Portrait in Adbhutam Bhava
And it is again making rounds,
Digging the grounds
Of sun-scarred hollows of
Memories
Muddy
With the dust spittoons
Buried in the old almirah haze,
A drawer solitary and numb like my ark of ribs
Wintry as disgruntled air of the bony whitewashed day.
I stumbled across the brown-tinged picture of my Grandpa
The other day,
Mustard,
Sepia in the neurosis of nostalgic times,
Marooned as that cold kohl-rimmed gaze in his eyes,
A Gestalt of convalescent husky ashen battalion
Of pasts befuddling the
Cranium in unanswered questions,
Yet these are memories that we cannot do without,
Tainting the bare blue morning in pinpricks of dew and hazel light,
Leaping on noon flight, skimming the silky surface of emotions
Curdled into a moss,
A largesse of sorrow – unbending, wounding and thorough,
And what else am I left to do than believe
In the portrait of past as wonder, and
Awaiting the blur of intangible hues, wiping away everything in
Rain and mist and rue,
And what else to sew than the abandoned knots of threads
Unfettered reminiscence,
Leaving in the devotional blight of awe,
This yearning deep and wild,
This yearning, of returning.
Jwalamukhi Temple, 2019
It was almost twilight as the hue of the incandescent third eye of the Goddess and the fire that glows – purer, brighter, rising till eternity, in the sanctum of the temple – eclipsed in wonder, searing in the blessing of devotion, brimming with thousands of pilgrims each day. After the Darshan, we sat near the milky staircase on the cusp of the twilight song fulgent and embedding us in the roiling mystery of this divine world, pondering only if it was that God travelled to us on such a dusky flight, graciously sweeping the darkness aside, as the spiralling rings of smoke fill the sphere of life, from the evening Aarti, is it how the light of the world evolves, tearing apart the blood- red sky, bisecting our parched atria, and filling our porous, mud-filled, thirsty bruises of self in diademed glory, conscience and love like a lightened dome of our hearts,
Is that how we find God? In us, defenestrating the rusted wounding despair out of the frame, and knowing again where the ocean accumulates in form, where the fire blazes iridescent as dawn
Amritsar – safar
It always feels ethereal to be part of a beautiful story,
Lying somewhere within the history of a town, as breathtakingly
Gorgeous as Amritsar. Amrit meaning the immortal, the elixir – it seems
The city has devoured all the liveliness, the amrit mystery of life, embedded in
Its memory, the soft reverberation of its chaotic charm. Ameristar glistens in the twilight
As we leave our sandals huddled in the grand Golden Temple courtyard. Then
Put aside all the buzzing sounds , entering the sanctity of the destination, the God.
I never experienced peace to be so tangible before, I could hold the day as it was
Blossoming above midst where the horizon met the sky rise temple – gilded, bright, I could
Open the curtained windows within to wander along the winding wisdom of Lord.
As we reached the heart of Amritsar, arteries of sweet air, the welkin just the colour of halwa
As a foggy dust of pink yawned at us, and the city cradled us, journeying, accumulating the
Lost segments of us, that we found again in this cusp, this recognition of Hiraeth,
Home.
Residence
I reside on a riverine land,
An eastern side of subcontinental dreams and embracing Bengali beams.
Here’s the cradling city I live in – a plunge pool of perspiring history and a
Crisscross of skylight entering the canopy of our bushy, woody lives like a prismatic,
Lunatic silvered refracting light.
A city breathing flavoured history through its rusted lungs, congested chests,
A city Byzantine with its oli golis winding as mangy mazes in tetul twilight.
City greened with cheering grass of Maidan siesta light,
City bruised and blazed in an oceanic spur like the porous ends
Of how Bengali gossip ends.
A peripatetic city, a placidly implacable city,
A city of grand celebration, chanting incantation,
Crackling with laughter when the Howrah Bridge slumbers
With the incandescent bright of godhuli.
Scrubbed white city like lime-washed churchyards
Of St Thomas’ Cathedral.
City of Goddesses emerging with ten hands
And shakti in the melody of ecstasy,
A city where I recall, reminisce, reclaim, redefine a finer fleecy silken thread of belonging,
Only to feel more convoluted in the cusp of its clasping topology,
City flavoured flamboyantly in the fuchka delight
And crispness of kochuri,
And the purer simpler smell of mati.
City that keeps singing mellow dissolving notes in the breezy wind of day,
City inscribed in the cavalcade of reverberation
and emotion brimming as the heart and mind of Tagore.
On studying theories of emotion
I am haunted by its conquest,
How the animality in this emotion tinges me red,
Turns my lust
Like scattered petals, pulping enzymes
In refracting,
Recurrent rain.
Today, we are diving into
The anatomy of emotions, which is to say
The exactitude that moves us,
How the stimulus information
Triggers physiological reactions
Leading to exclusive emotions,
Birthed at the crown of the thalamus, communicated by the cortex –
I wonder how this can possibly justify my arousal –
How I let my frame of bones squash in the rinsing
Overwhelm at the shower,
How the collection of water about my blue nerves,
The hollow sweat-embalmed nape, the kundali of my navel,
The fulcrum fecund feeling in the bosom grows
At the perception of your touch.
The tactile, decayed celebration of bodies breaking through
The paradigms, clasping onto each other, to extract
The nectarine lilies, the succulent passage within life, how can I
Interpret this emotion, wound by logic or molten desires
As grazing mouth in the field of honeyed acacia, in
The soft pulsating yearning of your tongue, rimmed
With sugar, syrup, spirited thrum.
Continued,
How might I branch out these emotions to classify
Them as limbic understanding, the simplified cortex sensation,
How could I expect its consequences to affect my body,
In its drowned existence fisting onto uprooted pleasures
Like ocean silk shards greasing the epidermis with healing.
Excerpted with permission from Mantras of the Moon: Poems, Srijani Mitra, Red Rook Press/The University of Alabama.
