Late Diagnosis of Oaklore
But I don’t have to say a word to the trees.
They already know everything.
Like when you knelt before me—
that’s not exactly what happened.
Instead: You cracked my pulsing ribcage
(two hands clasped, pressed),
reached into my slackening
thorax, held aloft my electric green
heart so the sun shone through.
My ventricles and valves lit up:
angular, cast iron slabs of deep
shade stood upright like books
with clustered oak bezels
in the dank, late-noon gloom.
Didn’t you notice?
And also, that one time (before you)—
when in search of forgotten songs, I rolled my heart out,
presented with pride even though flattened,
to a cartographer specializing in my condition—
the incomparable melancholia brought on when
already dangerous concentrations of high lonesome
slide down wooded ramparts and in rivulets
pool atop secret pastures dappled beneath lacy
canopies of Quercus lobata in early spring—
I’m telling you—all that light in the trees out there is me.
Or did I get my words wrong?
Am I the moth (transposed: lepidoptera)
summoned to the oak by invisible
scented syllables, a nose-to-tail
processional of parasites digging in
doing damage, disguised as bark?
You held up a mirror so I could see all my deficits—
the lacquered scrolls of -ectomies, bite marks
in tear-dropped clusters the whole world over
(flood, famine, fire, genocide). I’ve charted
their courses and confluences—
pointed uselessly to the bereaved
refugees in my smoldering spine
as if their faces weren’t obvious.
All this as I was trying to disappear
into the oaks (as you wished I would),
bidding my mouth learn to swallow sunlight,
my fingers to suck up water, when I walked
through my self alone refracted.
I returned breathless from the glittering glen
to tell you (inconvenienced by my revelations).
Needless to say, said the mapmaker to me
not long after you left,
you mustn’t ever try to put this back
where you found it.
Now you must take great care.
In stillness, remove heart as directed.
Line up the hardest parts of your everywhere-self
with the bark and graft to the trees
filled with light to diminish risk of future
perforation. Hold heart firmly
with both hands—especially when
applying jutting, glowing canyons
and chaotic quantities of euphoric green.
And, finally, it may be best
to leave a heart riddled
with illuminated oaklore to rest in shade,
to reach in silence beneath the earth,
to link up with those singing cells
forever beckoning liberation.
Archimony* at Dusk
*Noun: anger about an injustice you only discovered long after the fact, after years have passed and everyone else has moved on […]. – The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Bats dip their wingtips
into the inkwell
of the slow, sighing gloaming,
twirl ribbons of dark across
the disappearing day.
Their invisible threads
stitch the parts of me
I couldn’t reach in time.
Tonight my shattered
heart stands witness
to the skyward calligraphy
drawn by those with the name
meaning hand-wing,
and I know—beside the window
above the drowsy prairie mallow
and poppies—every flourish,
every kerning tourniquets a different
kind of devastation—truth found too late,
legible only by the long lost light
of forgotten stars.
Synesthesia: A Fairytale Remix
Once I walked through
a forest made of colors
the sound of a cathedral’s choir—
storybook pastels as night fell
and the voices began—a muted,
emergent euphoria composed of dusty teals
overlaid with inky, nightshade blues
and still the sighing violet hues (somewhere).
Then came the far away whispering greens—
azure variations carved from resonant sky.
All beginnings and endings
smudged and dispersed
decant a weighted curtain
on the sylvan stage of this perplexing glitch:
the gods can’t tell if I’m a princess
on the page or a pauper peddling tales.
In truth I’m little more than
a careworn insomniac
dreaming myths into motion,
inhaling colors through my ears
knotting cantankerous thoughts
into trinkets I barter for a scrap
of tin-torn shut-eye.
The Parable of the Choir
suggests it’s my turn to take a breath now,
reassures me others will sing while I cannot.
At last my palms slide from the gilded book,
pull the characters from their
parchment holds—I smear their serif souls
across the night, slip into the wake
of lilting sleep—and so topple the kingdom
dangle the beautiful young lovers
the wicked old witch
and the bright ethereal fruit,
toss the long-awaited kiss—dash them all
into the star-blushed universe
off the edge of my bed.
They land in a crumpled stack—bent pages,
dented corners, every instance
of their joy and sorrow slammed
shut within the heavy hardbound
tesseract of words where their
world blurs with mine. I step into
the relief between happily ever after
and the end—indecipherable harmonies hum
through the forest’s incandescent twilight.
Illustration by Sufiya Khatoon
Illustrator Bio: Shortlisted for Yuva Puraskar 20&22, Sufia Khatoon is a multi-lingual performance poet, artist, facilitator and mentor. Awarded with Suprabha and Santiranjan Sengupta IPPL Poetry Book Award 2023. She is the Joint Editor of Antonym Collections, Editor EKL Review and Co-Founder of Rhythm Divine Poets community Kolkata. She was nominated as one of the 100 Inspiring Indian Muslim Women from West Bengal by RBTC. She has authored “Death in the Holy Month ” shortlisted for Yuva Puraskar Sahitya Akademi 2020-22 and Ger-mi-na-tion ( Longlisted Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Prize 22)
