DEBASIS MUKHOPADHYAY - POEMS

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