Category Archives: The Abstract

October 2, 2019

Nobody, not even the rain

By Pavithra K. Mehta
Listening is the least invasive of the senses
Touch the most needful of permission
Gazing has limits which exceeded
Test the bounds of politeness
Tasting on most occasions would incur scandal
Sniffing will almost always seem indelicate
But listening offends no one, pleases most
Endears the listener to the listened to
So would you seek to grow intimate and ocean deep
Contained of many creatures –then–
Prick your ears and still the urge to speak
Fall silent, fill with attendance to
The moment speaking
Take notes like a schoolgirl, forgive like
A mother, receive like the sky that cracks
Open at dawn–
Let not a whisper go unheeded
The voices you are most in need of
Will not break and enter–no–
So do not wait for bugles or trumpets
What you are listening for is tumbling
Towards you like scent of blossoms
On Spring breeze, rising within you like
A full moon and nobody–
Not even the rain
Has such soft feet.
Stop
Place your ear upon the ground of time
Feel the silence rumble
(Nearer than
Your next breath)
Listen!

5 Comments | posted in The Abstract

July 27, 2019

Stream of Thought

By Pavithra K. Mehta

She was sitting very still next to a silver stream and when she looked into it she saw her reflection. Clear eyes looked into clear eyes. And she wondered suddenly whether, when she rose and left, the memory of that face– her face– would still remain in the water. In a secret way she hoped it would. And she wondered then how many other faces had stopped at this silver stream to see themselves in its depths. And suddenly the face in the stream spoke up in a voice that was familiar because it was her own voice— only somehow like the stream—silvery.

And the voice said, “The stream cannot hold me forever because it is a stream and streams do not know the meaning of holding on and they do not know the meaning of forever.”

And she listened to this in some surprise (because you see she was a little unaccustomed to being addressed by her reflection) but when she had got over her surprise she nodded and said in a matter-of-fact kind of way, “ Yes you’re right. Silly me,” and she rose and walked away from the stream without a backward glance—which is why she did not see her reflection smiling after her.

1 Comment | posted in Fiction, The Abstract

July 26, 2019

Expiration Date

By Pavithra K. Mehta

I found Fame in the cupboard–

Between baking soda and salt,

Her seal was yet unbroken,

Her Expiration Date at fault–

Or was it me?

 

Did I neglect this purchase

And let its worth grow stale?

Did I forfeit grand applause

While–opening the mail?

Tending traceless other tasks

Forgetting to put on my masks–

Has Golden Chance set sail?

 

If so I’ll gladly take the blame

And let this be my claim to fame—

I’d rather bake a cake — or two–

Than chase a Name.

2 Comments | posted in The Abstract

July 14, 2019

How Do You Live In Your Days?

By Pavithra K. Mehta

Do you live in your days like a forgotten ticket stub in someone’s jacket? As if the show were behind you? As if you went out one evening to watch your life, and decided halfway through that it wasn’t worth the price of admission.

Other things more interesting stole your attention, even though we’ve been told and told that all that glitters is not gold, we are so easily seduced by sparkle and the kind of food that fills our mouths but not our stomachs and never our souls.

How we gorge on the insubstantial, and substitute the vibrant, risky, full-bodied occupation of life with a weak-kneed, lukewarm stupor.

Do you live in your days like an unmarked bottle in the back of the fridge? A bottle that has been there so long that no one remembers what’s in it. Do you live in your days like a lone sock in the drawer whose match disappeared in the wash weeks or years ago.

Think. Think hard. What shape are you holding and in what container are you held? Those are not questions to be asked or answered lightly.

Live like the roar in the cave of the lion’s throat. Live like the mustard seed that is dropped into hot oil — ready to explode its flavor into everything. Like the wick in a candle. Flickering. Fierce. Alive.

4 Comments | posted in The Abstract

July 9, 2019

Senti Mental

By Pavithra K. Mehta

As a teenager I was once informed, and not unkindly, by a cousin whose earthly years tallied in the low single digits, that I was “a senti mental.” He split this four syllable word into two words of two syllables each, and pronounced each syllable as distinctly as only a born and bred South Indian can. Senn-ttii Menn-ttall. Taking into consideration his pronunciation, enunciation, and the general context of the conversation, I believe he believed the word (or in his usage, words) referred to less than sound faculties of mind. I recall the combination of confidence and concerned affection in his voice. It touched and amused me then as the memory still does now. I do not think it was an entirely misplaced diagnosis.

