by Sreyash Sarkar

''Love is a shadow.

How you lie and cry after it.

Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.''

             - Sylvia Plath

 

 Below the highway darkness turns the heath

To ancient shapes, to where the wind trots on hooves,

The mist a cloak swirling, or further back

To that with eyes and claws and scales and beak.

She grips the wheel, following dotted lines:

No traffic and yet she keeps to the lane.

A tick could throw her lighted world out of gear,

The earth erupts into all that has been there.

 

As burnt stars fill the night,

I remember her like imprints of a swan's feet left on sand

Drenched in lunar ecstasy,

That she rushed in like July ebbs,

And returned with receding flows

While by the river side rests a shattered boat,

Its worn-out sails

Awaits a dreamer's touch, like the gush of torrential winds with impending motion to transcend the silence of oars...

I anticipate, alone, grasping her morose clay

As the norms go before cremating- so dark and detached.

While the bond between living fingers and deceased dull eyes

Dream of galloping across meadows-

March days return with their covert light, and huge fishes swim through the sky, vague earthly vapors progress in secret, things slip to silence one by one.

Through fortuity, at this crisis of errant skies,

She reunites the lives of the sea to that of fire, grey lurching of the ship of winter, to the form that love carved in the guitar.

As seen in fantasy and observed in facts

We evolve to humanity from mere human beings.

As I dispose all of her that remained

And witness how waves wash away burnt stars

And how the neon beacons on masked sails, distressed...