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Balachandran V
Lying on my left side, body bared
Waiting for the cold creamed sensor
Feeling my heart beneath the hair and flesh
I smelt the perfume of the girl,
The warmth, the softness of her arm across my chest
And like an excited adolescent thought
She had her breast pressed against my back.
I giggled inside, fantasizing
The girl taking a fancy
To my broad, hairy, muscled chest.
I smiled at myself, my silliness, my innocence
Happy that even the imagination
Of the touch of a young body could rouse me.
In her soft voice she asked me after my health
About my BP, cholesterol, and the pains
All the while I was thinking how nice it would be
Pictures, full of
waterfall
echoes
You were the princess of the fairy tale
Who spoke in emeralds instead of words,
Whose laughter left an exquisite, bright trail
Of sounds as winged and visible as birds.
I never knew until yours went from me,
That any voice could love my name so much,
That just to speak it made it seem to be
A fragrance and a color and a touch.
My days are gestures of bewilderment,
My nights are attitudes of listening.
For fear you may have whispered as you went,
And I shall lose the starlike echoing.
"Hallo, hallo!" impatiently he cried,
And I replied,
Sleepily, "Hallo--hallo!"
No sound then; and I stretched
My hand for the receiver, all my nerves
Tingling and listening.
My hand clutched nothing, and I lit
The candle--strange!
I could have sworn it was the shouting wire....
But no!
Besides, a bare and unfamiliar room
And he, why, long-forgotten, maybe dead.
Yet all around,
Filling the silence up with tiny sound,
A million tremulous thin echoings,
"Hallo--hallo--
Stitches running up a seam
Are not like feet beside a stream,
And the thread that swishes after
Is not at all like echoed laughter.
Yet stitches are as quick as feet,
Leaping from a rocky pleat
To seams that slip like marshy ground;
And thread-swish has a hollow sound.
Stitches that have a seam to sew
Must not forget the way they go,
While feet that find the cool earth sweet
Have forgotten they are feet.
And a laugher cares not why
His echoes have a haunted cry.
So stitches running up a seam
Are not like feet beside a stream.
Day-long I hear life's sounds beat like the sea ;
Day-long, day-long
They sweep their deep tide-rhythms over me,
And as a song
Reiterated, fall unmeaningly.
Where once I bent life's echoes to my will,
Day after day
Following wings of sound over the sill
Far, far away.
Now my sick fancy lies inert and still.
Silence that slowly wraps me with the ease
Of dreamed-out sleep.
Quenches the sound of vague realities
Whose echoes keep
Their rhythms like old winds in drying seas.
Why do I think of stairways
With a rush of hurt surprise?
Wistful as forgotten love
In remembered eyes;
And fitful as the flutter
Of little draughts of air
That linger on a stairway
As though they loved it there.
New and shining stairways,
Stairways worn and old,
Where rooms are prison places
And corridors are cold.
You intrigue with fancy.
You challenge with a lore
Elusive as a moon's light
Shadowing a floor.
Silence is the sound of footsteps
Hushed upon a stair,
The fluttering of ruffled garments,
A song's forgotten air —
All the old, forbidden echoes
That quenched their fevers there.
I breathe the lyric of my love
Across the twilit way,
The gentle echoes bear it on
Beyond the edge of day:
All vibrant is the melody
The silences repeat,
My song is but my longing heart
Pulsated with its beat.
It winds amid the dusky ways
Where far mysteries shine,
To find amid God's trackless space,
One answering song to mine.
I am only a note in the chorus,
A leaf in the fluttering June,
A wave on the deep.
These things that I struggle to utter
Have all been uttered before.
In many another heart
The selfsame song was born,
The ancient ache endured,
The timeless wonder faced,
The unanswered question nursed,
The resurgent hunger felt,
And the eternal failure known!
But glad is the lip of its whisper;
The wave, of its life;
The leaf, of its lisp;
And glad for its hour is my soul
The thing that I am seeking
I know I shall not find.
A wistful voice is crying
This sorrow in my mind.
I know I shall not find it
However far I go,
But I shall always seek it;
My heart has told me so.
Though I must always wander
I do not find it sweet :
There is no journey's ending
To draw my restless feet;
There is no distant vision
To help me on my way ;
I know my quest is hopeless
But yet I may not stay.
Fame is an echo
Far off, remote —
But love is a sweetness
You taste in the throat,
Friendship a comfort
When twilight falls.
But fame is an echo
Through empty halls.