Professor

The flight of birds shook still air,

he saw a squirrel hanging upside down from the ledge outside the classroom window, 

a student was presenting her translation of Kabir's couplets 

he looked at her for a few seconds as if rapt , then pointed out the mistakes she had made.

He seeped the tea bag for exactly two minutes in the evening, 

in the tumultuous lives of Beauvoir and Sartre, a certain young woman Olga drowned herself, or did she?

a bird flew diagonally across his terrace door and cut the air into half

when he was younger, he wrote a long poem titled "Flapping Wings"

- his onerous, dark expenditure of words about the attack on twin towers and the ensuing wars in the Middle East. 

Distance

Now that distance has been written
and I write away the distance,
I wonder if closer
is the possibility
of a poem.

In letters and emails
there are accounts
of days,
and on chat
a history
of inconsequence.

Nearer it is
the prose
of relations,
shared evenings
and nights
and morning teas.

But further
they are,
voices,
gestures,
intonations
of friends
and lovers;

imagined,
remembered,
inching
towards
verse.

Of leaving poetry.

I have nothing more to say,
by the way of poetry-

All that I remembered
is now devious,
of the people I loved
there are few left,
of the kind of love
I wrote about
there is little left,
there is nothing more
of the unlikely
beneath the evident,
I, no longer, tearfully
trouble with reasons,
instead there is caffeine
neurosis and facebook
exuberance.

I leave myself
often now,
dragging chairs
across restaurant floors,
I write longer sentences
rather than clever phrases,
no more of those undulating
rhythms of my mind,
sometimes, though,
colour of sky
or embers on a moonlit floor
tempt me to poetry,
but I leave to forgetting.

Fragility

When I look at the moon from my balcony, I wonder how it would have looked if you stayed a little longer.
When I hear the solitary tap of that old man's stick, I wonder if loneliness was the same before i met you.
When I hear the reluctant silence of night, I wonder if I would have been happier without your voice.
It seems as if that hurried leave-taking of yours, that expectant walk of mine, that evening of wait were all scripted by you while I acted unrehearsed...and now with glimmering airplanes overhead I write momentary pains while you seek momentary pleasures.