Another post for poetry. And this I had thought I would never do again. But Love makes fools of us. All the time. And about love I have one original comment, if it is actually that. I feel it myself that one can very well be in love with the idea of being in love.
Fantasies? Yes. That is very much an example of the act of fantasising. What else can you do? When fear makes us indulge in inviolate tomfoolery, we have nothing else to do but fantasise. And poetry remains, as usual, 'a way of happening', a way to 'survive' in the embrace of these fantasies. The poems that follow in this post on my blog as well as the ones that will follow in succeeding posts are just that, narratives of make-believe, of my fantasies, and also of my memories. Memories of things that happened, and of things that never did.
Blogging has always been a most refreshing sport. Always. Most of my books began their journeys as 'attendant lords' on this blog. After Bordering Poetry happened, I had resolved to stop doing this. But then, I could not resist the lure and so here is Saffron Metrophobia for you all.
All of you, my friends, my readers (the numbers do keep swelling in ones and twos), to you I give this bundle of stolen memories which resemble fantasies. Sometimes, I do not know which is the more apt name, memories or fantasies. And I leave it to the reader to finalise about it.
SAFFRON METROPHOBIA
MAKE-BELIEVE NARRATIVES OF LOVE AND LONGING
OF SAFFRON METROPHOBIA
All those fears of knowing too much,
all those moments of unknowing love,
all those stories and all those names
that are no more – I hold them close
as I always would,
a handful of light, or a lungful of smoke –
I nurture them all with one single eye
and name them all in the hours of the heart.
I call them the silent whispers of the night.
I name them sweet, I name them dead.
I name them hope and I name them red.
I call them the past, I call them the end,
I name them eternally, I have but one name
like Man and mankind, I name them thus,
saffron, so saffron – saffron metrophobia.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOU AND ME
They call us friends, lovers even,
and that is definitely no mistake –
for polar properties vouchsafe our togetherness,
with all the difference in the world, in you, in me.
You steal poems like poets would steal a heart.
I watch them weep in those dark, distant clouds,
those living souls who had been rulers once
of nothing and had also been slaves of the art.
But I steal poems like Auden wrote shields.
I love them like I love myself, or even more.
I wait for the skies to write things anew
and still call myself the saffronised monk.
You would grow flowers of song and hate,
as you say, while I would watch them grow.
FOR MUSIC AT HARDWAR
‘Ad agio’
Only saffron eyes and all things other
than that remain, brown, black and
earthy and so green, green as can be.
Saffron peeks in like the mendicant
walking the roads of this holy town
with bowl and staff and iron tears.
And down beneath its holy facade
Lies holier thoughts, words unsaid,
unsung waitings and wanting too -
Saffron is a colour full of the darkest light.
Do not hate saffron – do not love its love.
For saffron is all around and above,
wherever there was once pain
and now is nothing
but rich emptiness.
LAWS OF LOVE
Law, said Auden, is like love, do not like law,
for the law likes love, and love, so they say,
hates the law –
Law, I said, is not at all like love. Love happens
as a way of being, and is an act of becoming love
after all, when rituals die with the saffron air of joy –
Saffron, said I, is the colour we made love to
and were hated by, hated and laughed at and jeered at
by our shadows across corridors and stairs and guitars
and car tyres and crows on the heights of Olympus
that had been K. B.'s itinerant library and magnificent home.
Saffron, said I, happens with each breath.
So saffron shall be death too, and loved as Love
that shall die and be a speck of dust in the sky
