I Was In Love...

He talked of his home, his mom,

The sandalwood forest left behind.

He talked of those private isles with brick walls,

where human vendettas pulverise bonds.

Innocently he kept at it, our conversation....

Of existence, of myth, of geometry, of an unrealised God.

I didn't know what he was searching under a cerulean sky.

I didn't know what had tilted in my perfectly reasoned life.

I listened to those tangible callings that tempted him to chapels

of deeper belongings tucked in those white cassocks and brown skin.

He left home when he was 16

That white bearded man who came to his house 

Spoke of Christ and meaningful existence gracing life.

The smoke misted my eyes

The beckoning coffee grew dark

I drank in that exquisite response of memories that evade one in solitude

It had the fragrance of a known sea fish curry of his village 

and of a diaphanous adolescence that was tucked between us.

'Still in the abandoned compost of human roots' I thought

The relentlessness of my poem was building 

as his voice was kneading our evening together

With nostalgia, with echoes, with tenderness, with the humidity of love 

Impossible! Impossible!

I was looking at a man 

Who had rolled in the sheet of yesterday's to opt for powerful humanitarian tomorrows.

How can I bind him to a home of separate times?

There will be the hum of cicadas and our laughter mingled with summer evenings....

There will be a red pathway to our small brick house....

He fondly told me about those lovely nieces and their contained happiness.

I saw him holding our child 

Darkly compelling they cradled a little closer 

Appreciatively I surrendered to the morsel I picked from the plate

The flavour burst in on me 

I surrendered to that orchestrated dangling fiction for a while,

of different syllables and of soft indispensable yearnings.

He asked me, 'Where are you, darling? You seem to have gone from this table and you heard nothing '

Rinsing that image, dispensing off the words

Red faced, I looked at him

There was mannerly desire in his eyes

Isn't that obvious? The human monk

'How revered he is! God acknowledges him as his truly wedded son

His ascetic leanings stood upon the permanence of a buried past and a coffined future.

'His today and tomorrow ruthlessly contained in God , our dark haired dimpled babies remain unborn'

The cool lobby of an achingly turquoise evening was turning blue

Collecting the moorings of our cherished togetherness 

It was time to move on. 

I stood up to walk back to my life of a separated wife

And he to one of a betrothed monk.

We had our reasons, unreasonable as they come.

Our lives mingled, did sit together enigmatic and knowing one evening.

The sumptuous had to end. 

Don't they all end to begin?

Festering thoughts of love, of home, of cravings, of him snaked through me.

An architecture of awakened longings of man and woman 

As ancient as time.

All that poetry felt in the memorandum of moments are unplaceable belongings of flesh.

Soaked in flesh was I?

I wanted him to sin, i wanted to be the event for once...

I wanted to silence those rosary beads rolling in his heart

I had crossed leaving him on the other end, I despairing looked back for that one glimpse

My heart flipped...

He stood there watching emptied of the filth of human wants

That radiance was almost Godlike!

I was in love, in love with a monk...