Aerial

 

Nocturne in Black and Gold, Falling Rocket (1875) 

by James Abbott McNeill Whistler 

You stood before me 

Master of your art

I stood before you

Bewitched, gaping.

With long slender fingers

You crafted for me

Whole worlds

in a bubble.

Of bubble,

whole worlds.

Believe me, when I say they were

Worlds singing -

with tunes most tender

Luminous - 

with daubs of thick paint

Soaring -

with words sprouting wings. 

Oh, to hold them in my hands

To press them to my ears

To peer through them all!

We levitated together,

These bubbles and I,

For several light years. 

Who knew, 

(Did you?)

they would pop.

Each one,

One 

by 

one.

With a shatter so sharp

Strings cut 

I fall headlong

(Do you?)

A dawdle of a fall

With echoes of sweet bird and far-off song. 

The clarity of silhouettes

Milliner's Workshop by Pablo Picasso (1926)

Oh, how long our day,

Now come to a close.

Oh, how tired these eyes,

From your saturated tones.

Now the lights switched off

Now the colors drained out

Now my dizzy slows down

Now such silence abounds

 

Blindness,

A wicked specter of the mind,

Trailing me all day,

Exorcised at midnight.

 

An Evening with Friends

 

Avenue de Clichy by Louis Anquetin (1887)

                                             

                                                

Night rush.

Faces, food, and frenzied fumbling

Masks half worn 

and half undone. 

Night hush.

An uphill trod

Soles buckling underfeet

Each step lighter till finally set free. 

Night slush.

Word piled upon word

Some rehearsed, some drawn fresh

The poet's and ours. 

Night hush

Again.

And a wide open window

Nestled in the city, a party

Slivers of laughter floating our way. 

Last Night Arose

Head by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1915)

Last night arose
Beneath my window
A golden gleaming sun.

Steady glare of the streetlight
And a troupe of dancing rain
A whirling expressionist woodcut
Etched onto the tarmac plain.

I watched transfixed
As the sky raged
And the tears began to swim.
I watched transfixed
And willed the glum fog
Inside me to lift.

But what warmth could I borrow?
What light could I seek?
What courage could I muster?
From a pool of damp lies and dreams?

To watch it transfixed
With hope and patience
And a quiet desperate might,
Was only a weak trick
To get through the black, black night. 

Lone Bead

Village (1956)

 by Syed Haider Raza

Linked tight into the human chain

Suddenly something snaps

 And you drift like a lone bead come undone

Slow whirling into space

Regarding the abyss below

Bewildered at those faces

Onward in their braces

Now so dim, their sheen

Much softer, their chug.

A grey cloud hanging overhead

Draws you in its embrace

And you wait spellbound

For the crack of light

To cut you through.

He and She

He and She by Agata Zyclinska

He wandered under the sun

Baked a crusty brown.

Her pallor by now

Had merged into the walls.

Rode upon his shoulders

in his tattered sac

The tale of a floating hero, vagrant and blue.

Under her pillow

Hid dreams of ships

Taking flight with sails unfurled and crisp. 

He dreaded the dusty swirl, the dizzy twirl, the ruthless city whirl.

And She found herself petrifying

Sometimes into a beige upholstered chair

Or sometimes, into a hollow brittle vase. 

But some days they crossed each other's worlds.

He in her dark enclave

She on his street corner

And sometimes she brought a steady hand to him

And he, a bit of the sun into hers. 

Yet Another Rainy Memory

An old view from an old room

Last night was a rare beauty, here in Dusseldorf. I have spent a considerable amount of nights here. Many of which have been the mellow moist ones, with soft cold winds and a gentle sprinkling of raindrops. Quite endearing really. Last night was different though. This city, rarely dramatic, always rather silent and a mesh of indistinguishable whispers, began all of a sudden at the onset of twilight to rumble gravely from the center of its sky-belly. The thunder for me has for a long time been a music so great, I can hardly trace the origin of its fascination for me. But it almost always instantly lifts me from my mundane, slouching insect-life to stare up into the vastness of the grey skies. It seems to emerge from some central node of the universe that eludes my searching eyes and my pricked ears. But it feels as if it vibrates from within me, travelling through each and every speck surrounding me. Like a seismic shudder. Last night was such a night. Full of deep thundering rumblings and incandescent flashes of lightening. And the rain. Not a paltry shower, not at all. The rain fell with a great passion last night. The kind that refuses to stay picturesquely framed in fastened windows but gushes inside and drenches the indoors. Wets the floor and the soles of tired feet.

