At the centre of Mani Rao’s “Address” is a simple imbalance: evening gives the birds a home, but the speaker has no place to return to. The opening image is unexpectedly physical — “the trees inhale birds.” It is not that birds fly into trees; the trees draw them in as if taking a breath. The verb makes the landscape a living lung, so that evening becomes not a time but an intake of air. In the next line the returning flock becomes “a warm shawl,” an image of softness and enclosure, as though the birds wrap the branches against the coming dark. Against this seamless natural return, the line “But I still wait for my perch in your arms” stands out. The word “still” carries the ache of the poem: dusk after dusk, the world completes itself while she remains outside a particular embrace.
The second stanza shifts from what is to what might be. Every verb is conditional: “I would peg,” “We would travel,” “you would breathe.” The speaker imagines caring for her lover’s “night flights” as though they were bedsheets she could fasten lightly to a line. The phrase is improbable — flights do not have sheets — and that very strangeness makes restlessness or absence tangible enough to fold and pin. The word “lightly” matters: she does not want to trap or weigh down his movement, only to be close to it. That tender image gives way to an even closer union — travelling “in one mind,” where “your old lands” and “my new skies” meet without a dividing mark between them. “One mind” suggests not two people comparing journeys, but a single shared direction made of different pasts and futures.
The final line is the poem’s most compressed reversal. If trees inhale birds at evening, here the beloved would “breathe me fly” each morning. The phrase is deliberately strange: the speaker becomes both breath and bird, released into flight by the lover’s exhalation. It is dependence, but not captivity: the breath sends her out, it does not draw her in. That difference is crucial. The perch in his arms is not a cage; it is a place from which flight begins.
Rao keeps the poem unrhymed, but it is held together by echoes — the soft consonants of “birds” and “shawl” hush the first stanza, while “flights,” “skies,” and “fly” lift the second with shared vowel sounds. There is no regular metre, yet the first and third lines of each stanza are longer, giving the poem a seesaw between outward reach and inward pull. The lines are short enough to feel breath-like, and the absence of end punctuation lets one image spill into the next. Even the title works in two directions. “Address” can mean a location, a place where someone might be found, and also a speech directed at another person. The poem is both: a search for an address, a home in the beloved, and a direct, intimate address to that same “you.”
Perhaps the deepest tension is temporal. The first stanza remains in the present tense of waiting; the second remains in the conditional tense of wishing. They never meet. The speaker’s imagined life is vivid — shared night flights, morning breath, old lands and new skies — but it is still only imagined. That gap between dusk and morning, between waiting and flying, gives the poem its restraint. Its significance lies in the way it makes an abstract longing sensuous, turning breath and birds into one continuous image: the beloved as both roost and wind. The poem does not claim fulfilment or despair. It simply holds the precise shape of a desire — to be held lightly enough to fly.