Ankush Banerjee

(Two Poems)  

 

The Uncertain Nature of Certain Relationships

 

‘You put two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...’                                                                                                                                                                                             Levels of Life, Julian Barnes

 

Hanging stale sheets

from last afternoon’s love-making

the clothesline twitches and turns

 

under the weight of a shared, yet

unspoken truth.

Winds course through wet grass

 

as overcast skies clot

and a hungry pack of dogs

pounce on a mongrel

 

which has strayed

into their territory.

‘You ought to be happy, and

 

if not, let us re-think This’, I want to hear

you say, before you waft away

and are not smelt off anymore.

 

The sheets continue to flutter.

The clothesline twitches

evermore feebly.

 

I walk back to my room,

to quickly scribble This –

In case, we speak again,

 

and I have to produce make-believe

evidence of my innocence

in a courtroom that would

 

ignore my guilt, or my innocence

by making love on

those same sheets again

 

on a similar afternoon.  

 

 

 

 

Full Circle

 

Well, what could they do –

 

His Gods were

more forgiving than hers,

and hers, more assiduous

and so, more long-lasting than his.

 

They kissed, under the twilight

of their shared catastrophes.

He stretching his beliefs to infinity

She contracting sensuously

in foetal position to Zero.

 

Settling into oblivion

and memory, simultaneously

like pieces of a perfectly fitting jigsaw puzzle.

 

The ending, un-putdown-able in words

is fleeting and sad.

 

Such is the fate of all Great Loves Fighting Time!

Against their own volitions

through life, or on paper – like this –

 

To have come Full Circle

would have sufficed –