Sunday 18 April 2010

when i see you thus in tears

when i see you thus in tears,
dearest,
i place myself in the context of everything
that had happened in the untraceable history of existence
and everything
yet to happen in the eons to come,
as the sun and the earth and the other planets
swift-sail down the milky way
on their journey
without a destination.

i curl myself into this moment,
a foetus,
and vanish,
along the placenta linking heartbeats,
into the throb of your pulse,
the taste of the salt of your cheeks,
and the pain of the little toe
you had just now stubbed
against this sharp stone
by the wayside.

*****

6 comments:

Balachandran V said...

Speechless! To the fallow land that is now my mind, these lines are like the fading memory of a shadow of rains that fell long ago...

P. Venugopal said...

thanks, Balan. we all come to barren terrain now and then. what i think we should then do is to be patient, forget about writing, go to the beach perhaps, read a bit of Kahlil Gibran perhaps... i have noticed it is like drawing water from a well. sometimes, after we have drawn a few buckets of water, the well goes dry. then we have to allow time for the water to slowly flow in and fill the well. laying off for a time will also help us re-invent, not fall into a pattern.

Balachandran V said...

I was thinking of love, not of writing. I have never been bothered about the latter. But the kind of sublime love that you wrote about - it doesn't even evoke any emotions now, except, like I said, languid memories of bygone life...

P. Venugopal said...

this is an extremely interesting topic, Balan. i have experienced it at its sublime form, just as you sure should have, in my early days. then it was virtually Bhakthi Yoga, devotion and total surrender, your whole waking hours are ringing with its music. the music continues into your dreams and resonates from every fibre of your body. we feel a kind of vibrating sensation all the time and are not in love with just an individual, but the whole world. it was the kind of love Meera had for Krishna. if we look at it closely, it was also the love Yasodhara had for Krishna, or the Gopikas had for Krishna. it happens only when we obliterate ourselves--obliterate our 'selves' and merge with whole. somewhere along the line, a change has happened in us. if we examine what that change has been, perhaps we will know why we now miss what we had known before. i am not speaking of love to any individual in particular. there is no love when the partial comes in. that is where we had erred along the way; we had missed the woods for the trees. partial love is no love at all. it breaks all bounds and fills the whole and overflows.

Prabhakar said...

//as the sun and the earth and the other planets
swift-sail down the milky way
on their journey
without a destination//

Lovely picture. the personal and the universal nicely linked.

P. Venugopal said...

i noticed your comment only now, Prabhakar.
there is a possibility with which i have been experimenting in the recent months, but i have not reached that level of alertness required so that one can stabilise oneself at that point where the possibility exists.

this is it: even when you look at yourself at the individual level, throw out your view to the wide expanses outside; do it not at a theoretical level, but from deep within.

and constantly too. just as one pushes out and pushes in the zoom lens of a camera, or swings in and swings out on a swing, touching here and touching there all the time.