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The sky today is a shade of blue both soft and hard at once, the sunlight like powdered sugar. The air is clean, quiet. The small birds outside the verandah shriek, but they are not noisy. The only traffic is school children with gleaming smiles and slow bicycles, maybe stopping to pluck some ber from the tree in front of our house.

The dog chases butterflies ceaselessly, creating the only dust visible.
What stress? It seems an alien concept here, almost too rude to mention.

Thank God.

three lines

dead deer
truck drives by with the words
"Meat Packing, Inc."

This actually happened. Walking to the subway to get to work, I had to pass a small wood. One day I saw a dead deer lying in the leaves and just a minute later, an 18-wheeler with the meat-packing legend swept past.
This jarring image stayed in my head the whole day.

A nice house in the sky

I say my hell is the closet I’m stuck inside
Can’t see the light
And my heaven is a nice house in the sky
Got central heating and I’m alright
Yeah, yeah, yeah...can’t see the light
Keep it locked up inside don’t talk about it
Talk about the weather
Can’t see the light
Open up my head and let me out,
Here we have been standing for a long, long time
Treading trodden trails for a long, long time...

~Dave Matthews Band in So Much to Say

Bread and memories

my grandfather still lives
everytime I smell
freshly baked bread
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dedicated to all the times in my childhood we used to drive around Cochin with my grandfather, and the smell from the bakeries forever became associated with him. He died eleven years ago.
This haiku won eighth place in an online competition recently.

Travel

"I dislike feeling at home in a foreign country."
~George Bernard Shaw

Anytime

Things I like about you:
~Your job involves helping children
~You keep reminding me that I regularly use words you can't even spell
~During these three years, I've never once heard the sound of your hanging up before I do
~You downloaded Pearl Jam on your comp so you could play it for me
~You make the words "Mad Fowl" seem thoroughly appropriate to describe me
~I can call you anytime of night or day. Anytime.

Temple dust

Evening temple dust
she walks
with jasmine in her hair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Square temple pond
reflects
the priest's daughter
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Written on a visit to an old temple in rural Kerala, September 2001. The light and shade, the stillness of the green water, the soft-focus, forgiving glow of the oil lamps was all magical.

Two worlds

Glimpsed: Under the scanty shade of a papaya tree, a boy getting a haircut. A tea-colored dog napped nearby; he stretched and yawned. The air in the hot afternoon was still and heavy. From my office balcony I looked down at them and imagined the snipping sounds of the scissors; nothing else moved.

Then I went back into the air conditioned air and sat down at my cubicle in front of my computer screen.

~April 2005, Bangalore

Have you ever felt this way

You and I

I explain quietly. You hear me shouting. You try a new tack. I feel old wounds reopen. You see both sides. I see your blinkers. I am placatory. You sense a new selfishness. I am a dove. You recognize the hawk. You offer an olive branch. I feel the thorns. You bleed. I see crocodile tears. I withdraw. You reel from the impact. ~Roger McGough

Riding horses

Two lovely emails I got, both from the same writer. Reprinted without permission (express or otherwise).

Hope all is well. Getting up in the wee small hours to go ride horses as the sun comes up. Life is getting better.
Miss you as always.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sitting on that wet bench, I realized that I have so much more to say to you, but it wasn't the time. Timing was never my thing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I miss you too, O writer of lovely emails.

Deep-eyed deer

Poets make pets of pretty, docile words:
I love smooth words, like gold-enamelled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish,
And tender ones, like downy-feathered birds:
Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds,
Come to my hand, and playful if I wish,
Or purring softly at a silver dish,
Blue Persian kittens fed on cream and curds.

I love bright words, words up and singing early;
Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;
Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees,
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

~Pretty Words, Elinor Wylie

Jamaica

Dinner on the pier

I can see starfish

beneath my feet

~Morgan's Harbor, Kingston, Jamaica. Spring Break 2003.

Mother

If I look really close

I can see my mother’s face

In the clouds

~Happy Birthday, Mom!

Pale September

Pale September, I wore the time like a dress that year
The autumn days swung soft around me, like cotton on my skin...
~Fiona Apple in Pale September

A face

A face I saw that arrested my attention: On the bus the other day, an older lady dressed in purple silk. Her hair was pulled back in a neat silver gray bun, her skin mapped with the lines of old age worn well. On her ears, diamonds wink like constellations. On her nose, more diamonds. I can imagine her in the mornings, eyes closed in devotion, fresh sandalwood paste on her forehead, a small heap of moist jasmine laid at the feet of her deity...

Goals

In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.

