Reading A Writer’s Artifice Poem by Ananta Madhavan

From the smudge of a book review
I reconstruct a writer’s artifice
And burgle the dream-trances.

Slapped by tall waters, in my own trance,
My ship will stall, when storms presage
Gloom and an ambiguous rebirth of waves,
The muted menace of their smothering.

I imagine I am on my native shore.
On the last step of a ruined Temple,
Where wind and sand and rolling waters
Have blurred the symbols and the Word.
I bought a conch with swirls that seem
To hint at history and the swell of the sea.

I trespass here
On lawns of well-mown print
And find sometimes a flower,
Sometimes a weed.

I too have tended mine,
A plot of always springtime.
In the burrowed earth
The balding roots show in transverse
The destiny of branches
Yearning for a touch of other branches.
Which freedom shall I choose:
To move in tight tunnels life has dug
Or, in my tethered longing, drink the sky?

A neat sentence
Nails chapters; personae
Roam in the mind. I live.
Relate or perish,
For hell is isolation.

Stark strangers may learn
Something of their kith or friends, like a language,
Limping over irregular verbs, but heart-secure
In the instinctive idiom of a smile.