Autumn’s Shadow
The sky azure, spread,
after an overcast week
bringing dull rain;
the scattered fragments of clouds
look like kids in piles of leaves ;
an eagle sways in the sky, and in his solace
he has triumphed over
his unceremonious life.
I look at the camphor tree,
its branches swinging with the cool passing
of afternoon wind,
and notice its trunk,
etched with wrinkles of memories.
How long have I lived as your widower, Lisa?
Fissure
Between desire and denial,
a small fissure hisses at you,
a valley:
you meander towards it, a wayfarer,
in fresh hope and temptation.
Then you fall,
like the downward
drop of a heavy ball,
sometimes rolling on gentle grasses,
sometimes thudding in the rock;
by the time you reach the bottom
you hardly have a face.
From the same fissure,
a loud voice crackles,
What did you achieve?
A long silence and
ever stretching emptiness is
what follows.
You and I live perpetually
as concubines of desire
if not of denial.
A Low-Hanging Leaf
It’s dusk. I can tell by the low screeching smell of it, taking on the chorus of fatigue, a lump of memory in your throat, that you try to clear and like a disobedient dog, it won’t move an inch. On an empty moor with dung heaps, a decaying serpent lies in a hole, wishing for the warm day’s sunlight, unable to slither anymore. Flocks fly and then they fall as if a plague ate them all. There are people, men, women, adults, love, the slow hanging sound of moans that turns on the whole world. Next, a colossus of hatred rains. Couples sleep, tightly wrapped, and there is a baby crying. A sparrow chews water, grudges of rejection linger, some leftover touch of her hands still smells, somebody just died, and the bed where millions have loved slowly cracks while the ghosts prepare themselves to make more intensifying love. Half of the world heaves and sighs and smiles a motif or chaos or a deluge or a flood. What matters, whatever it is, when it moves, it leaves its stink.
A wayward wind wafts. A low hanging leaf in its caresses prepares itself to fall. Not a grand fall, just an ordinary, leafy one, with all its rotting odor. Somebody with no sound or face, calls me from a whirlwind of decayed memory, “How are you?” I try to lift my head up and on the midway, I sigh with the fresh grief of a widow. “Just one more sniff of gloom,” I mumble.
All I remember is the wind and a low-hanging leaf. Then, we’re ghosts.
***