We were walking the trail
At midnight, when you said,
It’s rather bright.
We searched the dark for clues,
The waxing moon, the sleepless residents across the road.
But then we saw a floating ember on the forest floor:
A firefly,
The perfect explanation.

When we went out this morning,
The road was bone dry
But the evidence was stacking up –
Damp chill of the tall grass clinging to our calves, and the deftly bejewelled dustbin covers.
It was clear,
She’d come and gone like a fever dream,
A mousedeer laying her scent trail through the woods, then vanishing.
She hadn’t wanted to stay,
Only to let us know that she had been here
And left a parting gift.

When I was young,
I’d sit outside in the storm
And hear the sky crackle around me
Rain lashing the earth like a vengeful mother.
I did not know then that I was thunder’s child.
This I would find out only twenty-five years later,
Sitting in my friend Buda’s flat,
My face and the face of the priest illuminated by a single candle as he tossed cowrie shells into the bead-lined universe on the table.
We learn to take cover from the storm,
To stow ourselves away where no wind can reach us.
And yet, if you listen,
A voice, which is there because we are as old as every other thing,
Still says, sit in the storm
Says, you have been storms,
Been meteor showers and solar flares,
And eddies in the vast graveyard that only answers to the moon.
After the game, I stood up from the table and knew
That every thunderclap was a blessing.
It started to pour.

Just breathing, the body is poetry.
Flexing and heaving to its fleshly meter,
It arches and shudders from one verse to the next,
Parsing the rhythms of joy and terror.
My body is a mystery.
It moves and does not ask permission;
Hearing drums, it retraces the steps of its oldest ancestor.
It knows many things before I do –
Beauty, kindness, treachery,
Even love.
This is why I have no say in what it wants.
One day, a hamburger,
The next, to stand at the edge of a sea cliff
And watch the gulls drift in and out of their nests,
While it hums with the urge to take flight.
Some day, this body that does not take commands
Will return to being poetry,
Just breathing, until every line is spent.

They tell me that the March rains
Bring summer to a close.
Now people can picnic without checking the weather forecast.
The mornings are brisker;
No more the humid embrace of the rising mists,
Only the dawn air nipping at my skin.
I am exposed, uncovered,
Like waking up in an empty bed
Recently vacated.

The day I swallowed the sun,
I bled vermilion.
There was no way to stanch the plasmic haemorrhage
Of light trying to escape.
My limbs were glowing charcoal,
My skin, flaking ash.
Yet my singed heart continued beating,
As my lungs became potash.

I come to tell you that we survive incineration.
Later, picking through the cinders,
We can even delight in soot,
And make of it new ink.

I have been down this path before.
The first time was because I had seen you standing on the horizon.
There was no path then, save for the unpaved wild expanse between us
Just waiting to be trampled.
I discovered afterwards that desire defies topography.
That we are rivulets of water obeying gravity’s orders, carving canyons through bedrock.
I have often wondered whether cartographers change the land that they study.
Perhaps we are cartographers who do not realise
That to search for geography is to map our own longing.