Poet in the Big City

After three days, the city finally opened itself
to the poet, unfurled its petals like a hesitant blossom
responding to shafts of afternoon light. The poet wandered,
marveling at her footloose days, at fallen leaves, at ruined walls.
The poet spent hours getting lost in the cramped streets of
bookstores, quiet minutes spent with titles like strangers' lives
she would never access. She leafed through verse and prose
until she could taste words blooming on her own hesitant tongue,
could refer to herself in third person, half-amused and half-overwhelmed
by her gloriously human mind, her petty fears, her loves as vast as cities;
and by the city itself, that she encountered anew each day, an insistent lover
she could never learn well enough, a world of strangers and familiar lives.

The poet was still as a wallflower, the words all packed within her but
covered with thin ice. The city expanded and shrunk itself, sometimes
seeming as large as the distance between where the cab picked her up
and where it dropped her off; sometimes as small as the blood-red and
speckled leaf she gathered from the sidewalk to her chest like a gem.
Some days there is enough fear to render her helpless, leave her mind
frantic and desperate, and then aching. Some days the walls of the room
do not seem strong enough to keep the vile world out. It is often hard.
The poet never feels like she belongs, and often confesses how afraid
she is of men on the street: their entitlement, their insistent eyes, their
fearless swagger. The poet has been thinking, but has written nothing
in so many days. She is, as usual, brimming and overfull, preparing
the land for monsoon and then a glorious, sun-yellow harvest.

Today the poet shed off fears like heavy fruit off her branches, let go
of the burdens she didn't need. The poet scrubbed her skin and walked
out in the city, hid only between bookshelves and strangers on the street,
collected moments and sun and dust in the lining of her skin until she
felt as large as love. To be alone in a city is a great adventure, she says.

Later, when the last thin moments of golden light were disappearing
behind vehicles and footsteps, she walked away from her solitude,
skillfully navigated a road full of frantic vehicles momentarily stilled,
weaved through scooters and buses like a small animal in the wilderness.
From the safety of the sidewalk, she marveled at her own swagger through
the city now, her heart swollen and glad, her footsteps racing towards a
kind lover. Her bag was filled with thin books like slices of the moon,
rare and magnificent, shining when she held them in her reverential palms:
how could the world extend anything but love towards her when she
loved it so fiercely, so fully, when she blossomed out of her own meager skin
like a reluctant caterpillar just so she could belong better, be bigger,
just so she could graze the day with her eager fingertips?

winter

it's not winter until everything falls apart, until the knots in my back form a forest of ache, until the transition from one day to the next can seem like, quite literally, a lifetime. everything is strange, and yes, jaswinder bolina was wise when he said -- how easy to wound, how much easier to be the wounded. my heart is breaking in ways that i never knew existed. for all of the organising, the understanding, the closure i ever wanted -- ha! what i get is this, life drenched in irony and longing, my room so cold i cannot step into it without shivers. sunshine is thin and provides no warmth. oh please let me go through a winter without tears, without death, without a sadness so large it eats into my soul. oh please let me go

in love

It is the strangest, wildest thing to be in love. The things that once made perfect sense seem to mean so little; and everything that was confused, scattered, broken... seems to form a perfect blue sky, the most wholesome sigh in my belly. You leave, and I wave wistfully at you through the gate. You gently kiss my cheek, and I know I will trace the shadow of your lips all day. It is absurd. I feel as vast as an ocean, and so hilariously fragile, so easily breakable -- but whole. Literature always taught me that it wasn't possible to feel whole -- but I do, I feel as though the universe has filled me up from my forehead to my toes and I am billowing in the wind, I am wide and complete and so deeply satisfied, so gentle with the world, so at peace. For the longest time, I forgot how to read love poems. They made no sense, they were too soppy, too personal, too much. One could love other people, but how could one be in love with them like this, how could one ache so desperately to graze their lips or to catch a shaft of sunlight on their cheekbone, how could one know someone intimately enough to hate them, to judge them, and still feel only desire, oceans of it wrapped in one's mouth? I thought it could be true only at 14, only when desire is silly and half-uttered and unrequited. But I am not 14, I am older, old enough to have broken hearts and moved so swift that nobody could touch my receding back -- and here I am, back in this room with my desire as big as a house, as a country, nowhere to go and no wish to leave. I map the stains winter sunlight leaves on the furniture, on the floor, on the walls. I wait for you to come back, simply so I can lie in your arms for hours. It is absurd. It is fiction and film, and so hilariously human, so obvious that I never thought I would feel it again. This is also what literature says, is it not? That these feelings are fleeting, and so important, so real -- they add colour, and scent, and flavour to this whole bare task of living, of going on, of pretending as though you will reach somewhere different from where you already are at the beginning of every day. Suddenly there is meaning, and of course it exists in the trees and the sunlight and the fragmented moments that I collect like a madwoman, like a child -- suddenly there is meaning and it exists also beyond me, it exists in the solid, warm body of a lover, and that knowledge frightens me, aches in my belly, and curiously uplifts me, leaves me afloat on the gentle wind. I trust you, and I trust life, and I am here with trembling fingers and tender skin, I am ready to be broken and remade, smashed against a wall of glass only to be picked up again with loving fingers. It is so human, so human.