HEAD

Slamt down twelve-ouncer froths, foams, bubbles—
grows to beyond capacity from the rhythm of gravity and the randomness of escaping it.

Like a bad clock

Like a bad clock I am broken and I cannot explain why. There is no reason, I am just out of step. I cannot identify a catalyst. I never can. I wrinkle like a raisin then crumble like a cookie then turn to dust like old paint. I have slowly become a mess and there is no moment or event or sharp edge to which I can point and say look! There! That's what broke me.

I'LL TRY NOT TO GET YOU WET

for Amory

Gravity

You are a man of the universe, and I, a woman of the world. Our home is a classroom. You talk me through the big ideas as though I were one of your students and I squint at you. I learn things while the tea's brewing, while the glass is fogging above the kitchen sink. I learn things when the floorboard creaks and when the window rattles. You stitch the cosmos into the lining of our walls and I burrow into your brain; I will do this for many years. I will break things and mend things and learn and you will ask me questions about what is happening in the city tonight, in the world this week. Our house is a cafeteria and a town hall, a haven, a headquarters. You listen to the people who pour in and pour out. You make sandwiches and ask softly what else you can do. You find breaks in Space-Time and I fill them with the news. You frown at the papers and ask me what I think and you learn some things from me too. You cheer on the kids on compost duty and clean up the mud tracks and marvel at a crate of dusty tomatoes as though they were a galaxy up close. Last night I curled under your arm because the universe was too vast and nothing in my day felt relevant. You held my feet and told me that when we stood in the street for hours last week you'd suddenly noticed gravity again.

MUSINGS FROM A RECENTLY TOUSLED BED

This is a note that happens when the author crawls out of bed and decides that any excuse is a good excuse to crawl back in. The author (this one a male) decides he must write a note. It takes some time for an idea to form. While he waits, he watches the trees: outside, each of the thousand droplets clinging to the fir's spindly leaves catches the light that pours in from the whole sky, diffused by an unbroken cloud coverage; the droplets fall when a small bird lands on the branch and causes the bough to bow. The author smiles at the phrase "bough to bow." He decides to write a note about whether or not inspiration is more easily derived from sadness. Maybe the writing stays the same, but the sexually frustrated author was more eager to have his writing read. Maybe that's why this note took so long to write.

A mystery

That letter is a mystery. It sits in a little pocket in my desk and, from time to time, I reread it to see if it will make sense to me. The last time I read it, I began laughing uncontrollably. It is not a particularly funny letter, and I am not sure whether I laughed out of joy or incredulity. It is a marvel, impossible, absurd, a dream. A work of art and a feat of artifice. So vivid, beguiling, neat. I can't decide if it's evidence or exoneration. Is it true? Is it false? A red herring? A clue? Who wrote it? Was it you? Who were you? Who might you be? For whom did you write it and why did you send it to me? You write with such clarity and purpose. But I've never been sure what you mean. 

WILD ANIMAL

for Caitlin

I was brought quickly and gently to consciousness when you changed in the morning. It was like being in the room with a wild animal. I gripped my eyes tightly shut and held my body stiller than it had probably been in sleep. You're the gray wolf: an apex predator; and I'm a boy with googly eyes penned onto my hand. I was in the presence of greatness. But as much pride as I felt for my proximity, so did I fear the primal wrath that your clenched canines and glared focus might deliver. So I steadied my breathing and I waited for the distant clink of a cereal bowl before wandering out from the blanketed cave and into the world.

These days

These days, empty of momentum, I am filling myself with stories. The details, digested, stitch together like tissue, and I feel muscular enough to carry things again.

BE PROUD

Short things

I am making a study of short stories, short sentences, short men and shorts. They share a quality. Beside shortness, that is. It is that quality of which I am making a study. But the shortness helps, I think.

WILTING A ROSE

There's a whole craft that goes into wilting a rose. There's an entire league of rules and procedures that guide the browning, the drooping, the hardening. Without this order, a rose might go on flowering well past its expiration date. The petals could remain red far beyond the point that they'd all bent to the thumbs of passersby and been sucked dry by bee and hopeful nose alike. Maybe we'd all own giant vases full of ancient roses. Instead, they die, and the floor of my apartment becomes crunchy when the breeze pulls forgotten petals from their stiff stems and lands them in my foot's path.

Corollary

When I am hungry, I become afraid. Today, I woke up frightened, and so starved myself.

THOSE JAGGED K9s

Inflatable heart

THIS IS A NOTE FROM A BAR

Driving

Driving home one night this week, late, the usual route, I saw a man standing perfectly still on the divider of the Chirag Dilli flyover, silhouetted in the dust and high beams, looming over the left lane like a dead tree in a desert.

Tonight, the same place, around the same time, frowning against the frazzle of another social evening and those big truck headlights, I saw him again, perhaps not the same man but the same figure, a dark shape walking along the divider.

This morning, a naked man walked evenly across the width of the India Gate circle—all six lanes—with the air of a man going into the shower. Everything from his forehead to his penis to his feet was the same brown; his heels dark, his buttocks dusty.

Tonight, two different sets of street dogs in two different neighbourhoods followed me to my car. Others, strays, watched me approach, pupils wide in my headlights, and gave chase as I passed. They are barking now, here, as they were then, there.

Men are everywhere: lone loiterers ambling across intersections at an angle or waving their cellphones in the middle of some sidestreet. One is huddled in a watchman’s cabin outside a house in a nice neighbourhood, muttering; another waits outside Siri Fort auditorium with a bag on the ground at his side.

Earlier, at a traffic light, a man in a Mercedes shook his fist at me.

Later, in a house, I jerked away from a sudden flush of breath on my cheek.

THIS IS HOW I'D DRAW YOUR NAME

Where I am

I am in the kitchen making coffee. I am in the mirror feeling pleased. I am in a taxi leaking words. I am in a sari inviting attention. I am on the floor getting down. I am in conversation dispensing sass. I am at the bar requesting gin, water, gin. I am at a table twisting naan into mutton. I am on a couch leaning in. I am in a room on a lark. I am out the door with a shrug. I am in a garden answering questions. I am in a singalong at dawn. I am in a cab with my patience wearing thin. I am in the door with a sigh of relief. I am in a quilt on a high bachelor bed. I am reading cross-legged on an overnight train. I am in a blindfold with my heart in my mouth. I am in a pit with a bullet in my back. I am squatting under a sheet of corrugated tin. I am in a country with a passport. I am in the wild with a wound. I am in a fog with a flag. I am in a balloon with a pin. I am moving so that nothing is certain. I am on the road with the wind. I am using my tongue so I don't turn numb. I am opening up for whiskey and thrill. I am merry in a polka dotted spin. I am walking down an alley with a crick in my neck. I am sifting through lettuce with an arch in my back. I am asleep with my nose in the crook of an elbow. I am waking with a hand on my hip. I am speeding through the street with a grin on my face. I am jumping on a bus with an inflated heart. I am in a place I've never been. I am muddy in the field and damp in the grass and brown like the ground in my skin.

ALONE

Sunset on a cold day.
Gloves on hands in pockets.
The only way to keep warm is to keep walking.

What has happened

As I pass through the ambit of a street light back into the dark of night, I am suddenly clouded. What has happened? Have I damaged something? Have I implied something? Have I ruined have I shocked have I lied? What has happened is I have transgressed. And things have shifted. And so, it seems, have I.