Available Light : 3 poems after Artworks by Manisha Gera Baswani

Origin Story

And so, Brahma, the spider,
   spins again a silver web. His body 

is all night. Stars pin themselves
   around his eight ankles across 

all eight directions as we spill
   from his spinneret like spiderlings

 waking into life. And Mother to us all,
   he balloons on an orb of thin air, 

leaving a field of silk below—
   wound three times, no, thirty-nine,

so much sturdier than steel—
   circling the oval mouth of starlight. 

And we, his gossamer children,
   huddle around his hairy legs 

like so many sticky pests,
   like chalk dust on a blackboard, 

and warble: tell us once more,
   how you began time.

The White Poem

Like a new lamb, I wake into the morning—

I look outside and see a thin crust of snow

stitched upon another layer of snow. The green

of lank grass below barely peeking through.

It is almost December in Oslo, too, where my friend lives.

He speaks of the sun reflecting on the bright white sheet—

the pond frozen over—beneath which fish swim, enter

a sleep where their hearts slow—a torpor—while the sun

goes on sharpening his winter glare. My friend can bear

this shine, says it is better than the aphotic dark of November.

Here, in Narkanda, I spot the monal somewhere on a slope.

We look at each other but do not speak. In the distance,

children ready themselves to ski, awkward ducks

falling over. In the cold air is a light I cannot name—

it feels old—numinous—blunts whatever is glottal

inside me. It doesn’t hurt, being alone. Going for days

without hearing the whistle of a partridge or the heft of hail

thunking its weight on the tip of a deodar leaf. The snow  

is so cold, it feels hot. I do not know what that means.

But in the presence of a presence greater than your own,

something tells you, you should kneel. And so, I kneel,

bald knee to the ground, and cry softly into the snow.

My sobbing is so quiet I cannot hear it. I think of my friend

walking in the open, drinking warm beer to soothe his throat.

Tomorrow, he will shovel snow. And in a month or two,

the winter glare will reduce. Fish will wake from their sleep

and the pond will thaw too—thinking of this, I rise

on my feet, here, in Narkanda. Thank whatever presence

has blessed my mouth with a silence so deep, I contain

no language to hold it—like this poem turning

into a heap of snow. I have no use for words now.

There is nothing to show.

On blue

   In the woods, I walk to the pond with my book,

and hold fast to the idea that deer can see the colour blue,

   that the cones of their eyes allow such light

to enter, pass through—and the idea of it soothes

   my mind, and I imagine one such fawn fevered with thirst,

drinking from the lip of a pond, the water good to taste,

   like a lozenge cooling the canal of your throat—

and what is it in the way of blue, the way it reaches the eye—

   the long stem of a needle my mother sterilizes on a blue flame,

the tarpaulin of sky, pots glazed with a blue pigment,

   feathers of a jay,

pieces of broken azure tiles that children play stapoo with—

   is it all in the eye?—in the sea cave of Blue Grotto

where an emperor once swam, the light there so sapphire

   it seems to filter from the stained window of some hidden cathedral,

or emit upwards from a star burning underwater,

   the silver blued and the blue, silvered—I look,

and look, I am changed—I am Yashodha

   coaxing open Krishna’s blue mouth to reveal

a bazillion stars burning bright

   in the eternal darkness of space, there is

such light as you wouldn’t believe, couldn’t conceive,

   the smooth marble of earth so small in this boy’s maw

that I, his mother, am left frightened—but not I, who is staring

   into the clear iris of this pond, divining with my eye

   a blue that cannot be found, a blue so vivid

I cannot foresee what I ask for, what I want

   from these slow waters where the fish pivot & pray,

I want something impossible

   like a formless shape, a knife without a blade,

or to touch the bony ridges on a mandrill’s face—

   I want not to hew or whittle or snap or break—

I only want to behold a blue so large & undivided

   that it returns the sky to the sky—

but as I stand here staring at the center of the pond,

   wanting not to want the impossible, I know

that the blue I see is not the blue a deer sees,

   for she sees a colour twenty times bluer,

a blue so bluishly deep, I wouldn’t know what I would do—

   and in the light of this truth, I confess

that I suffer a little like a leaf in the wind

   but nothing so grave as to kill a horse—one blue roan, or two—

and I still don’t know what it is in the way of blue

   except it is the colour of dreams, threading everything I see—

iguana, brick, candle, hook—and I return to it like I

   return to the pond, a mud dauber to her nest,

a rook to his tree, and how to my eye, the light returns,

   repeats, not the deer’s blue but my own still,

through the gift of a pupil—vase and coat

   and ladder and sieve—all as blue as blue can be.