Requiem From the Pothole, Within Which I Stand, Precariously Balanced

An old woman drags behind her

a dilapidated mailbox, its half-broken door

rattling on the brick of the pavement.

For five decades, she has

refused to shut her door,

has set aside a plate of food for a son

who is dead. Dead and gone. The plan

to build a monument for him was discussed

meticulously, then aborted – like many

other things we planned to chisel. Besides,

everyone knew him by his alias. Which

only happens to be an incomplete nomenclature

when contriving a memorial. I remember

her as a line in a song, an epigraph

in a poem whose end-rhymes

you kept forgetting. Although, I

remember you joining the chorus.

A line in a song where her eyes

are always hibiscus-red: with tears.

An antique mother who keeps carving

pearl-coffins from her own tears. Outside

of the barbed wires of the poems,

her eyes were hollow: you could have

poured buckets and buckets of water,

but nothing would have overflowed. No

ripples, nothing. Her hair shot up

towards the sky, a dry oleander tree

whose branches were bereft of blossoms. A

colony of vultures made their homes

in those shriveled boughs – dry, dessicated,

drought-heavy. In order to touch her bones,

rattling like an abandoned chimney, I

had to unstring your olivewood fiddle. Alone,

with empty hands, bruise-rivered

like an overflowing estuary. You stood

apart, head inside your hands, staring

down. Dejected, because you failed to find

the hammer inside the toolbox.

Amongst the many terrors of return,

is the vision of a precipice 

turned inside out – 

the imagined frottage: an 

evening of smashing open 

the flower-pots

of this city’s highrise balconies.

Yet, this promenade

remains 

 a hesitant foray 

into the unwritten ballad – 

of how entire wheatfields

rush into wallflower orchids,

remain lost, and reincarnate – 

as memento magnets.

A row of seven balsam-saplings 

on the balcony, the pots color-coded 

to resemble a rainbow: a vague 

effort to brush into existence 

a coffee-table reality: an as-yet 

untouched picturesque.

Iron-gates, walls veiled

with glass-shards; high as a forest-ranger’s

elephant. Barbed-wire driveways: 

this is where philanthropists

are sculpted out of pill-popping mansion-mistresses.

A smack, a deluge, a snuff-out– the desert

a crow carries into the porch on its beak. 

A scratch, a squeal: a plateau swimming

underneath her unslept ivory-bed. A rasp, 

a scrape, a squeak: the chirr of a porcelain

vase perforating. This is the sound 

of her carving poets out of makeshift mountains. 

A massacre has just been made beautiful 

in brush-strokes, and I am watching. Watching

and counting. Counting: how many seconds

does it take to hold someone

jumping from the rooftop. Or not.

In this return, I bring home nothing

but memories of evasion. The kind of barrenness

that inevitably follows an apology  —  I admit

I misread the wavering undulations of your chest

as pretension.