The window remained open last night. I sat on the wet ledge last night. The music from within my room mingling with the rain’s, outside. I also danced on the slippery stage of my room, with shadows of my own. Dancers were not wanting outside either. Different acts. One followed by another. All dancing in the rain. First a sprightly pair of men. Rushing out of the shelter of the concrete building. One after the other, cutting across the street in a graceful ballerina progression. Light footed and brisk. Jumping ever so lightly over the deeper puddles. Landing with barely a thud on the pavement. Skimming over the rain filmed street, right into their car. A second later, a crisp whirring of the engine, and off they went. With wings weaved of droplets from the settled rain-puddles, airlifted to accompany their majestic exit.

Soon after, there was a pair of young girls. Unlike the fleeting vision of the men, theirs played out like a slow and long drawn interlude. One defined by a sense of pause rather than progression.  Standing a little apart on the large white staircase. At different levels. One behind the other. They seemed to stare into the rain. Waiting. Pondering. Synchronized in their frozen stances. If and when they moved it was barely a shift of weight from one leg to another, but always somewhat in sync. It looked more choreographed then the swinging bouncing act of the puddle hoppers who had just passed them by. And perhaps more hypnotizing for me as well. But the spell broke and perhaps in a combined telepathic resolve they both shed their contemplative, their cautious inertia and in a sudden leap of faith scuttled into the rain. And so they too disappeared from my view.

Much later, when I had tired of my twirling in the dark and had made my mind to finally twirl right into my bed, there came a lone lady in red who walked with an umbrella much redder, to the bus stop right opposite my window. She sat there. A mesh of color lodged in a silent corner of the otherwise dark and dull rain-soaked canvas. Her bus never came. In fact no bus came. For a long long time. I thought perhaps I could sit by my window to give her company. Sleep was deferred for a little longer. But growing weary. Both of us. Perhaps she made up her mind. For herself and mine. So getting up, she began her slow walk, under her bright red umbrella, dulled a little by the downpour, but red nonetheless, to wherever she was headed.

My Piece of Red

Landschaft (1935)

 by Emil Nolde 

The red sky

Framed in my

Night-time window

Is sometimes

A piece fallen

Out of a childhood nightmare.

And sometimes

A suffocating

Expanse

Of erased stars

And swallowed air crafts.

Sometimes,

It is so still

It seems it is sore

And taut in pain.

Sometimes,

It is alive.

But barely.

But it is almost always

A dull red.

Like blood

Of a long long time ago.

City Trains II

But sometimes

You are also

A moment outstretched

Of solitary thought

Between where I came from

And where I am going

A chink in time

To slowly

Leisurely

Think things through.

Things that otherwise

remain unthought.

Like whether we are really headed somewhere.

You and me.

Oh mighty metallic centipede.

City Trains

Under the El 

by J. Reedy

Are we really headed somewhere?

You and Me

Oh mighty metallic centipede.

Or are we merely 

shuttling back and forth

like an abandoned broken toy?

A Monsoon Memory

 Last year's diary entry revived in memory after a dear uncle gifted our home, this beautiful Kashmiri carpet. 

Roads are built and rebuilt each day in my city. The drilling. The dust. The frozen traffic. The clusters of brown glistening bodies moving about over eroded pieces of land. There is an incessant mechanical drone and a drab grey mist that envelopes your entire being. So much so, that it never really leaves your system. The noise,  the dirt, the sweat seem to seep right into your skin and stay with you, making each of us look a little more tired, a little older than what we ought to.

It was a day like all others. My rickety auto rickshaw along with numerous other vehicles on the street were stalled by such a road repair feat. As I waited impatiently for the traffic to start moving again, I noticed beside me, the endless concrete grids that formed the skeleton of the new road to come.

This was a fairly familiar sight. The uniformly constructed, vacant, concrete squares. Drying to form harder, coarser insides to sustain all the weight and pressure of the city. But these grids had something unusual about them.

Unlike most other streets in Mumbai, this one has the sweet fortune of being lined by tall flower-ridden trees. Moreover, the city had just dipped itself into the early showers of June. The breeze too was rather generous these days. It must have been at some invisible hour of the previous night when the wind had brushed the trees off their delicate yellow flowers and strewn them all over that lifeless spine of the street.

I sat, transfixed for quite some time, gazing at all those hitherto colorless and empty squares now filled with a fine layer of yellow flowers. Luckily, nobody was trying to remove them. The glistening bodies carried on their work as usual. And the flowers kept settling deeper and deeper.

Now, every day as I pass by that street, I smile to myself thinking of all those millions of flowers forming an invisible but fundamental layer of the ground beneath our feet. In between layers of hardened concrete, the memory of those soft and fragrant flowers gives me a renewed strength for another day in the city.