Smoked Frames: Srijani Mitra's Poems Recall Smoky Memories Of The Past

Extracted with permission from Srijani Rupsha Mitra’s Smoked Frames; published by JRLB Press.

Dream Islands

The night swings swiftly in the jingling of the evening bells from the home’s temples.

 I slip aside into the ambiguous agony of the concrete, deciduous lane into the vanity of residual rain in puddles of memory. 

There is a grand sight, a visceral purity, and a glimpse of a blanketed, deepening sky,

like the unfolding plankton of a sooty ocean. Narrating our beginnings 

In the rutting realizations of teenage journey’s ends

Still thriving in the clumsiness of the twitching touch of past lives. I spread the sheets. 

There’s a silence outside my window, turning a flickering pink from the akashbati’s glittering light.

Here and there, a bulbous gleam burns and hardens, cliff like, 

To granite. And I fall away, from all this, as I say how much I really loved you

as I say I somehow still love you in this scattering, breaking yet clotting, in the lap of the 

Winged satins of night. I faint and stay in a dreamy paint, 

An incantation in the body, it feels as if we are together now, again.

I become an island, water everywhere, coral surrounding each sense.

The secrets of love, whispered in the rooms of my body, like matsakanyas dance through memories. 

Ripples touch the nubs on my thighs, pirouetting their way.

The gushing waters leave me breathless. I lie bare, open-mawed drinking in water till the brink, 

the sweetened honey stained 

In your body of fire. I lie muzzled in solitude, awake, 

Healing, 

Throbbing, intertwined. 

What I Desire this Summer Day 

All night, there has been such broiling, such pouring out 

grinding geologies erupting with steaming zest. 

This summer day seems a fest, all wild bewilderment.

Asphalt ridges in the sky slowly kiss the dawn,

the way desire smelts into something, lighting like flame. 

This summer day, I want the safety of your breath

Soft, blooming blueness of skin blemishing

In touch, in thrill, in wildfire.

I want the honey winds to fill the lungs with flurries, adorning its braziers with 

Grace and briar. I want the taste. I want the drizzling thrum 

 Of transformation, 

the expansive plunge into some stimulus, sense-sure sensation, that I have longed for forever. 

Knowledge of the Body

Listening to lectures on the body’s pleasure, excavating the mounds of historiographic expressions of sex, Kama Sutra, lasya, kamabhoga

I realize how all these years I had wronged my body, believing its kinetic presence only in blundering. 

Now, I desire to know its evolution, to strip the skin off the ribs and peer at its striking beginnings: strings, ribboned membrane sheaths, cell sap, eschewed codes merged into lotusing, arising, I want to flourish in this writhing extravagance, the flash, 

Ignition in the edged spine, transmitting something vast upwards, towards the mind seated in the navigating essence, the axis mundi, with feeling intertwined.

I want to tap the touching grain rough, mucous. In longing, in aching arches and emblazoned geometries, 

Like pietra dura sculpted over the body, dorsal portraits with warbling mothballs,

waters turned volatile demands, wet porous fumes.

Oh, Lord, turn me pilgrim! Douse the flame-filled onusondhitsha, 

this lustrous vigour in the veins that sets everything to fire! 

On Studying Theories of Emotion

I am haunted by the conquest of it. How the animality in this feeling tinges me red, turns my lust, like scattered petals, enzymes pulped in refracting, recurring rain. 

Today, we dive into anatomy of emotion, which is to say, the exactitude that moves us, how signals from the stimuli trigger physiological reactions, lead to explicit feelings 

Birthed at the crown of thalamus, declared by cortex.

I wonder how all this can justify arousal, how I let my frame of bones squash in the rinsing overwhelm of shower, how the collection of water above my blue nerves, the hollow, 

Sweat-embalmed nape, the kundali of my navel, 

How the fulcrumed, fecund feeling in the bosom grows to the perception of your touch. The tangible and waning celebration of bodies breaks through the paradigms, 

Squeezing onto each other to extract nectarine lilies.

The succulent passage through life. How to interpret this emotion wound by logic of molten desire, like a grazing mouth in field of honeyed acacia, in the soft, pulsing yearning of your tongue rimmed with sugar, syrup, spirited thrum? 

How might I branch out these reactions to classify them as: limbic understanding, simplified cortical sensation? How could I expect this bodily consequence, its drowned existence 

A fistful of uprooted pleasures, like epidermis daubed with healing 

By shards of ocean silk?