With that preamble, from sometime after the turn of the millennium — a decidedly Senti Mental somewhat poem.

and this time
i know
will fade–like the memory of winter
(like the clichéd memory of winter)
when Spring is come.

and when you are arrived
(like that soulsweetseason)
with leaftipped promises
of blossoms and bliss
with brightlipped promises
of–

i shall recall with the
faint bewilderment
of the backward glance

days that were
longand

difficultand

dark

but–

i will not
be able

to summon
this current sensation

this current
current of
sensation–

of
being
cold

coldcoldcold

(and old)

of being
not so much

alone

as–

(only.)

everything that now insists
on its separate

sadness–

the dawn ritual
of heartache-
regular
rehearsed.
a line-perfect

pang.

faking-a-waking.

the swiftsighs swallowed
like small stones
filling nothing
(and lots of it)

smiles tossed like wistful garlands
wreathing the happiness other people
have found

in

eachother

everything now
poignantprofound
everything
par-t-ic-u-lar-ly

painful

shall fall silent and

as

easytoforget

as

asoftlysleeping

scar

that I shall wonder at when
I push back the sleeve of
this time and see it

there–

witness to a wounding
i will barely recall
(if at all) —

so close

soclosesoclosesoclose
will i be

someday

to the sun of your

love

(the sweetsumofyour

love)

there will be
nothing remaining of

this time

to hold onto.

an icicle- sharpointedestined
to melt into the memory of
something-
sharpointedestined
to melt into the memory of–

so close

soclosesoclose
will i be

someday

to the sun of your
love

(the sweetsumofyour
love)

that this time
i know
will fade-

like the memory of winter
(the clichéd memory of winter)
when Spring is come.

and when you are arrived
(like that soulsweet season)
with leaftipped promises
of blossoms and bliss
with brightlipped promises
of—

there will be nothing left
of this time to
hold onto

(save only

…this.)

Leave a comment | posted in The Abstract

July 5, 2019

Elevator Music

By Pavithra K. Mehta

In another lifetime they might have been good, perhaps even great friends. Their natures each pitched to unusual keys, offset enough to harmonize in inspired ways. But they didn’t. Not this time around. What emerged between them instead, was the relationship equivalent of elevator music. A vast politeness, a blameless bond neither strong nor interesting. It held them temporarily in the same orbit, no more, no less. Like passengers seated next to each other on a plane, who exchange brief pleasantries then fall into their separate worlds. Or acquaintances at a mutual friend’s party, who listen to one another’s stories with that air of formal attentiveness that betrays a lack of natural sympathies. From their forgettable interactions was absent the trouble or reward of real conversation. They traveled a shared highway, a little more than distant and much less than close. You know how it is with some people. And so it was with them. Though it might have been otherwise.

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July 4, 2019

I Think I Heard Her Sing

By Pavithra K. Mehta

And if there’s no bread to be had tonight I will eat words she said

I’ll sprinkle them all with pepper and salt, and gobble them up in bed.

***

If light is a language and sunset a sermon

And dusk is a tribesman in deep purple turban

Then why speak in words that will ruin the night?

When nothing that’s said can ever be right.

***

Bright lights on the hillside no stars in the sky

My heart it is heavy and it won’t tell  me why

The frogs they do croak and the crickets they chafe

While alone at the window I stand like a waif

Though my life it be full of love and its singing

It harbors still shadows of pain and its stinging.

***

Who put the cluck in the chicken and

Sharpened each green blade of grass?

Who rouged the cheeks of the sunset and

Filled the blue rivers with bass?

I’ve scoured the world for the artist

Whose skill grazes everything

I haven’t glimpsed her yet, but once

I think I heard her sing.

***

1 Comment | posted in Naturesque, The Abstract

July 2, 2019

Visitation

By Pavithra K. Mehta

Sometimes it strikes me as curious. The many, seemingly disparate meanings certain words hold. Words like Swiss Army knives. Small enough to slip in your pocket and capable of unfolding in different ways, depending on whether you need to whittle a piece of birchwood, open a bottle or tighten a screw. This makes them convenient– but also at times when context is unclear– confusing. A Swiss Army knife on a camping trip is easier to understand for instance, than a Swiss Army knife in carry on luggage going through airport security.

Misunderstood Swiss Army knives are typically confiscated. Misunderstood words however, will typically continue to travel through the world unchecked, trailing bafflement, umbrage, heartbreak, hilarity or–fertile possibility in their wake. Unlike a misunderstood Swiss Army knife an imperfectly word can cause happy accidents, advantageous reactions– even poetry. Especially poetry.

Meaning more than one thing means carrying, at all times, the potential to be useful, problematic, poetic, or various combinations of the aforementioned. In some ways this is the precise definition of what it means to be a person.

***

In the dictionary the word ‘visitation’ has several meanings. Though they do not at first glance appear to be related to one another, they actually are. These meanings brush up against one another in inventive ways.

Visitation (noun)

 “an official visit by an important person especially to look at or inspect something

The appearance of a divine or supernatural being

a time before a dead person is buried when people may view the body

a special dispensation of divine favor or wrath

a severe trial 

access to a child granted especially to a parent who does not have custody

the visit of the Virgin Mary to Elizabeth recounted in Luke and celebrated July 2 by a Christian feast”

***

Yesterday, after sunset, a visitation. Actually, two.

