for Jean-Ann F-R
Heard from a young man the other day: about his girl,
Savitri, and her aurora moment: she walks into a store,
the Bazaar Bombay (no, in Georgetown's Regent Street)
intent on buying some lovelaced wispy thing to cache
his eye in her green heart's bursting folder.
Back among the bolts of blue, the layers of crimson spangles: a bony
neckless face, earrings of metal, eye wells of abeer, cries Holi,
Holi. She flees the store into midday streets stuttering from heat,
straight to his front door, his couch; stripped speechless –
what just happened?
Limb tinder twined for fires that curve and calm the eyes
stared at the ceiling as the mystery spread. He worked,
a drill shift, vowed to root all spirits unsummoned out; spike
& beam a faith up down like girders for their love.
After she'd gone, he logged, he said, on to a soccer match:
ballers at London's Wembley Stadium, after halftime; trotting
back on the field: making signs of the cross,
pointing to the sky, touching the ground:
So sure someone is watching…that cruising satellite
eye, or, after the first star ignited, the undivided
One in front a galactic plasma screen, Chair
of the grand design – from microbe to first breath.
The Bombay girl? seems now she knows – the first
communion saved – how longings interned hold and surge;
what profiles sleepless roam the earth. With navel bare
come March she'll spray coloured water powders flowers
of shielding; she'll chant to chase shadows & shudders
of lingam away.
Did what?…her young man see the light…nah..
stopped playing the field, though.
– W.W.
RECOGNITIONS
Scraps of the soul drifting over the river of my eye,
each on his or her angled way of essential
forgetting of the threads linking us all,
shred my heart into sparks of fear
and of joy that leap with the finding, and fade with the loss
of links frayed by the tension off seeing too well,
the impulse of recognition staggered
by a relentless remembering
both the finest stitch and the most ruthless unravelling
of a quilt still spreading, impossible to check
whose patches of light are too brief to be
held and too sharp to be ignored.
(from "Gift Of Screws" by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 