A palace waits at the edge of a garden in Mani Rao’s «Calling 5», and the speaker knows exactly who is waiting there. The poem opens as a confession: “Oh I know you wait for me in the palace / But I am busy with the garden roses.” From the first breath, the drama is not discovery but acknowledgment. The speaker does not pretend ignorance; she admits the summons and her own refusal. That makes the poem less about a mistake than about the strange pull of small, immediate beauties against a larger claim.
The construction is spare: four lines, two sentences, each sentence spilling across a couplet. There is no fixed rhyme scheme, but the lines are held together by internal echoes—the shared opening sound of “palace” and “pastures,” the sibilance of “roses,” “nectar,” and “skies,” the long vowels in “fiery” and “closing skies.” The rhythm is not metrically strict; it follows the uneven movement of thought. The first line is stately and full, the second defensive, the third dreamy, the fourth clipped and shadowed. That shift mirrors the speaker’s own drift from awareness into absorption.
The first couplet balances obligation and excuse with the blunt hinge of “But”. The palace suggests grandeur, formality, perhaps a lover or a god; the roses are nearby, ordinary, alive. Yet the word “busy” is deliberately weak—it sounds like an alibi, and the speaker seems to know it. By saying “Oh I know,” she makes the listener complicit in her delay. The exclamation “Oh” gives the line a sigh, intimate and almost rueful.
The second half shifts into a more intoxicated register. “Dazed fiery I take to their cool nectar pastures” inverts normal word order, pushing the adjectives ahead of the speaker, as if the state of being dazed and fiery has taken over. The roses become a landscape: their “cool nectar pastures” are not just petals but a place to wander and feed. “Nectar” carries a double life—flower sweetness and the drink of gods—so the garden becomes both earthly and mythic. The coolness soothes the speaker’s inner fire, but it is a temporary refuge. The line break after “pastures” is important: it lets the reader pause in that sweetness, almost forgetfully, before the next word arrives.
Then the final line turns: “Forgetful of the closing skies.” The speaker has been so absorbed that she has missed the darkening, the end of the day, the narrowing of possibility. “Closing skies” is ominous without being explicit. It may mean evening, or an approaching storm, or the feeling that the chance to go to the palace is slipping away. Because the poem is spoken in retrospect, the word “Forgetful” carries a faint self-reproach. She is not saying she chose the roses over the palace; she is saying she lost track of everything else while among them.
The title adds another layer. “Calling” can mean a summons, a phone call, or a vocation; the number five suggests earlier calls, repeated attempts, an urgency behind this particular response. The poem then reads as one message in a longer conversation, a moment snatched from an ongoing exchange.
What makes «Calling 5» significant is how much it holds in a tiny space. The palace and the garden are ambiguous enough to work on several levels at once: romantic, spiritual, moral. The poem does not condemn the speaker; it understands the trance of beauty. Yet it does not let her off. The final image of closing skies leaves the reader with the cost of that forgetfulness—not a thunderbolt, but a quiet darkening. That balance of tenderness and warning gives the poem its staying power.