Towards Invisibility

By Tuhin Bhowal

for IZ

Slime, as the serpent, the dream develops:
               Knives marblewhite sluice limes, go unnoticed.
               At the idea of hands, milk clabbers
               Loose; between want and wanting, there’s a face:
               Mirrors drift as water in sand, then break.
               The refrigerator becomes habit’s
               Purpose, swings sublime. The night stands opaque:
               Beans ballet, tiptoeing their endstring feet,— 
               Swirl little kinks of light; mushrooms dirt-sweat
               Yellow, as pumpkin grooves generous, sliced
               To smile its scurvy smile. Yet, through this sweet
               Bestiality of produce, bodies
               Of meat lie dead. Glut-gore: guts of duck dressed;
               Fish—their gills, once silver, now parrot flesh.

Did my body ever exist for you? No two
Animals, yes, mistrust each other, at the face.
 
               If not love, a gesture towards love, when
               Two bodies hold shame, together, all night.
               How the whole cob bears the kernels, but then
               On the sober beauty of corn, what
               Has been said? Silk, tassel, hair? Nails take flight.
               Soon, the anthills will swell as mounds of dye
               By a dead sea:—old pus, angelgreen, might
               Ooze a stye, or an abscess, and soon, I’ll
               Be the king, anointed by his own eye.
               There’s no end to the distance my body
               Trespasses; but no, there is an end: I
               Lather at that face. Pink as pith in plums be;
               Brindled peach, or dire figs, whose mystery drools?— 
Slime, as the serpent, the dream disapproves.

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In Praise of Difficulty

By Tuhin Bhowal

               How many ladders does it take to bury an orchard?
Idly enough, the next morning, it took only a hand— 
gleaning the ground’s windfalls as though fruit were
               crops of maize: peaches dry; the plums inflected
into the nights,—as a golden shovel kept tilling
purplish anklets of the dead. It was not enough to taste
               you chaotic. It is not nearly enough; confusing tears
 
crystallise the third eye. Keats continued unfinished at twenty-five.
At the end of a room, disguised as a theatre, somewhere
               in a montage of the projectionist’s fantasies, his
sister prancing,—a field full of daffodils tied to her hair is
you. Disgraceful enough, to think of what a hypotenuse
               is to a triangle: a monk must be to visions of sex.
And after sex, a briquette of ice, slyly slipping,
 
               drawn into a warm bath, is also you. The water is
you, or perhaps, it’s fear or of grace’s absence. Then sibilance . . .
To be born in a country worshipping abstraction
              more than absolution, isn’t worse than no hindrance to
rituals of ablution, at the least. Here, I say,—on this edge,
I’ve had many diminutive dreams: A shoal of fish fishing
               for fishes with a fear of drowning.
 
To know if the flesh is cooked, we poke
the eye. That’s how bodies survive, or seem to,
               through vision; and therefore, its lack— 
which is what—but merely the vision’s cadence, eventually,
turning on itself. Years later, when orchards dream again
               with spring, and fruit, it is through this blindness
we advance, as we long, so long as our young bigotries die,— 

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​Recipient of the Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Poetry Prize 2022 and longlisted for the TOTO Awards for English Poetry, Tuhin Bhowal's poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in The Margins, Ballast Journal, Redivider, Soft Union, Poetry at Sangam, and elsewhere. A Mentee with the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) project and a Translation Fellow at the South Asia Speaks Literary Mentorship Programme – Class of 2025, Tuhin lives alone in Bangalore and tweets @tuhintranslates.