Pallav Ranjan

August 12, 1995

As we walked upon frost bent grass,
did you inhale fungus spores?
And white blossoms that drooped heavy,
did you notice,
they smelled of death.

Berries, in so many tight bunches, so red.
The light. The sunlight. The morning light.
Do you remember how I ran
to capture those colors?
And on hills you noticed green hope.

There was that Ganesh shrine nearby,
snout towards the Himalayas,
eyes so beady gazing where his father danced –
except thorn had built a curtain, a living veil,
between him and his parent.

A memory of headache
sunlight bright
vodka by woodstove,
vomit stinking in tent, yours.

These ghosts walk about me
on the meadow where the sages were
two thousand years ago.
They, too, like us, watched fires burn
and the morning dawn,
they, too, saw our colors.
Flames fly now
not as an offering to the gods
but in an effort to make Rara noodles dance.
Armymen with rifles are gone
they were afraid we would set fires to bushes.
and fires, fires, fires,
spreading like you in my mind
would take the meadow grass like never before.

You straddled me in the sun yesterday
in that shelterless meadow.
The clearing,
just me and you on our knees,
that place is there still.

The tent forever like blue fire
eats into the browns,
greens, and the autumn.
We should be there today, every day,
forever, like pilgrims,
back at the same clearing,
in each other’s arms.
Back to early memories,
dark alleys, dim restaurants, arguments.
Like pilgrims.