I stepped into our mudroom and startled a little cat sitting at the top of the staircase outside our front door. She darted down the steps. Then stood behind the trumpet vine bush at the base of the staircase, her head peeking around it so that she could still hold my gaze. We stared at each other silently for a few moments, then I called out to my husband to heat up some milk for her. I crouched down at the top of the staircase and began talking to her. Where did you come from sweet one? What do you want? Are you hungry you beauty? I began to walk towards her and she stepped cautiously out from her hiding place. Then rolled on her back and let out a plaintive miaow. A movement so trusting, and endearing it made me smile. If it was a movement calculated to win over hearts, then it was well played. 

When I placed the container of warm milk on the step below me, she stepped up to it on her ballerina paws with no hesitation. Began to drink, pausing every so often to look up at me again as if suddenly transfixed by what she saw. 

We stood at the top of the staircase, in our darkened mudroom watching her. She drank and my heart filled. 

Not long after she had vanished into the night, we looked out and saw a little fawn at the base of the staircase — a startled brown face in lamplight looking up at our startled brown faces in the window.

***

What if –we are each other’s visitation?

***

1 Comment | posted in Happenings, The Abstract

June 29, 2019

Forgetting

By Pavithra K. Mehta

St. Kevin and the Blackbird 

by Seamus Heaney

And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labor and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

***

How achingly lovely is this poem? It’s based on an Irish legend nearly 1000 years old, that Heaney retells to perfection. The vivid imagery of the first section holds you hostage. You are captive in the cramped cell of this verse with its kneeling saint, its window and that single upturned palm. Then the arrival of the bird! Hard to read these lines and keep your hands from tingling. Such a precise description, that for a moment, it is the reader’s hand that holds the nesting bird. And it is the reader who has, with the arrival of this winged legend, been linked into “the network of eternal life” [what a magnificent phrase].  And then the birth of that breathtakingly generous commitment so quietly announced. “Until the young are hatched, and fledged and flown.” A softly stunning line that requires a moment to recover from. How thoughtful Heaney’s placement then, of that starry asterisk. A beat, in which to find the ground again.

And how masterfully the storyteller shifts the tone directly after. Lifting the curtain to tease out the truth that lurks beneath the mythical. Introducing the paradox of seeking out the real in the realm of the imagination. We must try to put ourselves in the skin of the saint. And doing this, are shown a fork in the road — does our inhabitation of the holy introduce our rickety mortality to the saint, or does it elevate us into his transcendent experience? Heaney gives us both possibilities to live. And how. He gives us the sore forearms and the suffering knees. He gives us too the numb lostness –the creep of the underearth. And we, in all our unsaintliness, know exactly what this feels like. Because while we may have never incubated blackbird’s eggs in the hollows of our palms, we can extrapolate. We know what it is to have pins-and-needles. “Is there distance in his head?” And again the poem makes a beautifully abrupt turn. From the physical to the metaphysical.

A question that places distance like an object as a possibility in someone’s head. And the beauty of it is that we know instinctively what that means. To feel an inner expanse that is not an attenuation [Remember St Augustine’s claim: time is the distension of the mind.] The spaciousness that does not stretch, that is one with timelessness and that can sometimes be stumbled into. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space…” said Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and being no saint he concluded the sentiment with “…were it not that I have bad dreams.” But Kevin’s dreams are unclouded. His heart mirrored undistorted in the river. His prayer untainted and transparent, “To labor and not to seek reward.” An aspiration that mirrors the pith of the Gita:”You are entitled to your labor, not to the fruit of your labor.” An aspiration that issues forth not from mind or lips but from the entirety of his being– and then those lovely, lovely last lines:

“For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.”

And we, standing again in the skin of our own lives, full of mistakes and memories and self, we know, as the poet relies on us to know, what St. Kevin does not. That the river’s name, of course, is Love.

***

Heaney reading St. Kevin at the offices of his publishers, on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

“[This poem is] based on a sense of doing the right thing for the reward of doing the right thing. And I think that a literary publishing house which continues to hold those values is in that domain of a self belief and faith and chosen values opted for and stood by. Publishing is to some extent still, and to a great extent here I think, a labor of love, and a matter of work for the right reason, and–even if you aren’t going to get any great monetary reward–to keep going.”

***

1 Comment | posted in Happenings, Other Verses, Others' Verses, The Abstract

June 26, 2019

I Miss You

By Pavithra K. Mehta

For V (with gratitude and apologies to Billy Collins), 2005

 

You are the rice and the bowl

The brass lamp and the prayer

 

You are the distant sound of temple bells at dusk

And the elephant’s trunk poised in blessing above a child’s head

You are the wholesome fragrance of thulsi in the garlandmaker’s basket

And the wise old banyan tree where the birds rest their songs.

