Body, Scent
Two poems
by Nabanita Kanungo
Body
It’s the brevity of a song
sulking in night’s stark odour;
naked clumsy despair,
facing a mirror in an empty room.
A few bright stains playing on eyes
keep it dying under breath’s mask —
a sodden bench in a park,
old embraces and calls,
pigeons mating on the afternoon’s roof
when no one arrived.
A whip leads the cattle years,
slowly the oil-press turns
until an ancient defeat climbs blood’s branches
to leave the promised ash in its palm.
This is how it learns its quiet lessons
of falling on its own beginning,
to be scattered as a word
unto the deaf landscape of time
and confront again the long absence of a face
with which it will manufacture another hollow,
another reason to resist descent into a rain
that cannot brave falling from the edge of sleep.
As though it wanted to break free of hope’s trance,
often from the bones, a glass-house calls
for a stranger to pelt it with a dream,
but his aim fails
and the circle cannot be closed.
And something servile looks up
expectantly at the sky again
for a meaning to this hunger,
squatting in a corner of the courtyard,
eating its fate of words;
this thirst that gropes at dry expectation
after marauding an entire evening
on those sagging hills of a wish.
Scent
A moment stops suddenly
in a crowded street.
Summer has arrived in the fresh draft
of a subtle conspiracy.
Something of lost afternoons returns
in traces swept by winds,
like gentle knocks on a door,
deeper than the blue of distant hills,
a short spell of craze or death that frees
or traps like remembered rain,
and the narrow path cut
through the outgrowths of time
will tell us who isn’t here to share
the awakened childhood of tangled sweat.
So the moment stands there,
almost touching that citrus
hanging from an unseen branch,
alone in its imagined forest
where the murmurs of flowers never fade
and the strain of armpits go on humming
in dark subterranean rivers
of a forgotten pleasure.
Nabanita Kanungo is from Shillong, Meghalaya. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals such as Caravan, Planet (The Welsh Internationalist), Prairie Schooner, The Missing Slate Magazine, The Bombay Review, Cafe Dissensus and Coldnoon, among others. Her work has also been anthologised in Ten: The New Indian Poets, (Nirala Publications, 2013), Gossamer (Kindle, 2016) and 40 under 40: An Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry (Poetrywala, 2016). A Map of Ruins, her first book of poems, was published by the Sahitya Akademi in 2014.
