Teji Grover

In the park is a hollow wire elephant. There are just
four leaves on its body going up through its foot. This is the
only image that keeps following me around like my unborn
children. These four leaves continue to tremble in whatever
I say and do. Aside from this, there is this ultra-blue sky
stripped down to wires by its hollow body.

This is the only sky that seems sky. Not the rest.
Only those birds which are able to fly between the wires
seem like birds. Not the rest.
...

I'm writing like this
as if meeting my blind children
in an orphanage, many years later.

How tall they've grown
since you left.

How small they've become - the words
I brought to clothe them in!
...

Friends often ask me.
It's getting to be 1001 days.
They ask
do I still think of you?


What do I go by?
The drop of sweat trickling behind my ear
is what I go by.


I don't know, Babu
if it's my boredom with their question


or my fever going down.
...

Love it could be that sits on the slippery step of the ghat. It's some unfamiliar animal that one's reminded of, looking at it.

It could be a dream. Inside the temple, in place of pillars, there are female posteriors. Ashes of jealousy are showering down. "There's still time, there's still time." An old woman is speaking into the sandy grass. "The wrinkles will be wiped away; there's still time, my child."

Foreheads are about to split open. Souls are adrift cracking through domes of glass. A luminous body is scrubbing her heel in a wave. A man, slight as straw, sits next to a mound of marigolds. Moist eye. He says, "Is there nothing to me at all?"

To his left, between someone's breasts, a seven-coloured stone, pulsing, fashioning its own sunlight.

At ten-o'clock in the morning, in the river, water is like readymade tea. A Japanese dancer, in slow motion, dances out his T'ai Chi, raising his flute to the pyre.

Someone will soon be here
to shatter the make-believe.
Someone will soon be here.
...

The fisherman has landed on the riverbank.

Kalidas becomes watchful.
And in the fish's stomach, our heroine's ring is watchful.

No, no deals for you here,
fisherman. Go away!

This time
no memory will just glide into your net.

The world-to-be
will not get caught on your hook
this time, fisherman.
...

Before I come over to your place
and I see you reading
in the courtyard sunshine,
- the novel that I'll touch in the afterglow of your reading;
(in the light of a falling star, another star has to fall) -
Before my fever soars to 107, reading.

This woman
who embroiders the beauty
of earth's poisonous flowers on her scarf
who hides a deranged thickening all the way to her ankles
Before letting even a hint of touching this woman cross my eyes.

Whatever is clamouring to be spoken aloud,
or that windbag in a play riddled with silences -
Love or metaphor or doom or smoke or Manikarnika ghat
Before these fake catalogues, these feignings come to an end

Before the churning of these lines or those
or the nick of some Zen haiku
or the fresh wound of your saying no

Before everything here begins to suffuse the spirit
with an illusion of insight.

Before this before begins to mean
I don't even want to lift a single grain
to see if the rice is cooked.

This is my kitchen, Badri Narayan.
...