A Bishop in Love
(remembering Elizabeth Bishop)
We need a foreign country to set us free,
Even one so poor, where no one cares.
Openly we hold hands. No one stares.
No gossip. No innuendo. No creed
To live by, intent only on life’s
Daily needs, food, clothes, rent
They dance, free it seems from strife.
We, however, cannot sense what is absent.
By the small stream by our house is where
You glisten forward. With a small pail
I wash the white from your hair.
Interrupted, the stream surges, sails
In circles, mindless, without a care.
Another day as sublime?
We need. We need amenable time.
AGAINST INTERPRETATION
(remembering Susan Sontag)
It is the mind’s reflexive quest for meaning,
“the intellect’s revenge upon art” that steals
the very essence of what happens first
when we view art, the colors of what we feel,
the sensory arousal, making us oblivious to our thirst
to connect with the freely running,
the unfelt touch of the private, deeply personal,
hidden part of ourselves, the intuition
of something wrong, the song out of harmony,
casting a faint sliver of light on what by intention
we could not become. To begin to categorize
is to judge and conveniently exclude, cauterize
the different, to restrict, trying to conform
the delicate, nested in its nature, without form.
INTIMATE LOVE
We argue day and night, it seems, about the meaning
Of intimacy, how much we know in the moment’s fire,
With so little notice, how almost anything ignites desire,
How the mind is so mindless of the deep feeling,
How heedless of the other body, hardly familiar,
Lying beside, seeking always something in someone new,
You are certain you never want to see again, in an hour or year,
How fiercely we hide, the strange ways of interlocking we prefer,
Hoping always to avoid clumsiness. Was Kinsey right after all
About the pall we cast over desire, how it flickers and fades,
The variety and waywardness, we secretly seek to feel.
You asked if all this transience was love. Were we made
For whimsical fickleness? I wonder about our getting old
As one, the ease and peace of it. Will desire yield?
PERSONAL CAPITALISM
It is the creator’s essential quest
the unrelenting pursuit of excellence. Motivation
models begin with the basic needs, but the best,
self-actualization, the soul’s profit, is the culmination.
Fumbling perhaps, the search persists, to give perfect
form, realize a shape as delicate as light,
refusing to surrender in any aspect.
Distractions of the heart can come later,
if ever. How to choose the better,
small feelings or self=centered pursuit without fetter?
Strange though. I cannot seem to keep still.
No side effect. No impending mental ill.
What matter? A few unglued cells. A pill.
THE NEXT WORD
“About-“ but then what comes next; would any noun
Do, something clever, a noun implying something else,
Something more than itself, ‘kite’ implying the immense,
Umbrella or something minute, nicely fitting in
Any space ‘termite”, implying nature’s gnawing detail;
Perhaps living in the present requires adding a gerund
“seeing”. But “what” sneaks in. Perhaps something all
Encompassing “the big bang” where we will likely end
without seeing-; but would that be too prematurely stark
like drawing in at midafternoon, a guessed dark’
Or would stopping there, be enough, leaving the rest
to someone wiser , who knows more, sees best,
has experienced the great ha-ha of randomness,
and stops at ;“about.” knowing that is all there is.
MORE MANSIONS
Where green fed on green, they now spread,
Corporate weeds, in overpriced zip codes
Stock options can afford, with a nearby road,
Severely private, sporting bold
Threats on sunlit boards, spelling dread.
Who are these cloistered residents -
Recent immigrants from tyrant lands. They fled
With nothing in hand, dreams in their heads,
Learning here, deft market moves, way money is made.
Complaints murmured behind alarm-clad doors are about
Rowdy boys, brown and black, who sing and shout
Unheeding of signs, seemingly without care,
Except how high the climb of the ball in the air,
Their only reach; will trespass jail it in the air,
As cars, priced more than their lives, drift by.
Them. Nowhere to live. No none knows why.
*****
Pramod Lad was born in India, educated at King’s College UK , and completed his Ph.D. in Biophysical Chemistry at Cornell University He was a scientist at the National Institutes of Health. His poems have been accepted in The Examined Life Journal, Right finger pointing, Omentum, Eclectica magazine, The Innisfree poetry journal, The Umbrella Factory.
