 Debasis Mukhopadhyay lives & writes in Montreal, Canada. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Curly Mind, Posit, Yellow Chair Review, I am not a silent poet, New Verse News, Mannequin Haus,Thirteen Myna Birds, Of/With, Scarlet Leaf Review, With Painted Words, Quatrain.Fish, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net. Follow him at https://debasismukhopadhyay.wordpress.com/ or @dbasis_m on Twitter. after the steep climb the loose trail plays a hymn so much like the immersed clouds dwindling away in a bird's bath beneath a bottomless sky filling the silence with no imagination this horizon is too aloft to gaze on your lost words burrowing underneath I am left with just a wilderness punctuating the receding memories of blood & anemones out of the spine every so often I'd imagined them forever still forever trampled on now ambling along the edges of the earth I see them folding softly into entropy with no imagination ballad of an overturned canoe everything looks blue this sky parts & full weighing down the rust red canoe that soared through the endless water like a blur of a light drowned in the fish wriggling & learning the crepuscule on a hook look in this blue where the mirror of the sky makes a canoe to become larger than itself & look in that blue where an overturned canoe lurks in the recesses of the mirror before everything looks just another blue pursed by a fading rope missing the dock the remnant of our time you thought perhaps a lonely blue was always bleeding in my hands that wrote letters & poems hands that squeezed your rain-soaked hands in a long gone night when under the halogen street lights yellow lacquered clouds were smiling out of gloom to sing you wings & roots hands that melted then far too quick down your memory to become skeletal pressing into stillness now you could perhaps turn your head & see those hands of mine tracing the oars clasp the passage of fleeting ibis you would even see them flinching under a blue never bargained for I was told the oars float & they do just that they keep floating away like in a ballad of an overturned canoe in a summer lake backdropping a clumsy death or two yet you would not see them. ain't even no mud where your feet could sink in. your dress is rising up from beneath the water a slimy blue testing the surface like an echo here ain't no echo in my head because I am not seeing anything not seeing the weeds tacked to your body the weeds that like stitches turning into scars deep across your skin the skin I begged for alike your soul the soul is a soul that even a doll always survives without looking up at the blue of the sky you are not swimming & I never wanted to swim across anything but a muted song here ain't no mud no night dark no thickness of shadows no murmur of fallen leaves where our feet could sink in I wish I wish though together we could behold our drowned bodies curdling back to our drowned memories all in a luciferous sheen here ain't nothing under our feet here bubbles just blooming to get past the hollow water & there up above the dock our kids chase magpies flying toward the horizon & when tired they just look into the bottom of the bucket to contemplate the yellow lacquered perches still flopping Birobidzhan or one day in the life of Jose Maria Jose Maria rain falls on the fecund smell of Bay rain falls on the salty pebbles & Santa Barbara devours all the lullabies that could still kindle your bones perhaps it's never enough to confess wear age & dreams like a reindeer skull a stateliest trophy held in thrall emptied of the sad blood for evermore what's left in these days is just the renewed shadows of footfalls seeping down the loose spine playing a hymn you'd heard for the first time in Birobidzhan where the Trans-Siberian railroad would waver & die away in the ripples of Bira swallowing the blood from beneath the patina of sky & where the smoke of its engine would forever lie in wait in the tangle of the tiles & slated roofs, bell towers, lofty walls, & cross roads like your longing instilled in a sepia postcard unlocking that gypsy girl tresses falling over her shoulders who would always laugh while making love to you & who thought before the shadow of the pogroms could loom closer the best thing to do was to exorcise the stars from above our graves no Ivanushka was never her real name neither yours is Jose Maria today in the sunroom a train of shadows passes you hull down in a flightless air wrapping & unwrapping all time & clime that may congeal in your lungs like a lump of light or a flower-lit stream having aim to unleash the soul to resound one day blindly such long waiting in hope it's like watching the jiggers burrowing blindly head-first into your skin breathing defecating & expelling eggs time is nothing just flecked with eyes all around your suspended skull — a noble skull for how-to-draw-a-cubist-still life I always thought-- cut flowers wane under your eyes still helmed with a mud-moon spurting above a forlorn Birobidzhan yet to surmise its own doom the leg of lamb crumples tenderly to the flame in the oven gleaming with the edge of your febrile years the first & last time you prayed you said I am lost perhaps another cup of cocoa perhaps another smuggled cigar & no funneling back to the nights of broken glass perhaps it's never enough to go on asking your blood is today sliding down too what has held the weight of your world of poems that all your fairy tale lovers would lift one day like an old slouch hat sodden with rain covering your skull time is nothing eyelids gathering a streak of light over a slashed pomegranate a cubist still life ha I always thought a ravenous skull Jose Maria the dreams keep pounding on your bald pate wherever you touch your meaty lovers will come out of the hollow of the map of the world & kiss you on your eyes glimpsing scene by scene the memories vomiting up their stomachs wherever you touch the Carnival Queen will come out of the hollow of your flesh to exhume & then to forsake her love leaving you to a voice that appears as if “air has been trapped in the stomach & forced through the mouth after being out of water” something that does a lobster in the boils something that didn't do those who flooded the camps & clamored like burning tulips yes tulips cleave apart yet the weight of their color weighing in your eyelids perhaps makes sense to move off from those amorous mouths of your lovers still tentacled to your chest & just appearing to be red a still life to clear your paths through a maze of whorls standing out bold & black like barbed wires slicing off the blue veins of loves & deaths you wish you had known a home a woman a riverbed of incandescent sky & not a memorial train taking you again & again inside a diagram of transitive earth where the stations float up backward & rains keep on oiling the metal wheels of your train loaded with the then Jews — something we all can relate to our best childhood movies -- & soon their heads rolled off to sleep in a webbing of dried blood for the years to come crashing onto the shingle of their longings time is nothing the train keeps coming back crawling through your eye sockets like dreams you wish the dreams are all scooped out of your skull for a day or two time is nothing a Jew is always a Jew joining in the refrain I am a so marvelous Jew singing singing the map of the world flies open wherever you touch places are all warped with trying to curl you wish you have found their bones still falling by the cattle cars & warbling unperturbed Jose Maria rain falls on the salty grapes mounting up on your Picasso's hat women you met in Vienna dangled in a party shop like a pendulum unsuspecting the coming years ticktock ticktock women stifling in Paris reflected in a polished parquetry like candled lustres foretelling the coming years tocktact tocktact time is never the depths between the soft mounds of those creatures the everlasting is the curved staircase God betroths you in a vermilion twilight of clouds if you pay the price to collapse in the arms of a china doll knowing in heart you will die like a Jew someday in a mute canvas like a mistake resounding beneath the rabbit skin glue & what death clenching with both hands the words you would have trafficked under your breath all through your life like a poet who lives & dreams of the passage of days in Birobidzhan with a wounded conscience of a smuggler of burned potatoes awaiting a reckless wind to break into a cold sweat inside his sonnets & awaiting a slanting rain to press on his alleys of burning stones you are that poet walking backward from the backdrop of Birobidzhan to a dream-squandered sky still left to stroll in the blood or you are that souvenir bending over an open grave to bid rejoice ha blessed the skull folly to this still life still-untitled or a bleached deer skull antlers awakened out of dreams
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