Three Poems By Debashish Lahiri

EXILE

Silence has a way

of returning you 

to yourself,

ruthlessly,

like an emperor's fiat

that confines by exile. 

The sentence of silence 

is executed 

by a mirror 

recording 

the pantomime of metamorphosis 

for a future forgetfulness --

what poetry in its wake?

Ovid had been staring

at his dressing mirror, 

a delicate gilt thing,

a gift from Rome,

in cold, cold Tomis

before he fell asleep. 

His Fasti hadn't yet been written.

SUMMER NIGHT

(For Pablo)

I wake up

often

in the noon

that slouches

a minute

behind midnight

and recollect

that moths die of light, in darkness.

There is a moon

in the sky

and the wind bares

the skeleton chest

of a river

to it:

ribs heave in the moonlight, --

the heart of water

is missing --

a passing note

of lament

left in the shallows

trembles

in the mud.

Quickened

by the sun

delirium

has escaped

the funeral of Casagemas

because it was witness

to memory

blooming on his temple

like a dead carnation,

and now darkens my room

with Picasso's blue.

I sit up

for fear of lying down:

night melts like candy

into day.

How strange,

we remember

all our acts of forgetfulness

so exactly.

HAWK IN THE LANE

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer"

Second Coming,

William Butler Yeats

The hawker's cry

waves

through the sun-dark lane

on a current of sudden warmth.

Afternoon

sits up on a couch of mist

and through blear slumber

wonders

what hope was on sale

on a cold day.

The hawk does hear

the hawker's cry,

but chooses to ignore it.

One lost hawk

that cannot find its way home,

because there is no home to return to,

is no great matter.

The hawker's whistle imagines

there is a hawk listening somewhere,

or someone at least.

The hawk's new freedom

from the headiness of return

to lanes

where afternoon has grown narrow

makes him think of love:

that time when his sky danced

and the earth stood upon its sky,

when barefoot stars

squeezed blood from grapes of light

in earthen tubs

and spilled light,

swilled light,

stained the coming of evening.

But, even the time of love comes to an end

like flight in the hawk's wings.

Without wings

the air refuses to hoist a hawk's reverie.

A hawker's cry

sounds the estrangement of clouds

and measures afternoon.

A hawk is having a dark daydream

of lanes in the sky.

Walking in those lanes

takes time,

time the hawk does not have.