Two wicker chairs

--

On my visits I never gifted him anything.
I knew that he needed nothing.

But last time father talked about books.

Shifting in the wicker chair, looking away, he told -

‘Those which used to please me earlier do not do so now’

He was half sad.

And I think half annoyed because they do not grow old with him.

I wish I gift him a book that will grow with him, forever and ever.

--

Time passes by
without bringing with it the change
that it had promised, or that I had misread from its cryptic scriptures.

As I wait here,
an old man in this wicker chair
staring at afternoons through the mangrove,
for Time to act as a clown and make me laugh
or as a tragic hero and make me weep sentimentally,

I hear it laugh at me
mocking me, without ever touching me.

And here I am, forever in front of it; like Tantalus.

The fox

My path curls back to myself

and I trot,

diffident, confused, silent,

around it, alongside it,

but always on its hazy edges

trying to figure out where it heads -

getting lost, losing track and regaining -

all with the wiliness foxes are born with.

Trying to trace it, and retrace it

from all hilltops

from all rock mounds

with my glassy animal eyes.

With them I seek to understand my footprints -

the silly, malicious footprints that only foxes leave behind.

The times I am not that fox are the wrong times,

escapades which I do not deserve;

my window frames are not that beautiful and not that sad

for they are etched in the foxiness of ill grown habits.

It is to this fox that I return to

and find myself again and again.