What Lights Up...?
what lights up
the lightbulb filaments
of your recall Old Man
this streak of fire
through the thin wire
of memory and mind
what line
from which poet?
the ibex looking down
quizzically
at our car from cliff
the croc sunning corrugated hide
on the banks of the Rapti
as I cross the river rolling on elephant back
wary elephant treating riverbed like a mine
trundling diagonal across the current
and red-robed monk
slowing down life not through asanas,
but with mumbled prayer
that slow-rolls the cylindrical prayer drum
and stars
at their night shift
in Ladakh
2
I don’t remember the dripping
deciduous word-leaf
holistic halfway-through
its never-ending
fall
from the tree of knowledge
3
and your eyes I remember them
bright as a window of a just-lit room
seen from the cinder-dark
outside
the black-moment cinder-dark
that was I at that moment
4
sad isn’t it
(not a bit)
the spyglass getting hazed
in the cold
as it peeps into the mist and melancholy
of the gone-by guzishta
Urdu word for the past
memory sabotaging memory
past subverting past
Notes:
Written after a query at the end of a Himalayan car safari lasting seventy-eight days.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2019)