Contemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 6, No 2: CLRI May 2019
Dr Gerburg Garmann
Previewing Sleep
You say: Bright and brittle – time means nothing in this case.
I say: Ants and bees possess a weird authority, don’t you think?
You say: A kitchen can fill an entire house…
I say: All this gold dust blown out the window looks like an accepted credit…
You say: You need to engage in reverse begging more often.
I say: A hopeless business will find no honey to slow its demise.
You say: Tonight, life sits on a folding campstool cashing out love.
I say: I love syntactical oddities just like the privacy of water.
You say: Some tables have been known to move themselves.
I say: Some take what they can get and then some less.
You say: There are no two ways about it.
I say: Stuffed animals have moved to the top of the pecking order.
You say: I call that a sudden change in the terms of engagement.
I say: Yes, I agree, and did you notice the tipsy sparrow’s feral smile?
You say: That’s why we need both the needle and the thread.
I say: So, you DID fall in love with her?
You say: No. So, you can enter my mind with safety.
I say: Only if you bring back my flock of swallows from our first 100 years.
Sisyphus Prays over the Bones of His House
Sisyphus prays over the bones of his house.
It is better to be somewhere other than at the foot
of the hill with tropes lamenting tropes,
better than explicating the twists of the rolling boulder,
though from there, he could give proof of the economy
of sound, of the ecology of budding thoughts and
their sweeping away in whispers by forces he does not
understand. Something he does not want to do.
He wants to lift the curse and walk in the ripples
of that soothing music, the one preceding any economy of sound,
the one enveloping and releasing all swept up whispers.
He wants to remember the one skipping over young grass
and rushing in glissandos over scented pebbles before
they turn into incurably consequential rocks.
He wants to sing forever over the bones of his house
and spin the memories they hold into something coming before
canons of eastern daylight instead of pushing phantoms uphill
and inevitably miss their downhill slopes.
Remeasuring the distance to the top day after day
can only be endured by letting your mind either
drift towards animalesque galaxies of the closer kind or
by sometimes peering under Persephone’s dark robes
unless you accept that the boulder eventually
becomes nothing more than nomadic waste or shrinks
into the soul of your last patinated penny rolling out
of a broken piggy bank onto terribly clever land.