Love, given over to stone,
Encoffinated warmth of sun,
Shielded from the prickled infiltrations
Of a many-menaced world.
But here we live too with porous beauty,
Here we kneel with bulwark of shoulders,
Then fall without a twitch to the wind.

For whatever it is worth...
_____

Once upon a time
I came upon a flute;
chic, delicate and fine -
fashioned impeccably
from exceptionally fine wood
hauled discreetly
from the flourishing forest
of fumbling youth.

‘twas just one of its kind.

A surrogate to which
you would never truly find.

One scale at a time
one throb at a rhyme;
its notes ripened into
mesmeric, beatific rhymes.

✽

The day was Wednesday
and December was the month.
My fingers had gone all numb.

Aquiver...

I held the flute nimbly -
the dew on my vernal lips
caressing it gently,
when the clasp came undone
and the comely flute
split in two
or maybe five or seven.

The tally is incidental
but the occasion,
for sure,
was nineteen eighty seven.

A proxy I could never find.
‘twas just one of its kind.

✽

Just this verse remains
like a tease that dwells
amidst lost reminders
of contiguous yonder.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
Though grandfathers hold back the darkened thrall,
The half-flit coven of breezes and icy vine that sprawls,
Until the black worms away at them and they grab hold
Of the language of death like a locket over their hearts.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
In spite of the keepsake of hoarders, fathered by fathers old.
Death’s single-worded world speaks; the chain of old men folds,
Kingdom’s pawns, their broken tongues lie bleeding with sun,
The black fluency slips through, then childhood falls as one.

Someone must go off to death, little ones.
There is one who played with us in sunlight
Who sits between the ancient legs and watches us
Like a friend from a window who is too sick to play.  
Old men, soon to your rest, and I will let death
Carve its name on my shoulders while my spirit frays.

Dear Author:
I am posting
your 'the-then' thoughts
on this web-blog
since I do not know
where, in time
and in place
are you lost.

If,
someday,
you happen to stumble
upon this web-page,
send me a message
and I will quietly
remove this entry
in exchange
for a small fee:
The privileged readership
of your soul-stirring poetry.

❀

WE ALWAYS REMEMBER

You and I,
wherever we are
are fated to love.

No matter
whose poems are being read,
You and I,
or something of us
springs up in each one
in some way or
another.


Whatever doesn't ever
reach the lips
has reached the poems
...already...already.

There,
Do you blink?
as if to disillusion me.

You talk of bright worlds ;
unknown to me.

My side of the discourse
is limited to sighs and tears
and blushes,
and wiping off
the spreading Kaajal †
with my baby's mouth-napkin.

But you aren't even married yet.

And
by the next time we meet,
I will have painted my lips again.

You remind me
of what I couldn't be.


© The Nightingale

† Kohl

You were a tree.

Not too short but not surpassingly lanky.
The foliage wasn’t thick either
and yet not scrimpy enough
to make the tree look shorn or deciduous.

Ample light passed through the leaves.
The elements were temperate,
neither sultry, nor betraying a freeze.

It was neither day, nor night,
hard to tell the dark from bright.

There was a placid rustle
as the breeze politely shuffled
across the nubilous chaparral.

I stood there

knowing it is you
and the flowers from the tree were
profuse.

They kept falling on and around me.

She was a beautiful girl
with intense eyes
and long black hair.

We would sit
on the windy cliff
till the Sun
went over the hill,
and
she would sing to me
and talk to me
about life;
that promised to be ours.

Then,
the evening would take
deeper, softer shades
and we would go
our own separate ways
waiting......
for the next day's meeting.

Today,
as I write about
those lively days,
I can still
feel the gaze
of dreamy,
eager eyes
of that beautiful girl
whose life and dreams
oozed away quietly
through the hole
in her heart.

My grandmother had forgotten everything but the ability to be good,
Innate courtliness sitting like a castle upon a moor.
Her world of insensate rains and fogs and heaths,
And still the hearth flickering from her lost eyes.
My grandmother whom I adored, to all the world,
Your goodness will go unnoticed into night,
Just as your eyes stared unknowing
Before the subsuming of tides,
While the world blasted through your bones,
Breath without force of inspiration.

Here, love is the far proxy of look
- She is dying a distance -
Yours travels from brook to sky
To the heaven wanderings of death in my blood,
The black smoke-congested veins possessed
By the baffled realms of battlefield
By the horrors of the mundane
From this old mouth, emptied of kisses.

Thank you,

For the freedom
         For this day
For each night.
And for our freely given rights.

Thank you,

For what you did
              For the day you fell,
For the last breath you had
       And the reason I'm alive.

Thank you,

Even though
   We never meet.
Even though
    I don't know
            your face.

But you are on my mind
On the eleventh month
          Of the eleventh day.

And at this time I bow
My head, every year in
           gratitude & respect.