‘The Eyes Of Those Fish’ & Other Poems

What’s this that makes the mind shiver like a shadow?

This isn’t the familiar morning breeze

with which the birds came to report nature’s condition,

Nor is it the winter sunlight

with which came the humming of honeybees.

This is some other reality,

a premonition that builds itself up like a reassurance.

Something will occur now,

transforming this sunny-windy world.

The bees will leave this world,

abandoning their nectar-filled combs.

Perhaps we, too, will have to abandon this place,

vacate our own bodies,

leaving the personal history of desires,

decamp to the bottom of the seas

to search for the eyes of those fish

lost somewhere in us.

Someone made love to me in my dreams yesterday

it felt like a different world

I felt the flow of blood in my nerves.

Strangely, I couldn’t see the lover in my dream.

It was like the suffering of fishes,

his eyes fixed upon me.

There was surely no water anywhere,

the wind was like water,

and there was very little oxygen in it.

The love-making was like atmospheric pressure,

even others could feel it.

There was no one here,

only the feeling of everyone’s presence,

exactly like the love in my dream.

A little later though, I saw a car go by.

Perhaps I was travelling in it.

On the bonnet of the car

perched a kite, its feathers rippling in the wind.

It was not a kite,

it was perhaps a fish,

its scales swimming in the wind.

In the dream I kept thinking

how many such things I’ll find

similar to each other,

but they’re not what they seem.

It was good that the one who loved me in my dream

remained unseen.

The one that can be seen isn’t what one sees,

the one I was attuned to recognising.

It might have been a creature made of straw,

blown away by another gust of wind,

a new invention of nature,

never before sighted.

It would have been like a human

or it wasn’t.

I’m now like the night

and the wind,

Like someone who hoards all the kisses one’s heart treasures

and has lost one’s own taste.

I’m like I’m not,

like these words aren’t

the words that kept us.

The night is thick

like heavy rain

wetting our eyes

that see something else now.

Now it’s night,

and the night wind

makes the grass dance to a strange rhythm,

like something no longer alive.

And there on the rock

a shadow darker than night,

like the shadow of a large bird

spread over its two wings.

This shadow is bigger than its own shadow,

it’s coming here.

Luckily, it’s night now

and there’s the night breeze.

He was like darkness

Like a desert that looks endless

The crests and trough of the sands of darkness

And little storms in the middle.

I kept wondering why

and carrying on.

It felt like I was in a river,

I couldn’t lift my feet

to reach its bank.

That’s when I saw him

The owner of this desert

A man with deer horns

Running towards me

At first slowly, then fast.

But I wasn’t scared

I knew that he was only sand

Pure dust

He’ll fall like he has risen.

Only this remained to be seen:

How violent he could be.

But what’s this?

He fell at my feet,

prostrate, breathless.

I knew that this was also

a sort of deception

like the rest of him —

muscular body, beautiful horns.

I began to wait

for him to get up,

and he kept turning into the sand

of the desert of darkness.