CROSSING THE RIVER
“There is a soft little thing in you
Almost like a baby”
Poking my face
From the window of the steamer
I told you:
You are not here
Even in the waves
But I don’t miss you
The steamer moved with me
Scratching the watery flesh
When it’s not day
And it’s not dark
The water takes on a strange colour
And each colour has its own odour
Fishing the half-baked desires
Gargling out what I can’t tell
But there’s a telling even if words
Intervene and take me away
From my telling for silence is
Like a grave, nothing comes of it
Only vapours of the decay
The mud-becoming.
When we move out of the steamer
We have to jostle our way
That’s still some time
So now that you are not here
Let us talk
(This dark floating mass of water
Has a strange way of not looking at me
So I have to)
Did we not always
Get in between us?
And played ghost to each other
Fermenting our blood with a strange mistrust
Then blaming each other not in words
But in the craving, in the crying
We never meant, we never felt
And we acted so normal each time,
Never allowing us to be
What we are
We put on what we had to and then parted
And all that was not untrue either
Only the so many ways
Of not facing each other
A little slanting of light would have shown us
In different hues
But we never believed in lies and so missed
The truth and wandered and wandered and met
Where we never wished to be:
This watery terrain of misled thoughts
Gargling out the secrets of our sunken ships
That soft core we so neatly disowned
Has its own way of teasing us like so many eyes
Crawling back to life from the dead, winking at
Us
And we don’t know why
And what to do
The ones on the upper deck
Have started to move
Now I shall feel the pull and the push
To move out
To carry myself home.