completion


wooden drawers
don't yield up their secrets
easily. especially after monsoons.

some of them make it clear
that damp rearrangements that go
on in the moist darkness
take up till winter to finish.

eventually when I get this drawer open
i find a dark-grey, fungus-ridden
spectacle case holding
old spectacles with rusted and bent handles

a round, corrugated seed
a small, sharp porcupine quill
a used stamp, depicting two

greater adjutant storks
and a brief shred of paper
with words not in my handwriting:

“it’s all openness      it’s all gift.
run up the chorla ghats to a shouting point
and scream out from the edge of a precipice:
each valley is goddess
each mountain is god!”


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Salil Chaturvedi
salilwheels@gmail.com