8 September 2013

Tishani Doshi [Wolfgang Kirchner]

from Tishani Doshi’s Everything Begins Elsewhere:

Seasons

By October the reach of sky is complete.
Everything longs for escape —

the snow geese weaving their way south,
             the pigs in the yard,
                                           the leaves.

We are walking that line between the trees,
shameful in their half-foliage
                   replete with desire.

Somewhere across the valley
            there must be another life —

           a woman drawing her children a bath,
a husband returned to this picture of wife.

If we believed in seasons
             how easily we could hold on to this:

this falling away and returning.

But we, who live
            with only the heat and rain,

with perpetual dying —

we, who are impervious to birdsong,

we must imagine the sound of love
            as something of a deafness —

a single vowel of longing scratched across the sky.


Buffalo

Impossible to imagine.
Buffaloes — a dream of them:
coats thick with rain,
bodies like continents.
A whole world thundering
through Indian laburnum.
Think of beginnings:
amusement parks at dawn,
pianos, bedrooms, gods.
Think of all the invisible
insurrections it takes
to wake a city from slumber.
In these woods, a single man
will do, armed with a stick
and a paltry collection of stones.
When I see buffaloes run
I think of love — how it is held
in the meaty, muscled pink
of the tongue; how quickly
it is beaten from us —
all that brute resolve
               disappearing
in the undergrowth.