Monsoon in Goa / Delhi

From this vast half-mirror of sky
the world opens out.
ocean charges unleashed on to sand
to the tips of your toes
and takes you back 

into 

the eternal oxymoron:
its ever changing shifting state
a constant.
its unpredictability
predictable by the red flags.
It is beautiful and scary
and dirty and it washes
to, washes away, washes constantly,
(try to wash off sand
with sandy water of sea)
it is chaotic and vengeful and churns with rage,
it is calm and soothing and one with the still sky
and with you,
within you,
your eyes
when you watch.
sometimes the horizon seems to dissolve. 

The first day 

the flashing lights intrigued
combing over the submerged rocks
who we thought were beachcombers,
some strangely perseverant species who searched
day after day what the tide washed in:
wondrous treasures like the skeletons of rare fish
amid the black sand and debris
that we saw on the beach
and a syringe and a
dead rat.
but the second night it was explained that
they were catching crabs,
the big ones that come out only at night
when the tide is high
(which is the only time the humans go in–
crabs must be wise) 

high tide is rough 

but it will bring you home. 

but this, 

constant clashes of paradox –
on such a vast scale as the sea
is what makes for chaos of such a living kind:
paroxysms of waves break over waves
shatter upon rocks,
roar with such an intensity of rage, the shards lingering in the ebb,
liquid energy goes up in the spray of each turn that will
crash to release, like fissures of lightning, returned to the sky
after filling the ocean air
electric.
Flying back
I already missed the waves
but found a similar beauty in the expressiveness of clouds,
though much more still.
they made coastlines and waves washing on shores
then islands and ships floating at the tips of
the plane’s wing.
they were talking heads and screaming faces
that lapsed into silence as we passed them by. 

Landing, we were surrounded still 

by the magnificent grey elephants of sky
that had been there two days, we were told by the city,
had rampaged for two hours that morning
but were sleeping now.
water collected on the roads.
I thought of them as seeming
like Marquez’s angel:
cataclysms in repose
that will soon wake. 

 

“I am searching for the person in this photograph”

It is worn, tattered on the corners: a drawing 

silhouette of pen-strokes, looking over
its shoulder. Face lost in the artscapes of stories- too many, lined up like a century of wrinkles, that almost obscure. Turning around mid-walk as if called, looking back, but never intending to stop. 

“But this is a drawing” 

–No doubt about that, the paper is rough 

to touch, no glossy film
of photographic prints– like the scraping sand of a familiar beard.
you can feel the indentations left by the pen-tip
where they make an impression from the artist’s hand
that left no fingerprints but perhaps something else
too raw – a stain of soul. which once spilled,
has no remedy to be rid of it – something like mango
but not yellow like that. only children are that colour,
when they start out. 

“I know 

but can’t you trace the shutterspeed
in all the moments that got trapped in it? 

“see here 

a ghost of the flash that went out
an exposure set just a little too low
enough to capture the realness of it. 

“and the frame 

of this mind this second this place–
captured. The most beautiful portraits
are the ones where the eyes
open into the soul. a kind of a
raw vulnerability
caught unprotected, comes out off guard,
sharper than daggers
to you who views.  

“That is what I am searching for”