Two Poems - Record of Where and Woodpecker

By Purbasha Roy

Record of where I was last winter

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This same brick house. The walls no longer

comedic. The winter moonlight intimate to

the fog halted before reaching the windowsill.

I stand begging my consciousness to find a thing

like completeness by clock. Treating myself as a

stranger to me gave me more comfort like eyelid

covering the burning eyes. I called this a sensation

the first raw mango bite graces human tongues with.

What metaphor is for the urge to hold lost moments

between moments those seem to refract the life I was

with you. Watching the world the way a world is

found through a bioscope. Always the excitement

for what is to follow. As words like hands can build

things, I had then mortared a song for you. How it

had an invitation in the interludes. I prayed from pit

of my bones for you to read them. What you did, turn

them into flowers. Floated them unbound in the winter

river. The way stale flowers are after last day's offer to

a deity. Winter river between teeth of pollution demon

kept billowing and carrying the thing, constructed the

way tribe of sound is, in a telephone wire…       

 

 

 

Woodpecker & Bicycles & Life

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 If I forget what happened that dusk, wiped

would be the woodpecker’s gouge in a dead

tree beside the road to home. The dusklight

weakening each moment like the mind fog

on the reach of clarity. The tree from a

handsome distance looked like a sprinter

in wait of an On your marks. 1,2,3 Go…

The soft wind laden with usual autumn

evening stuff passes by on its symphonic

vowels. An astonishment laid foundation

that moment. I pressed your right shoulder

and desired a world thing not so worldly. I

halted for once. And so did you. And the

bicycles we rode out of intimacy for velocity.

I behaved with awe. Waited. For you to replicate.

Like mirror. You didn't. My body wanting to

disappear from the expanse of something

glorious. And then the glory shrunk. For a love to

behave as love the need is, to strangulate the time,

that spotlights the begin of solitude emerging

between a togetherness. How I diversed from

it like careful chaffeur,driving through winter

mist. Thinking about blessed endings the gentler way.