The Museum of Stones

I’m changing relations. What’s distant comes nearer, what seems to be common appears being wonderful, inside and outside converge into a cosmic flux.

Jabes: One thing is to copy a text cutting and pasting it, another thing is it to copy a text writing every single letter. Each blank has the potential of becoming an abyss or an invitation to fly: I am writing now kwiskwis. I wanted to write the Latin word for “who”, but I am not able to. My iPad does not give me the letter I need.

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Erase the legend:

The Notness Monster
Dies in the lake above the sky

Sampurna Chattarji

You are not my body,
The six year old said to the sexagenarian.

Neither are you, said the goat to the kid,
The wood to the woodpecker,

The stick to the shadow.
You are not my body, love,

Is that why it hurts?

Arrow as plumb line
Wound the depth of the sound

Balance the opposite nerve
Spoke in the wheel

No circle can resist a knife

Sampurna Chattarji

Seed a circular sign in a sky
Field magnetic with felled trees

Giant compass of a leaf
The land of your terrible branching

Picture your head in a metal box
The spire of your breath steepling

You plant two stones on my cheeks
What can grow from a stone?

Sampurna Chattarji

Breathing together, in unison, the rise and fall of our breasts, is a kind of language, too.

Whatever we do, think, write, we will never achieve the grace of large-winged birds wheeling in the sky above us.

*

Strangers return us to ourselves.

Is water the river’s skin?

*

“I love the human voice”

“If I had to choose a favourite, I would choose…you.”

*

Perhaps the prettiest sights will go by in the dark. This fertile febrile dark.

Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row.

*

Venus races us again, refusing to be left behind.

Speed is my demon, too.

*

“Where are you now?”

“I don’t know.”

*

What scars do places bear?

Do snakes slough off memories with their skin?

*

And finally I see it, the moon.

The fog, gentling everything.

*

Electric poles vanish, oil refineries vanish, villages vanish, an orange canvas tent, two crows on a bulldozer, a yellow school bus, waiting at an unguarded level crossing, silent.

The courage that comes from the fiery liquids we toss into the blood.

Some evenings she remembers the etching of brambles on the skin of an alien sky.

Blue fish, blue bicycle, red hand.

Black Maria, black widow, red eye.

Melt me down, the voices say, in the innermost of her fears.

Meanwhile, the kestrel becomes a cormorant, the book in her hand becomes the encyclopedia of birds, her bangle a circle of red, knotted thread.

The ladder that climbs to the water tank, the possible precipice of an oil flare.

“Do you want to be a dog or a guitar?” she said.
And she thought of the cradled arm, the embrace of wood and hollow, the curves that fit, snug, from a long intimacy.
She thought of the knees, bony below the faded jeans, she thought of the clutch at the crotch, the seeming endlessness of dark.
She thought of the thigh, and the nails, and the hair.
She thought of the strings of heart and catgut, of nylon preservative, she thought of the shudder of sound through skin.
Re verb, she thought, a doing word.
To hold, to be held.
“A dog,” she said, “can only be adoration, a red tongue, brown eyes at my feet.”
She thought of saliva.
She swallowed.
She thought of all the words:
Strum and fret and pluck.
Twang, she thought.
“Yes,” she said. “I want.”

Sampurna Chattarji