And gathering she sings in air:
– Devapriya, Poet
“Fair as the wave is, fair art thou.” – Simples by James Joyce
Gowri’s poems speak with her ‘stream of consciousness’ for the bleak silence hidden in the intricate patterns of love, lust, hate and grief. They turn out to be sublime on rereading, leaving persistent remembrance of relish with her occult words.
Tea
First they broke the chairs.
Every morning, the opening of doors,
Sucking the thin end of a name doubled
On itself, laying down babies on laps.
When the splinters were grown
And breeding, there was spring.
Then they talked about banning
The way words attached limb to limb.
We nodded. Flinched. Opened
Our mouths secretly into another’s.
Then summer came in our sleep.
Anyone could sell their good fruit
For salt, furniture, prayers. Maybe
Cardamom in sweet tea, boiled with milk.
My body imagined a womb. You bit
Into old seeds – മഴ, കാലം, മഴക്കാലം –
Burying them before the rain.
When the year was done, our knees
Were rock from standing up. All night
We scratched poems into the moss.
In the morning they came to ask us
Which newspaper we paid for.
(gaze)
If you’re here,
Watch over the body.
Earlobe and lip and toenail
Resigned to the entropy of an eye.
Either could be surprising, the asymmetry
Of its navel, or the persistence of a bee at an ankle.
All the time it takes to grow transparent, tinnitus.
It answers first from its silence, then from yours.
Pause. It sways before it aches and before that,
It overflows from a broken pelvis.
A bruised nipple, an ant’s feet
Curious around the heart.
In your blind spot,
The soft hunger of knuckles
Digging into dirt. This is how sight slows.
Wind over the cone cells, the pliant retina.
The light waits an hour or two, then tiptoes,
Nibbles at an elbow, says its name.
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