a piece of sky
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
Sunday, May 05, 2013
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Sun-dried tomatoes
A small piece of rope – blue, plastic- one end tied to one of the pillars of a makeshift shed and the other to a nearby tree, maybe three feet long, or shorter … a few items of clothing hanging , all worn out, not spread out like washing left to dry... more like weary thoughts dumped together.
i saw this image – not so much image as a few feeble lines barely touching- i saw it the third or the fourth day of drying the tomatoes. The tomatoes had started to wilt by then and since the days were long and nights hotter i had felt confident about leaving the tomatoes out till dinner time. The first time i bit into a piece of sun-dried tomatoes in a sandwich hurriedly eaten at a bleak airport lounge it was like tasting the warmth of sunshine caressing the tomato vines, i must make this, i had noted as countless tomatoes ripened and burst on my tongue. Some days later i picked some spotless roma tomatoes, sweet smelling basil and a canning jar at the grocery. Washed and dried, the deep red tomatoes with their soft shining skin were a sight to behold. Cut into halves their insides were achingly beautiful, tints of persimmon and pink with ruby red veins weaving through the flesh and around perfectly shaped seeds. i spread them on a wire rack, sprinkled salt on them and left them out in the balcony. Sun shone on the tomatoes and they quickly wilted and withered, their skin puckered and each red ovals magically took on unique shapes, and by the end of the week i was left with a handful of the most delightful, most zesty sun-dried tomatoes. i packed them in the canning jar filling it up with olive oil and the jar, oh the jar with deep red tomatoes and green basil and plump white garlic and black peppercorn stood on my kitchen counter spurring anyone who looked at it to take up painting.
And those washed out clothes; they still hang warily on to the tiny stretch of time in between sleep and wakefulness, in danger of falling down to oblivion any moment.
Monday, September 26, 2011
You
Thinking about you is like running my finger along your chin, foretasting the gentle rise and fall of your dimple, savoring the prickle of your stubble.
Thinking about thinking about you is like watching white clouds waft through a sky,
forever changing, forever escaping my gaze, white clouds forever getting lost in the blue
leaving me
a whole new sky.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Because i cannot see into darkness
Stepping away from the clamor of life i pull back my window curtains to see it, an old apartment building waiting to be demolished. No word i know can carry the weight of its emptiness- empty, vacant, abandoned- none says it. Its windows and doors and air conditioners have been torn off leaving behing yawning holes to the centre of its emptiness. Peering through these gaps i see how each apartment was once a home, that sort of place you call your own when you are out in the world, that sort of place entering which, especially alone at night, your hand juts out for human contact just to overcome the moment. All the bits and pieces left behind - broken furnitures, torn blankets, one faded teddy bear- further fills the place with nothingness. If this abandoned building was left there as a joke the punchline has to be the swear word someone painted on one of its pillars, a bold f and u, a wavering c, a timid k and a hazy u ; a punchline losing its fizz as its told.
Because my eyes cannot go all the way into it i send my words to grapple it. I seize it! but in a moment it thrashes about violently, gashes my hands with its gills and escapes my grasp.