Et in Arcadia, Ego

The moon

 written in paper veins

Whistling grass

Your skin

Cool

Now warm

Brine

Tanned, stretched

Twisted onto bone

Bound

Now flapping free

Your being enveloped

And voided

Nothingness

Rooted

In your stalks.

Smoothness crumples

No one sees

redness

Pulsing

Directionless

Searching for the Nebula

Which, once blue

Told us of entropy

Of cold distance

Disparate

Disappearing

Darkness

Matters.

From the tram-tracks

A thousand nights

Unslept

Unfeeling the weight
of a thousand years

that lay on Her lover.

A crane flies along the skyline

Where steeltowers meander

Where Orion hunts no more.

The lepers are gone

From the hydrants.

The forlorn Doel whistles in vain

at constellations smothered by smog,

at banished Shamas

at screeching Starlings.

Can I be the sand

on his tired feet

Or

Seathing saline hands

scraping his being?

My beloved’s face

was carved in lines

not of Sravasti.

The engine roars,

vibrating wings

a memory.

We totter along

through owling woods

strewing entrails

along the asphalt.

Halfway (to Namkhana)

Sun-skinned,

She turns to me

Smiles:

“My name is Arunima Sanyal

Were you looking for me?”

Les somnambules

Devenir poète,
C'est, devenir un fragment poétique
Qui se forme de feu
Se tue
S'efface

Une mèche de fumée
Montante
Parmi les nuages
vue par les cils
du moitié endormi...

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The Sleepwalker

Becoming a poet
Is to become a poetic fragment
Which forms itself from fire
Kills itself
Self-erases

A strand of smoke
Climbing
Among the clouds
seen through the eyelashes
of the half-asleep.