Discovering An Estranged Wife

N.S. Murty (India, 14/02/06)

 

1

 

Love is not sensual.

It is a great sensuous flux

That flows ! through the ethereal frame.

You think you are strong, infallible

And live in the myth of strength of your will.

Take me,

It just takes two eyes to dress you down,

Dent your confidence

And a husky ripple dancing over the lips

To inundate you.

You never expect it but it happens in a wink.

Like gentle breeze it passes over you. That's all!

You reel under its narcotic spell;

Get benumbed as far as other interests are concerned.

But your wits get a shot in the arm.

Every inch of your frame pulsates

And a strange urge to communicate seizes you.

Sometimes you lose your sense of propriety.

That Tsetse bites young and old alike.

And when it engulfs

Nothing is beyond its sweep.

 

      2

 

Thank you! Thank you

For rekindling the last spec of fire

Hanging on to the tip of this ossified frame.

It acted like a shot of Decadron

To a heart losing its canorous rhythmic beat

Before relapsing into silence.

I was smouldering for ages

Burning my spir! it within me

Without a friendly aerial assistance.

I almost resigned myself to a dreary death---

Caught between the cogs of

Endless opposing earthly interests.

But your breath of fresh air

Made me find my bearings.

That spray of your looks

(God! What an inadequate expression it is!)

Is like a soothing breeze to a sun-tanned face.

Or, should I say,

Is a summer evening shower

After a daylong singeing.

But pray! Be my friend.

Continue these favours.

In your collaboration, I rejuvenate

And renovate long-abandoned

Half-done desires to their fruitful end.

Just promise that you shall be by me.

I presently beat my fears to pulp

And recompense your infusing enthusiasm

With successes galore

And dedicate them to you

Before I meet my D-day.

 

      3

 

I know.

I know I am up against an iceberg.

My Titanic love had hit you and broke to pieces.

Now, I struggle like an eviscerated frog

On the dissecting table in a biology lab.

Not that you are passionless.

But your eyelids drop down

Like autumnal leaves looking at me.

There is a great Saharan silence

That I have been unable to break

Which kills me.

The pain permeates my psyche

And I suffer a wordless agony. As your admirer

Don't I deserve a minute's court?

A minute's attention?

Even a flower beyond my reach

Wouldn't forbid me from looking at it.

All beautiful things are part of nature.

They have no preferences

When someone tries to please himself

Without infringement or interference.

Grant me this concession:

To pass these hours of angst

Merely looking at you,

Your movements

And their grace.

 

      4

 

Like a snake charmer

You peck, poke and swing that plait of yours

Over the shoulder.

That devil slips down as slickly

From there over the fronts in front.

It has the same silken shine

And reptilian grace of a Cobra.

Your face at one end resembles its drawn-out hood.

Does one need a bite?

Even without its sting

One is bitten by its beauty.

As if that is not enough

You put on gold-rimmed spectacles

Matching your skin and attire.

All looks get filed

And magnetised to align in your field.

To me, everyone longing your attention

Looks like a sleepless night

Awaiting daybreak.

Like an arrogant merchant of a seller's market

You pare no looks at them.

You churn your surrounds

And just attend to your work.

 

      5

 

It is easy said than done, I know.

But then, let me try if I can help it---

That 'undo'ing of these years of yearning for you.

Give me time.

I have to unlearn myself.

There haven't been any clues to amnesia,

Tips to forgetfulness,

Nor keys to 'de-memorise'.

Yet, it couldn't perhaps be

A more difficult proposition

Than winning your favour.

What a metamorphosis you brought about me!

I was blunt, adamant, and inert

Until I was exposed to you.

Like a waxed candlewick I caught fire

And calcimined in flames like a crucible

Melting to take form.

Suddenly,

A seemingly harmless music started seething;

Talat began to haunt me through my dreams;

Ghazals got heavy and overcast me like gloomy clouds;

And I could sense the rubble of my own 'quake'.

A strange stillness....

A pleasing pain of searing hot metal

Cutting through the cake-like heart...

