It Goes Like This
I am on the brink of extinction—a strange breeze ventures in, a dizzied morning—a duck here and a duck there, sprinkling sounds of beaks which drift away with the ripples, such ingredients for cinematic echoes. A hush, indeed—so tumbling memories—never a stroll, knock upon the back of my skull, but I find ways to never turn around. Incessant taps—I know that familiar pattering, and I know to lift my tongue only to the knitted skies ahead. Oh, that single cumulus—oh, that drifting boat rocking, as if lost but on it goes into an air so naked, I press my hands against my cloth. If I turn around—so if I turn around, ripped and shredded canvases, left with scars for palettes and splintered brushes, frayed with hollow ghosts, mouths so deep, to enter in meant to never come back, and so angelic are the days to lead me to keep walking, however if I stumble, nonetheless to keep leaning toward the duck here and the duck there—such trumpets to dine my weathered throat. I recognize no one but strangers—I find myself in such strange lands where step upon step lead to more unknowns, knowing that is the entrance into fear and I’ve learned to let the fear settle in, to let the fear diffuse through my thoughts because there’s no other way. So such strangers—let them be, let them heal, and I listen and I cry for in the tear of a mother, the voice of a father, a brother’s embrace, the palm of a friend, I recognize myself as a stranger who wants to know more about a song which lifts me from staff to staff until I’m just a note waiting to float away toward the soft of a sky, welcoming and blinding, and I fuse myself and let my eyes stay closed for the possibilities are much like the wing of this duck and the wing of that duck and so I dance on the land of a leaf and let the sun twirl me into a ripple of this pond.
Shome Dasgupta is the author of nine books, including The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), Spectacles (Word West), and Iron Oxide (Assure). Forthcoming novels include Cirrus Stratus (Spuyten Duyvil) and Tentacles Numbing (Thirty West). He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.
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