sextillions of stellar
objects later I am that
which rhymes with
the read and re-read
almond, the spent pile, an ayat
of Leila. Night.
foaming at the mouth
the split moon has become
a silver scalpel here
is my head I do not ask
for miracles, only
your witness finger
your isosceles hands
trisect sky-angles, a velvet
mehrab, born of night’s blue
bruise, night you held
at bay with sentinels
of spells you said
those prayers over
me as well, dandelion
words, they blew softly
on feigned sleep
like whispers felled
my hands are a petrified
forest, a fossil tablet
I cannot shed
this circle, the point
at which we wed
you milked impatiently, I bled
deflowered as the thin
red line under morning’s
eye, an elemental ash
of soot, water, glue and
gaps. I stand
dismantled where I fled
I don’t know
how much a litre or
millimetre is anymore
distances are words
I cannot tread
love by any measure
a quantity misspelled
but if I hurry I could well
be the slightly grateful
dead specify
my mortal bed
size in yards
and inches, of course
meanwhile a teaspoon
of the Big Bang floats
around within us all
a requiem unsaid
©2011 Sophia Pandeya
Each nightfall she braids
three rivers into knots
of silence, anchors
their shores to a
corner of fallen
sky and leaves
for the lost
land of moon-wells
You wont find
her she sleeps in
a sand-bed crumpled
like a paper moon on
the lips of
the Indus
The delta has
died and left its
gray ghost upon
the banks of
her shoulders
She wears it like a mantle of flowers
©2011 Sophia Pandeya
confluent as the lines of your hands once
were, clenched tightly as you struggled
against the itch the urge to open
your palms to the skies and catch
the next rain of thought henna-fish
will be lost and never found
again on these tracks there must
be borders or else chaos ruins
the filigree she warned squeezing
drops of clove tea over the drying
islands I told her I was writing
a labyrinth without maps she said
everything is a thread that unravels
© 2011 Sophia Pandeya from the poem series Water, Memory
the windshield is
a cinema raindrops
patrons throngs arriving
leaving arriving I cannot
look not now not
ever says a muffled
voice in the back before
the shatter all rain
begins as rime hexagon
prism seed spell snow
grows in your sky
womb until crystal
succumbs
© 2011 Sophia Pandeya from the poem series Water, Memory
The first memory was a white
blindness a braille of
salt that water leaves
behind like a wayward lover making
a trail of tell-tale deserts
in his path a slow burning writes
scrolls on your cheeks a garland
of tiny skulls holds
the dark ocean you crossed
to become this flower
© 2011 Sophia Pandeya - from the poem series Water, Memory
