for Sakshi
Your face an oblong fact. Your hair a swirl of light in a jagged syntax. The curve of your laughter like a shot of caffeine in the mainline vein. This is how you look from the other side of my death—Your wrists torqued, shoulders hunched, your eyes a liquid curl of endless awe. You map the graveyard like a mouth does the memory of love; digressing along the diagonals— stumbling through the weeds to unfurl a nerve you didn’t yet know existed. What do they mean? You asked me once, The things you write— what are they a gesture of? And I said I wanted to speak from outside of my death— clutch and claw at things beyond the clasp of language. And it isn’t bad, to be honest; the ground eats all light and lets nothing through. Everyone is used to the quiet of it— lulled into sleep like a formless child. The mind outside the skull is just one— cold and liquid— membraned like a sheet of transparent glass. I get to walk in and out of your dreams and invent the past. There, the splash in the skyline from the day I met you, and the gust of breeze from the ocean in our backyard. The veins of the sidewalk spelling our names incorrectly. The sun slivered at the edges of the neem tree— the truncated symmetry of its scattered light and the unending crescendo of old-time Gods. The bravado and the fatigue of it all. Possibility piled up on possibility. The bright wild static of our childhood— the light spilling out of our hands like a litany of unsaid things. It’s all here— everything we lost— like a river of unending quench. Memory has no margins here, the world winnows all at once and everything is water— nothing sinks. And yet I am always swimming towards you, gnawing against the current, nudging and nudging against the curve of things. Your voice an anchor at the wrong end of a very long tunnel and I twist and turn in my sleep, crush the maggots underneath— trying to find my way to the dream within the dream where we hold hands again.
Abhinav is a graduate student residing in Delhi. His poems have appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Chestnut Review, trampset, The Deadlands, and, Gulmohur Quarterly among other forums.
