BIBHAS SEN'S PHOTOS

To Angela (concluded)

Death-song for Angela

Wind-chariots of love

white or melting beneath the skin,

stations lost in midnight peace or rebellion,

Wild storm beneath your gown

and the crazy, green silence

of lonely hospital rooms

Angela,

stay a while here with me

in this land of pink and sleep.

Violin in your sleep,

softly we stand,

our fingers quietly kissing in sand and light.

I could be your little orange town

as you summon a magi in sleep,

I could be your dream.

A town in the skies,

all the roads here lead to sleep,

and little paraffin birds spread out their wings

in water and dreams.

White eyes among nude petals

thirst for the fragile beak of the sky,

your lips carve music in the clouds.

Once again,

our lips will waltz in touch

as I hold you in me

in this city of love.

Angela,

You shall touch me again

in love or sleep,

as the piano will find a beat

along the wounded strings of your heart.

Touch and angel lust,

your voice wild across the winter night

in my blue telephone,

Won’t you touch my lips

with a song or a kiss?

Won’t you cry,

my mad rain lover?

Blue sea-horses diving in your eyes,

fortissimo in your breast,

we lie down and shiver

beneath the porcupine breath of the sky.

Your eyes in my eyes,

your kisses fractured along the liquid, orange throat

of the lemonade evening,

here we are, lying down

amidst the sound and the city

in our little, paper-boat across the skies.

Glory of harmony in your starry laughter,

wet roses in your molten copper voice,

my finger runs along the wild black waves of your hair

like Neptune’s seas.

Beauty in the piano land,

mist and lovers beside the river,

your lips travel time

and spill ancient folklore of love.

Send me the fragrance of your breath

and some quatrains hidden in snow

as we remember old men leaning out of windows

in the December sun.

Death beside the ocean

in the purple carriage of winter,

your body worn in time and beauty

will sway like a wild flower in last ecstasy.

Dear Angela, my love,

the moon in her white gown, shall not know

what it is to wan inside a lover’s last sigh;

while the trees, the wind and light

will a build an epitaph for our kiss.

Our hands entwined in love,

our clocks melting down our thighs,

the rainbow will give rise to a new time.

Our faces and naked touch returning

to the soul of brown God

in the white lanes of sleep

leading to Brahma’s feet.

White sheets, white unslept pillows, white feet

and white song of parakeets rising like war

in this afternoon air of silence and radiance.

Your letters are little holy ruins

that make monuments for the ants

in rain; your voice anoints with joy

Aurora’s glowing horses of dawn.

Last smoke in your eyes,

last smoke from the chimneys of earth,

the last song for my fingers.

Amidst this love,

this ambrosial lust for lilies

and music from the stars

the song of vultures on earth

and specimens of slow, brown decay,

Angela,

I must leave you again

amidst the poem and tower

in the clouds,

amidst the elves and white lanes of sleep,

my fingers still stroking

the wild sitar in your eyes at sunset.

Let our love run through valleys in sleep,

like bloodstreams through the harmonica.

Let our death-song come to an end

in this land of camphor and blue.

Words to the panther lady

Painting by Rimi

-1-

Lines on wet glass

drenched with cobbled laughter,

dream staircases go up in smoke

the panther lady visits the town

with a bag of pink flowers.

Inside your wet, melanin eyes

the dream changes station.

-2-

The night has a strong taste of skin.

The train melts through the mind

remembering the lips that burnt in Siberia.

Only the desert children smile

as they play with the corpse of rain.

-3-

You will watch the walls form

inside your laughter.

You will watch the leopard

kiss your dream,

as the mirror

fractured like ice poles,

will record the scent of your fingers.

Ghosts of the Ganga

Ghosts of the Ganga

-I-

The Ganga is your feline ghost lover

slicing through the heart of the city

caressing and culminating existence.

The Ganga is your blood-mother,

dressed in her widowed veil.

Translucent,

transgressing,

fleeting,

transforming lives.

Ferrying tidings of the sleepy sun

dissolving his orange petals in death,

as the dots in the city murmur on her banks;

halogen evenings on clay

and the vibration of rails,

a city conjured up in the white mist,

as she protects her banks with her flapping shroud

and the lights in the city twinkle;

the mercury lamps of a ghost city,

the stadium towers, the floating noise,

the soft halo of the marble dust palace the breeze

refracting life; unreal in the movement

of the swaying bridge in the winds.

Those moments of light, life, unity,

staring at the cityscape like a speechless assassin

and watching the buildings rise and melt

like Illion’s flute,

conjugating the matter and spirit.

The river is your flowing Goddess,

stopping at the land of death,

and carrying the ashes beyond life.

The river is the metropolitan blood of the city,

purifying the crystal ghosts

and ghosts of time,

ghosts of the blood wedding,

ghosts of the violet princess,

ghosts of the orange cat,

ghosts of the sleepy sun.

Ghosts of you and me.

Driving insane through the haunted streets,

the Bypass swerves like a ghost tongue

vanishing beyond headlights;

or the little violet figure,

transparent in the wind on Dhakuria Bridge;

the little ghost-seller blowing out his oil lamp

at Gariahat Market as he walks towards Golpark,

sleep-walking almost, beyond an earthly destination;

they all feel this strange presence,

all a part of this strange dance of ghosts

that flow within a river through the city.

Strangeness her mask,

strangeness her face and flow;

the Ganga is your ghost lover

raging in her sacred tumult

through the nerves of the city.

-II-

Jelly nerves of the city

throbbing at her synapse

with nitrate grins,

post-modern, post-colonial, post-structuralist

problems of existence,

post-temporal blues,

political ghosts of killing,

wherever you look

there’s no left, right or centre;

just a ghost-land of struggle

for the crystal noose.

Red is no longer green,

Green is no longer red,

(what happened to crystal blue?)

just the elegy of crystals

with their viole(n)t descendant

to violate beauty.

Yet the metro gushes in the underworld

carrying semi-dead walkers

like a blood demon.

I can’t care less, sitting with you

in this tiny café

and staring into the ghosts,

form and un-form

in the hollow of your eyes.

-III-

The secret of Time

is to travel like crystal impulses,

transmitting the sky-ghost,

the night-car, the radio and cold pendulum ash;

the secret of time is the happiness of the walrus,

the violet smile, the orange cat, the blood wedding

and the little yellow cab at Landsdowne

beneath the dissolving sun

and the love-making of crystals

beside the Ganges;

the post-colonial ghosts of the nitrate grin

with the metro rushing in her night-dress

when you fiddle with the safety-pin in bed.

Everything then dissolves like the sun

when you dissolve into me;

arm in arm,

lips on lips,

breath in breath,

a single static reality

sans time, sans crystals, sans ghosts.

Transmission of truth,

telepathy of the ghost city.

In the name of Time, Crystals

and the Holy Ghost,

the trilogy of truth,

triangle of existence

and transcendence,

oblique madness.

To be mad is to see the truth,

when the green walls of the asylum

and the fluorescent lights

and crystal vapours dissolve

in isolation and depression,

the syringe fiddles with the blood veins of the city,

and you dream up the trinity of harmony;

the ghosts, the river, the crystals, the love-making

are then mere spectral dots of existence

like the murmuring ghost-lights over the Ganges,

twinkling, throbbing with life

in synchrony with the swaying bridge.

Even the moon sways then

and shines on the violet crystal,

the clock-desert records super-truth



The city drenched in her quinine grin

is then a secret flux of fading light,

floating in and out of your consciousness.