by S.B. Easwaran

for SP

 

only the night-lamp glowing,

the kitchen steaming with pale soup

and fierce sauce from jagged hills

 

a table stacked with poems of Siberia,

yellow books of gloom and a cup of dice,

all to be scattered with a sweep of arms

 

the collage woman with sad, marten eyes

floating amber notes from her saxophone,

fluid as the mandorla she is framed in

 

your hand to hold as we swim away,

singing of Gnathang, Zuluk, Jelep La,

crag-ice places we soften in sea dreams

 

and with our equal breaths to feel

the pull of the pink blotter pulling ink

from our dingy, domestic universe

 

drops gravid with the memory of water

swirling past us, seeking salmon flesh,

pale, soft, and wild as the pine slopes

 

from which the mist sweeps down, moist

with longing for drifts of hearth smoke,

warm in the love of plain village homes

 

stipples of anemones to light our way,

guardian jellyfishes, a blue whale to be drawn

in the wake of, its eyes cool and resolute

 

as it breaks through the roof tiles, takes us

past your childhood and mine, mountains and seas