It was your year of last things,
but you were luminous,
within those final fires.
LAST. Such an enormous word. So deep that one may spill an entire lifetime between its spaces and remain bereft of any desire to add a single extra syllable during their remaining time ahead. A bracket that holds the precious and the discarded. A vessel having tinges of the visible and the invisible. A whole caravan of definitives and ifs.
Michael Ondaatje brings this emotion into vibrant life with this collection. The poems, interjected by essays here and there, sing about lost friends and forgotten loves, gently tap nostalgia and drunken youth journals, scratch the capes of disappearences and ruins.
Let us speak about our enormous flaws as told to us
by others-accountants, wives before leaving-
about how we deceived ourselves, even our dogs
by ignoring their concerned pre-walk, tear-stained howls,
though they rested often on our chests
making sounds like old ships.
When are surrounded with ornaments
of the old world, you need to hear one
living vein.
Columns of ‘What ifs’ rise stronger at the centre of the mind garden, hauling the hand of lost moments along with them. Alternate lives spring like little shrubs around its periphery, marking their own territories in whistling smugness.
Or even before, during that slow crawl
of tectonic plates across the Pacific
into the future with us unaware
of each other at some high-school dance,
a drunken party, or the boy
who was invited to your heartbeat
under a kimono
The then.
Vignettes from college life brush with authors in alleys of old cities and older morals, and thus is conjured a picture that is both lifeless, and breathing. And just like parallel awakenings, I walked in the world bygone, with my body still static in the present, and experienced delightful dichotomies and fulfilling transience.
Youth never remains a sentence.
Indeed.
SEEMITA DAS 