'Perchance it denotes only/the season, slant of the afternoon'
It pierced the reader’s heart.
The nib shows the taste for blood
that grows on it.
Perchance it denotes only
the season, slant of the afternoon,
the shadow of the tea, our conversation.
The writer says,
often he reads his words first.
I turn. I see the wound.
I know how the pen may return,
turn and turn in that hole.
I ask why there sprawls no couch
in her place.
The therapist says,
“We do not dwell in that kind of world.”
We live, indeed, in a spare earth,
cramped between some
rejected almirahs filled with
worm-through books on Freud and
Pavlov.
When I reached her chamber
the wind gushed through the things extant,
rushed the fallible to the edge of fall,
and I knocked on the white door:
The Doctor is [in].
Now her widowed window closes in.
No sign of the outside wind.
“Why did you come?” Asks the therapist.
“To know how you are.” I murmur
while trying to stare at her ceiling.
It hurts my neck.
There is no couch. The room is not
so nice, painted in sickly green,
teeming with the moths desperate
to eat the silk of our words.
(An author and a father, Kushal Poddar, former editor of ‘Words Surfacing’, authored eight books, and his works have been translated in eleven languages Twitter: @Kushalpoe)