By Sragdharamalini Das
Eighteen winters ago, I could have woken you up with a dogged wish,
I knew. So I keep pestering, on that morning of alabaster breath;
December drifting through the wires of the street poles, pecking
your body covered in patchwork quilt. You brush me aside, but still I call
so you would get up, we would go out, and buy that Christmas tree just the right green.
I call you as I did each year growing, without break and by your name —
it was still of aid back then, you were twenty-six. Impatience gnaws at the tip of each minute,
hovering over your frame lying crooked and long
like that branch from last year’s tree, third from top
my father didn’t mend, but cleverly turned until
its sorry countenance stood perfectly still, facing the wall near the cane sofa where we sat
and sang our carols after dinner.
The fairylights were hanging all wrong that morning, glum asystoles around the bookshelf
I yawp in your ear, Help me fix them, you shoo but I
take your palm instead. In its albumen paleness, I see runny lines of fate all washed amok
and I curl my fingers in the design of warm tickles, saying: wake up, wake up, wake up!
That morning I fret, my Christmas tree, time slips as I call your name —
that year it wasn’t yet a limping pause on my tongue, or a maze
where I misplace my breath.
When you dredge your senses from the bed
on the windowsill a wooden box you’d see;
beyond it will be a tuberose sky and inside, baubles, stars, and wreaths.
You should have gotten up earlier that day, that way we’d have had more time
and you should have known that the shadow of December mornings swallow
whole streets by four and nights leak
into creeks of bottles, the colour of coughed-up rust.
I’m seven then, but I had learnt to wait. I sleep after hearing your steps
falter near the main gate at night and smell
a formalin weariness on your clothes at dawn
when I’m up and making Christmas cards by your bed — the best one kept for you.
I wait for you to wake up, for eighteen winters ago
it was a year of faith. No morning wretched its gut, spilling precise times and certificates.
Eighteen winters ago, you could be woken by a wish
for you were years apart from the dialyzer and the ICU.
So that morning of eighteen winters past, you squint your eyes ahead of noon
and later in the car, the Christmas tree stationed safely between, you sing:
The horse was lean and lank
Misfortune seemed his lot
He got into a drifted bank
And then we got upshot.