At the last page of my notebook,
Browsing through the leaves of
Kabul memories and blank possibilities,
Is why this decision…
I only open the last page as I move on.
Just that first page from the flip side
And then I am certain.
…(Y)ou cannot make plans in Delhi.
Delhi is tentative, fleeting, a stopover -
It is only good for making memories.
I think… that I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt. The words turned up in a dream and I wrote down upon waking, uncertain what they meant or to whom they applied.”
Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. 2007.
Someone asked me if i have written something lately. Nothing i said. Yeah, nothing really. Maybe, someday, I will be able to sit down to write again. Write like i have never written before. Make sense of what’s going on inside my bloody head. Celebrate the mobility of the pen (or of the fingers).
But for now, i just want to take indulgence from the words of my favorite poet… Reading and listening to this poem made me remember that one recent afternoon spent navigating around islamabad.
LEANING INTO THE AFTERNOONS
Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man’s.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.
But enough of this foolishness.
Curiosity
Alistair Reed
may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.
Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems,
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.
Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die –
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.
Only the curious
have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.
Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,
are changeable, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.
Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.
