The Inches

Sitting here, mere inches separating us
Inches that will always separate us
My atoms ache for your atoms
I keep staring at your tiny fingers
Typing away furiously, and
I'm just about ready to swallow my keyboard
I beg the universe
And you turn to me
Your voice strained
From all the coughing
You ask me for a lozenge
I want to give so much more
But for now a lozenge it is
You extend your hand and then,
Just like that, for a brief moment
The inches disappear
The candy takes my heart
and everything else with it
You turn, the inches separate us again
I'm back to sitting here
Loving you like hell.
And this sorry poem, like my love,
Does not go anywhere.

from Words For Departure

I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

*
You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd--strike the thing short off;
Be mad--only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

--Louise Bogan

Magic

‘You, my love, are pure magic.’ he said. ‘You have brought magic in my life, accepted me and shown me how it’s done. You are my Hagrid, Albus and Hermione rolled into one.’

Kitchen

'To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily
result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become
hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?
I didn't like it , but it made it easier to go on.'

- Banana Yoshimoto

The Irony

“Malaviya Nagar?’ I asked the cabbie. After years I had returned to the city. This city that has seen so much, centuries of conflict, has hardened the faces of its men and the voices of its women. ‘The women of Delhi are easy to figure out’, a man of Delhi had told me once, blowing smoke into the chilly December night. ‘All you need to tell her is that she is not just her body; she is also her thoughts, her desires, her opinions, her voices, her spaces and, of course, her clothes.’ I remember my mother in faded baggy jeans on the scooter. She used to take me everywhere, strapped to her chest. My grandmother lazing around in the summer heat, her hand fan’s quiet breeze grazing my hair. I don’t remember much of my father. My sister was born here. She cried a lot. Maybe because it was hard to hear her in the din of India Gate in the evening. We lived right across, of course. ‘500’, the cabbie replied with a grin, ‘and on the way I’ll show you the place where the big rape happened.’ After centuries I had returned to the city. So much was new. So much the same.