One Monster
After Ted Hughes

read by kate conover

It is noon. I can see you marble-eyed
at the far edge of the pond, where slime
and clouts of mud swirled about by giddy turtles
betray your kingdom, mine own a smooth garden of pebbles
and reeds knotting and unknotting, dancing like my hair
when you lift it away from my face, pluck out fish.

Underneath, time ripples, water clotting sunlight.
In limbo our limbs dangle dangerously close,
I pretend not to notice the crescent scar on your left
shoulder dip and flare as a third eye. Later
you will tell me a wild boar left its teeth in you. Later
I will learn to disbelieve you.

Today my skin is drinking in
the taste of mould, puckering at the tips. Green
tigering the gold  I could call my world, apt
and strung in this volatile element. About your neck are
emerald beads for my taking - until you have to leave
safe and dry (so you don’t catch a cold driving back)

for home, your wife, your son, sunday dinner.
I remain in those waters now mottled,
now blinking bubbles. I carry in cupped hands
a gift, mossy feet across your living room,
crumpled lilies, iridescent flies,
begging nothing.

 

Possibilities in Leaves

read by kate conover

I can trace the root of my confusions
to a lover who intimated once, on my birthday,
I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees,
knowing it was stolen and at the same time,
beautiful. What did he intend? I wondered,
floating passions ruffled pleasantly and
desiring to be pinned, in disarray perhaps, understood
anyhow. And spring has many wiles,
it clothes and unclothes, depending on
geographical specificities. I wanted
a gift of a book, of leaves pressed between its pages
that day. Later realising that lack is also
a measure of love, birthdays reminders of days that die,
days best eclipsed by solemn commitments to levity
elsewhere.

Now you give me leaves held in books like I wanted,
pine puncturing their words so I can taste
one walk, with sun and mountain sloping
without end. You were hiding more than just
stories in your pocket, I saw green needles
grinning out at us, and don’t know now whether
you wanted to contain that day, or use it
to draw blood.

Tanima Sharma is a student of English literature at Delhi University. She is interested in theatre and the printed word, and prefers cats to all other creatures that roam this earth.