.

But we build our houses and bake our bread

Because at the end of a long night of love,

You are still hungry.

You cannot eat flowers, or can you?