A Way of Going
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
About the Author
S.B. Easwaran, a former journalist, now lives in Sakyong, a small village in the Kalimpong hills region of the eastern Himalayas. His creative writing has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, International Literary Quarterly, Prosopisia, and Majuscule.