A voice struggling to find expression...

A renaissanced eye

Longs to look at your uncultivated simplicity,

Wordless beauty,

Coalesced into your face.

Damn it! Had I not floundered

I would have been blessed this much for ever.

But I shall obey you and try

The most Herculean of my tasks thus far...

To throw veil over these little experiences;

To extinguish the passion within me.

But let me try

If I can help it.

 

      6

 

I was mazed to believing lust for love.

Like a locust

I was eating through carnal riches

And lay satiated.!

The labra I played with

Indenting dontally under emotional upsurge

Never complained.

Neither was I taught

Nor learnt it for myself

To look searchingly into eyes.

I always found some emotional freeze,

Unspelt silence in the eyes I encountered...

But had little time to linger longer.

As the switch put out the light

And fanned my fire

I strayed like a distraught cloud

Fumbling over vales and mounds

Till my tired veins burst to spill and spew.

But today

I notice a strange beat in my heart.

No. It was never its rhythm.

It started pumping more blood

Whenever you graced my view.

Beauty divested of all its attributes

Sums up objectively

Standing incarnating you.

Why this throb?

Why this angst?

My looks grew timid

And learnt shying away.

I feel like a tamed shrew

Without the master ever knowing it.

Why don't you teach me?

 

      7

 

You think I am dreaming?

It was as good as that but true.

I was riding a bike and you were on the pillion.

You nestled on the seat

Collecting all your wings like a bird.

You had not uttered a word

Until you saw that crashed Ambassador.

Nature is such a wonderful poet

That it presents each of us, his life

In such Simile's and Metaphor's.

Like mine own life, the car went disarray

And crashed against the divider

And stood in the opposite direction.

Ain't I passing through the same retrograde motion?

Precocious maturity now presents me

With skipped over juvenescence.

What a pity! I had to turn my back to you

While I was longing to lock my looks with yours.

Those few seconds of togetherness,

The real moments of pleasure you chose to bless me with,

But no more,

I cherish

Till you unleash the next one.

 

      8

 

God knows how dearly I wish

I had been the letters on the most cherished letter

You read often;

I could have garnered all your attention.

You never knew I how strongly I felt

I had been the sound of those very words

Calendered between your lovely lips.

One never knows how many times

I would have! been blessed with your kiss!

Ploughing through classics and prosody

I was doling out verses on your manifest beauty

And was excelling in the excesses of my cloying comparisons.

More like a child, I was drawn to the jingle and beat

Of words rhythmic and rhyming

And was circumnavigating aeons-old images.

! I construed all your pleasant laughter

Was at the ingenuity of my figures of speech.

 

God! What a revelation!

What an emancipation from ignorance!

All my ego had melt down and I realise

What a poetaster I had been all the while.

Now you rightly put ! me in my place:

To studentship, once more.

I have no regrets.

I learn without inhibition now.

Me! What a condescending look, darling!

What an agreeable smile!

Can there be a subtler exposition of a Simile?

What a liquescing love

From those, hitherto lapidary eyes!

How foolish of me running for figures of speech elsewhere

Playing blind to a repertoire of unspoken gestures

Before my very eyes!

 

      9

 

With many moons behind me

I thought I was way ahead

In the marathon run of life.

But, no. That juvenile delinquency

Is running close behind.

To give expression to ideas tantamounts to

Abridgement of emotion.

What a contraction it is!

Words seem to hold ideas rather in a too casual way

For, when I try to empty back the emotion

(I can not but wonder at their vacuous thresholds, for)

Nothing spills back into my cupped hands.

So, forbidding myself to search for those word-fills

I try to relive the emotions whenever I get alone.

No soone! r than I had started thinking of you,

My blood gets warmer; eyes assume a strange tint

And I feel lighter and lighter

As if I had taken to my wings.

Your graceful profile comes to my mind.

Yes, your charms are no less delightful,

Yet your dignity, your demeanour,

Your conduct and yo! ur idiosyncrasies play before my eyes.

I introspect and judge them critically.

But every time

I end up loving you more than before.