Lost in Translation

The best ending in a movie that I can remember? Lost in Translation.
This movie is visually lyrical, from capturing the neon-soaked, almost hallucinative Tokyo cityscape to the loneliness and alienation of the two protagonists.
The ending is a bitter-sweet stroke of sheer inspiration.

I'm in the Soup

This is an exchange between Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle from "The Code of the Woosters."

"This is frightful, Bertie."
"Not too good, no."
"I'm in the soup."
"Up to the thorax."
"What's to be done?"
"I don't know."
"Can't you think of anything?"
"Nothing. We must put our trust in a higher power."
"Consult Jeeves, you mean?"

Oh, only if we all had a Jeeves in our lives to turn to! Where are you, Jeeves, when we need you?

Dreaming Tree

Standing here
The old man said to me
Long before these crowded streets
Here stood my dreaming tree
Below it he would sit
For hours at a time
Now progress takes away
What forever took to find
Now he's falling hard
He feels the falling dark
How he longs to be
Beneath his dreaming tree
~Dave Matthews Band, "The Dreaming Tree"

Change

We do not change as we grow older, we just become more clearly ourselves.

Love Sonnet XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

~Pablo Neruda

Under the willows

That's me on a post-coffee poolside lounge. Saturday mornings were always so peaceful. You had the whole pool and deck and the willows all to yourself... Tallahassee, November 2002

Do you remember?

Clocks by Coldplay
The No Doubt version of Its my Life
White Flag, Dido
The first cut is the deepest, Sheryl Crow
You don't know my name, Alicia Keys
Calderona (forgot the artist)

~Songs that bring back memories of Washington, DC. Sometimes it's like being back there physically, back in my friend's silver-gray Corolla driving down Route 50...

Star-laced wings

Dreams, inconsistent angel things.
Horses bred with star-laced wings.
But it's so hard to make them fly, fly, fly.
These wings beat the night sky 'bove the town.

~From "We Have Forgotten" by Sixpence None the Richer. They can make melancholy sound so good.

Opinions

It is not advisable, James, to venture onsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarassment of discovering their exact value to your listener.
~From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Gamut

Soft you day, be velvet soft,
My true love approaches,
Look you bright, you dusty sun,
Array your golden coaches.

Soft you wind, be soft as silk,
My true love is speaking,
Hold you birds, your silver throats,
His golden voice I'm seeking.

Come, you death, in haste do come,
My shroud of black be weaving,
Quiet, my heart, be deathly quiet,
My true love is leaving.

~'The Gamut' by Maya Angelou. This poem somehow strikes me as being sweet and rather old-fashioned, even Victorian.

I would rather

Telephone call-

But I would rather listen to

The falling rain.

Cuando los angeles lloran

Cuando los ángeles lloran
lluvia cae sobre la aldea
lluvia sobre el campanario
pues alguien murió
Un ángel cayó
un ángel murió
un ángel se fue
y no volverá
Cuando los ángeles lloran
lloverá

Roughly translated as " when the angels cry, it rains on the village, on the bell tower; someone died, an angel died, and he will never return. When the angels cry, it will rain."

~From "Cuando los angels lloran" by one of my favorite Spanish bands, Mana. Written for activist Chico Mendez after he was killed for his efforts to stop logging in the Amazon.

Age

Wisdom doesn't automatically come with age. Nothing does- except wrinkles. It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.

~Abigail van Buren

Rain on Saturday

I am home alone on this rainy Saturday. I sit facing the wide glass door with the blinds open so I can see the thin, misty rain come down on the grass. It is incredibly precise, somehow; I think of the cold water outside and the hot steam curling from the coffee cup at my side.
I may be the only person in this lonely landscape of grass and wind and glass and rain. I can liken it to standing on the edge of an empty pier with the sea and sky open in front of me.
September 2002, Florida

Spaces

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

~Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet"

The first snow

Last night
I longed for Florida
but not anymore...



Written in Washington, D.C., the first time in my life I woke up and saw the world covered with snow.

White Oleander

Fabulous opening lines, from the novel "White Oleander" by Janet Fitch. The prose is magical and draws you in from Line 1.

The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot, dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.
"Oleander time," she said. "Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind."

Death

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it,
with no finger in it;
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, 
with no throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
~Pablo Neruda, " Nothing but Death."
One of the subjects that fascinates me, as it does us all, whether we realize
 it or not, I think.

Azaleas

I am late
But pink azaleas—
I must stop

Why, Georgia, why

Four more exits
to my apartment
but
I am tempted
to keep the car in drive
and leave it all behind....
~John Mayer, Why Georgia Why

Felt this way on a few of the many road trips I made...somewhere in the middle of the open road, the feeling would strike: just drive, drive, drive.
But coming home was never a disappointment.