Sibani Sen
BODY LIGHT
—after Whitman
Why do I long to sing the body too? Yet can only trace the visible bounds
perimeters mark light and dark where blood flows and no perimeter should be
here are the borderlands of the given and the made
—I exist to make
you exist to be made for—
the illumination of fixed conditions
contingencies of love
*
in this dark body one
ray dispels the shadows one
moment radiates. I
wish the clocks would hurry and time
meet me ahead of me and find
me never wanting. Why
this body? Measuring minute by minute
till it meets its final zero.
I touch you—shiver—I feel you
find in me a parting
another world an experiment
or a disease that ran for miles
a ruined continent
is this a body that filters war or mind?
*
Pleasure each station of the spine flick
each juncture each hollow each cove
with the promise. Do I feed the pain?
Feed the inevitable demise. Thrill
the sensitive protractions. Bodied light in
time. Aren’t you a bulwark?
A hold against the processions all
are processions—invasive species
viral contagion chronic
cataracts that go on and on deep
penetrative needles of space
closing in on the central being
you chose your poison
though you may feel chosen
*
that one last hit/the frontline/ colony collapse/ blood cells multiplying/ glacial melt/
hotter/ prophylactic failure/ organ failure/ system failure/infection /concession
concede—you conceive this body alight out of the dark warming channel
fluidly formed. What jellies and whites, what purses of lungs, and muscular breath
what birth that is the vulnerable grasp of delicate unknown chances?
shimmering passage I see the contrails of another rising
body light state of extremity
is there no other point but this end point?
*
On the body’s horizon this rising
marvel of skin-silked flesh bright
clear fastening sinew
muscle-shot boned-in marrow-centered
like a planetary axis slow-circling
its own orbit upon orbit.
Is my body not open to all?
Yet none can enter it openly. Water/ air/ light/
the seeds of the earth /the mouths of the earth-born/
you as you open to me. Why do I long to see
the wild untroubled plains in your eye’s silvery skies
an unclouded expanse? In the season of unknowing
I delighted in our seductions—you with me/the rowdy musicians/ the shy librarian/
a young writer with unnamed desires.
*
the nocturnal fireflies winking their ways home fleet
to leave behind my body’s burden its dragging resolution
if this one
does not kill me then my complacency will
I see my heart in the lines of your limbs sprawled carelessly across my lap
so we exchange promises we cannot keep and plagued kisses and a bewilderment
that lit my passage outward through the breach
*
the accord with the world crumbling
the charge that binds us to it crushing
in the heat of the day the solitary
intakes—I make mine, mine, my
catalogue of enchantments
here is the soft petal of the elbow
now wrinkled now taut and how
it mirrors the pink ball of the heel
the shiny lobe of the ear
the grand genuflecting knee
*
in sunlight the dark body lightens the lust of spring
drips violet dusk, yellow spring and bright buds of cherry blossoms
the ripening of youth the mottling plum
what throat of bird will you steal to sing it?
in bright stillness I saw the oriole on the forsythia
the sweet scent of the redbud’s limb—this is not an aside— I cannot make
peace with the withered sacs that ripened further into death such deadly
light has the body shone as the sun abandons itself to evening.
Now will I, this beast of infinite wishes, abandon you all
how many of you will abandon me too? Body, I see your wishes’
dimming light, unafraid to ask its rattled husk
—why don’t we tell the truth?