 

However you are not the droplet that sleeps on the lotus leaf in the

middle of the pond

The potter’s wheel or the stray notes in Krishna’s flute

And you are certainly not the cry of the milkman in the morning

There is just no way that you are the cry of the milkman in the morning.

 

It is possible that you are the splash of the bucket lowered into the well

Maybe even the custard apples on the bough

But you are not even close to being the red banana flower

 

And a quick look in the mirror will show

That you are neither the saltspraysting of the sea

Nor the hurling grace of the fisherman’s net.

 

It might interest you to know,

Speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

That I am the sound of crickets at sundown.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

The umbrella turned inside out by the wind

And the silk woven mat on the floor

 

I am also the sway of the coconut palm

And the longing of the red earth for rain

But don’t worry, I’m not the rice and the bowl

You are still the rice and the bowl

Not to mention the brass lamp and — somehow —  the prayer.

***

Ten years and more later…

My husband is not a sentimental person. He has a box of old letters, photographs and miscellaneous keepsakes saved more by benign neglect than emotional attachment. He is as likely to ever want to look through it as he is to want to go salsa dancing on a Friday night. Which is to say– very, very unlikely. As far as I can tell, he is immune to nostalgia. This affords him a kind of peace that I sometimes envy. While I am far less sentimental than I once was, I’m still prey to occasional bouts of nostalgia that fell me like the flu.

***

“I miss you.” Three words that I’ve said so often to V over the years, and his response has always been the same: “But I’m right here.” And he always is. I have never known quite how to explain this quality of missing. The piercing sense of the absence of a thing that surfaces bewilderingly and most keenly in the full-blown presence of that thing. It is a subtle, gnawing, uncomfortable sensation. Like an itch that’s impossible to scratch because it is impossible to locate. A distance impossible to bridge because it isn’t located in space. But you feel it. You know you feel it.  In an unguarded moment this feeling can bring you to tears. In moments when you are better defended you laugh it off.

Life is a strange animal. And animals get hungry. And it is hunger that gives us the potential for tragedy, comedy. Hunger that gives us the potential for metamorphosis, and evolution. 

Hunger is an animating force. Perhaps the animating force of this world. And it is fundamentally defined by the sensation of lack, and its identical twin, the sensation of longing.

***

“It’s funny,” says my husband, “But these days I get hungry while I’m eating.” I look up at him across the dining table and we burst out laughing, because it’s a ridiculous statement and yet it makes perfect sense. It is not long after the ER visit. V at this time had spent two weeks on a strict diet of fruit, rice and boiled vegetables. No spices, no sugar, no gluten, no dairy and very little salt. “I’m eating plenty,” he says, “But there’s this entire compartment in my stomach that stays permanently empty.” He is smiling as he says this, his eyes full of merriment and not a trace of self-pity. V has always enjoyed variety in his food, but he has no trouble accepting, with monk-like contentment, whatever happens to be served on his plate, literally and metaphorically.

I think again, what I’ve thought many times over the years: This person whom I live my days side-by-side with, is no ordinary being.

***

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

hunger (n.)

Old English hunger, hungor “unease or pain caused by lack of food, debility from lack of food” from Proto-Germanic *hungraz(source also of Old Frisian hunger, Old Saxon hungar, Old High German hungar, Old Norse hungr, German hunger, Dutch honger, Gothic huhrus), probably from PIE root *kenk- (2) “to suffer hunger or thirst” (source also of Sanskrit kakate “to thirst;” Lithuanian kanka “pain, ache; torment, affliction;” Greek kagkanos “dry,” polykagkes “drying”). From c. 1200 as “a strong or eager desire” (originally spiritual).

appetite (n)

  1. 1300, “craving for food,” from Anglo-French appetit, Old French apetit “appetite, desire, eagerness” (13c., Modern French appétit), from Latin appetitus “appetite, longing,” literally “desire toward,” from appetitus, past participle of appetere “to long for, desire; strive for, grasp at,” from ad “to” (see ad-) + petere “go to, seek out,” from PIE root *pet- “to rush, to fly.”

***

“I miss you.” 

“But I’m right here.”

This is what it distills down to. 

“I miss you.” 

“But I’m right here.” 

Just so you know — this is the only conversation we are having. And by we I mean me. I mean you. I mean almost anybody. Almost everybody. This is the only conversation we have ever had (no matter how much it seems otherwise, it’s all just variations on the theme), with each other, with ourselves, with our God/s, with our time, with our reality. 

“I miss you.” 

“But I’m right here.” 

The compartment in your stomach that cannot be filled. The itch that cannot be located.

The hunger we carry like a koan (that is our privilege to carry like a koan)–

Until we don’t.

[End of conversation.]

1 Comment | posted in Journal Snatches, The Abstract