Latest news with #LonePine

Scroll.in

‘The day begins with endings': A new book of poetry about topography, time, and shifting identities

Lone Pine A mountain pine in the plains. How did it come in this unfrequented alley? How does it survive so out of place? It towers gawkily above the rear of the building. Walk past it every morning to touch its toughness. Its needles are dropping always. They are the sponginess you tread. A few are caught in the bark's rigid flakes. Gently prise them out. Release them to fall where they belong. They cover dust and flatness with the scent of resin slopes. That arrival: a return. The car with shut windows had wound through a pine forest. At last you stood on a ridge in the blue forgotten air through which the great trees were a dry redolence. It seemed that this was it: belonging. Home was this. But the pines kept murmuring something else. You are a guest wherever you are: home is out of place. Ol' Man River The flanks of the brown river beneath the massed and shadowless clouds fan out and slide into the shore. Midstream the water is patchy but looks immune as armoured cars to being diverted by myths on the side. The river is not an old man. Nor has it ever been the Mother no matter the evening pieties on show. It is young blood obeying old commands to just keep rollin' along. It bundles silt towards an ocean. Tea He hugs his tumbler of tea. It is the most precious thing. He stands beneath a dripping tree where those who still serve have served him. They are at their posts again. He was here as usual early and was given tea. Now that his service is over why does he exist? Scuffed shoes and shapeless pants that he has to pull up full sleeves almost empty with bones. But his tumbler has just been filled. Teens On Shravan Monday So many of them barefoot and merry striding through the unholy muck on the ghats at dawn. It isn't that the new dustbins have overflowed: they are mere appendages to a smart city whose time has been coming since the inception of time. More of the boys are in the murky water splashing within red barriers that keep them from colliding with boats or being carried off. Not that such things are to be feared: the boats are slow these waters can only drown misdeeds and this is an auspicious month with fasts to be observed precociously. What of hunger? Nothing requires smart phones to be given up. Here is music and there are selfies arms resting on shoulders nineteen to the dozen strong. The Bridge The day begins with endings. A message confirms the collapse of an arched fantasy. The news of a death belies another fantastic event: the union of man and woman. One of them is weeping along with a child who knows as something covered in blankets is stretchered out. The day is hazy and began for you at water's edge. The boats were tethered on sand. The bridge was lit like a birthday cake. Outsider Outsiders must learn this river's code. Today the sun will be shrouded but the bare bodied men at water's edge know when it is time. Nothing can stop their moment. A conch. They raise water in their palms and hail the rising they cannot see. Their voices carry the day. One of them is doing something expansive with a cupped flame. Their call makes light of sludgy steps. It has gone up through tree and temple to rouse once-forgiving streets. This call you remember from story books was raised in war against infidels. Now it so inflames piety outsiders must learn to lie low. Screenshot: Red And Green A convoy of military trucks is coming up the country lane. The caption says they are on a flag march to keep the peace between warring tribes. Hanging out of the drivers' cabs are red flags. Triangular red plates are fixed below one bonnet. But the trucks are mostly dark green almost black as if indelibly stained by the shade of forests disappeared. The tribes out in the open now must fight each other to be first in line. Here are trucks to keep the peace unstoppably. The photo shows another green and red unstoppable thing: resplendent as it arches above that single file is a gulmohar tree. Slightly out of focus doing its thing exotically until peace-keeping distends every road. The Watchman The watchman – that is to say the man who mends watches – does not look the part. He looks to be the problem when times are awry. He has a muscleman's shoulders a politician's paunch and a mafiosi's slur of speech. His cubbyhole must cramp his style. He does not look you in the eye and he is careless of his sparse hair. But nothing is careless in what his hands are upto. Beneath the glass attached to his eye his stubby fingers are doing things to things you cannot see. The drawer his stomach grazes is half open and he reaches in without looking for the implement he needs or for the bag of empty tags to label watches with their people. The pen has its place across the table spares are in stacked boxes – batteries, straps, protective glass, whatnot – and alarm clocks line the shelves. But no alarms in this precisely congested space that runs like the insides of a watch. Things are kept as they should be and here if anywhere sits the boss of small things. In quiet ready for you: he is the nub when ticking needs to be set right.