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| under the hood of my umbrella |
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| by krishnakumar sankaran |
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A Night At The Beach
You trace lines for me and point
to hunters and their muzzled hounds
chasing bears across a summer night.
I see a red point eating
my cigarette and birthing ash.
You frown, I try
to find your lines in all that space,
But all I see is a full stop here,
a colon there, so I stop.
You tell me stars are gas
super-heated. But the night is cool
against my cheek and your palm, warm
like a star that has been falling all night.
I tell you what I know of stars,
that they are signal fires.
The night - smoke, thick and dark.
That someone up there crouches
in a cave transmuting
coals into suns hoping
we don't lose our sleep over
why the sun drowned himself.
That the northern star is the point
of his cigarette burning down
his lungs into carcinogens.
You smile, but tell me what do you know
of futility, of ash in the wind
that stings your eyes. You, who never turned
to breathe smoke downwind.
Why I always play undead
Trees are over-rated and corpses, cheap.
Besides, the cracked grey of dead earth
shines easier on the eyes. Look at the heroes.
None of that straight spine, gryphon glare
or bassoon warcry of your standard paladin,
no. Here the hyena drool, the rictus grin, the catch
at the throat on a whispered 'Master'.
No halos neither, who needs inspiration
when hunger is all we know. Remember,
leadership is vanity. Let the living crawl
and the dead stoop when you beckon
them to your will. Let them groan, it is seemly.
And when you see a stream of blue flags
creeping closer on your trail, save
your game and wait for persecution.
Drought
You wait expecting a grey rabbit
to pop out behind the wicker gate. Sun-rotten,
a carrot, an everest for ants, in your cross-hairs
There is silence and a distant sea. Grass
hunches in regiments and whets its blades
on your shins. Somewhere there is rain,
and corn ears turning to catch the thunder
underground. You know only the dry taste of your tongue
and the hush post passing dust clouds
that bears the promise of a grey apparition
between the X where your eyes meet.
Clouds
All clouds are ice cream, you said
in class and sketched isosceles peaks
dark and jagged like alligator teeth,
which you then folded into a cone.
You held it against the rusting window bars,
and prayed for a stray chill breeze
to push a shivering white cloud in.
We couldn't watch, so we stared
at the lines on our palms
while Teacher's sky blue nails
closed on your ear like a beak.
Schools don't let clouds in, we said.
They don't have birth certificates
Or ration cards. You shouldn't pray for things,
We said, you should pray for people.
You lived on the fourth floor and scowled
at gray pigeons who pecked at your shorts
drying outside on a clothesline,
held down by plastic crocodile clips.
You left poisoned pellets in a plate
of rice. They rustled their wings and rose
as one when crows dove in like a black cloud.
They strung themselves up along
a bobbing telephone line, red eyes
like unblinking candid cameras watching
recording the gulps snaking down black-downed
gullets, the clatter of black beaks
half-closing on air, the surprised caws
falling fifteen feet.
"We fall with grace, all of us",
you said later, "We gawk like stars
like pinhole eyes of some god hiding
behind the bark of the night." You left.
Librarian
It is now my life's ambition
to be a librarian. I will lead
young things down bookshelved lanes
that smell of old people and dead worms.
I will hold their hands and squint at racks
searchingly for that little slip
with a spidery scrawl of a name
and a Helvetican number, a pointer to some
suitably ruined-looking work that allows
itself to be branded a tome. I will nod
shyly to their clutching thank-you's and wait
three weeks for a furtive scarred hand
to leave it on the counter near
closing time: Freshly singed, with wax
like a goitre hanging off its spine edges,
ash in the golden grooves of its name,
and missing a page.
An Evening Among Silent Trees
Under the hood of my umbrella,
I am the only piece of dry
wood in the forest that is this storm
to strike a match against
She will arrive like a ghost in a sheet
of rain; her hair like tangled snakes,
lips parted to breathe out the wind; leaves
fleeing the touch of her feet
to fall lightly to rest at mine.
Maybe she changed her mind
and caught the evening bus back home,
knowing I will take the hint
when I run out of cigarettes.
The storm rustles; stray birds scatter
from silent trees. It could be her
or just a falling branch |
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