Limbo
Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory—
Emily Dickinson
In winters I have this dream where the ground is all water and if you stand still you drown. So I run across the city—the landscape a line of wind in the peripherals, I lie on the wet grass by the sidewalk, and watch an endless ellipsis of believers nudge towards God of a makeshift temple. I tell myself we’re all dreaming the same dream in different colours, the dream where I get to see you once and kiss you on the forehead. Your mother forever suspicious of me. My mother unaware that the dream exists. Where the boulevards cave in on us like parentheses. I could kiss you on more than just the forehead but the dream has its margins, there are always people around and I have never been brave, not like that. In love I believe we have all the time in the world, we get to run as far as we can, wherever we want. You tell me there’s no point running, soon everywhere will tilt and I’ll give up on you in winter. Which is trivial, has happened before, so the dream stays intact. And I tell you the point of it all; that if we stand still we’ll drown, and it won’t solve anything. Even in the water we’ll remember. Memory is a liquid dream, broad and blue. You on the other side of me and I on the other side of you. Whenever the winds shift we’ll wash over each other like a wave. That neither of us will forgive the other. So you lean in and the light cuts like a slash of blade—we end up in the taxi always dropping each other into the future. Clear road in the dimmed light. Desire spilling out of our hands and ruining the landscape. On and on we wipe it clean when the telephone rings and you’re on the other side saying our problem is we don’t know when to let go. That this is just a dream and we’re too good to be true. Which is reasonable, but beside the point. The dream cares little for either of us, we’re two dots in the ellipsis, nudging into each other. There’s a thin trail on sand, and as soon as we look back, we’re already water.
(For T)
The Third Time We Changed Cities
The idea was that
of a jagged beginning.
The morning an oblong
cauldron of possibilities.
My face pressing
against the mesh, the world
a latticed cone of light
the sky blank as a bone—
My mother watered the soil
in neat lines. The pores of earth
bubbling like ancient wounds
in a garden newly allotted to us
on a five-year lease. Our names
on the door not etched yet.
Our next home, curved further
down the lanes of some nameless city.
Our language an incomplete echo
of the people now past us. Wet slants
of left-behind hibiscus like a liquid truth
swaying in the wind, all summer I
kept thinking
I’ll have to carry this on.
This flower bed. This trivial
privilege of being
alive. Eventually. Without
my mother—Some morning
down the lanes
of abandoned possibilities.
Untitled
Online, a woman twice my age cuts directly to the chase, says it’s the abs I’m interested in, other stuff is dust in the wind. Never met a gym guy who’s into poetry. Anyway, let me see them clearly. Which gets me thinking, about the odd things we chase, against the wind, always against the wind. I started chasing language when love wasn’t enough. It should have been, but that’s beside the point. In a lecture that’s no longer online, the professor says there is a hard limit somewhere, and it’s necessary. You cannot go past it. That’d be absurd, we are finite beings. Each time I cut past the obvious, the grammar starts caving in on me. In the text, there is always a body of water and I die thirsty. Everything is about love or the lack of it. Outside the text I am focussed on the wrong things and my mother goes on chasing some idea of me. She is there, she insists. Almost there. Verging. Like the wind prior the paroxysm of water. She doesn’t understand what I write. This is not her language, and I am not her fault. Between the two of us there are no words, just the blur of space, and the howl of wind, crashing.
Abhinav is from Kanpur. His work has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Trampset, and Chestnut Review among others. He has received nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.