Flickering on a Map

Rohan Chhetri once claimed that, in New Delhi,

In winter, I wrote poems that went on for years

Into my sleep. Is it possible to be

Even more possessed, even more unbounded

Than that? How does one ever know when poems start,

The composition of them, that is, and when

They end? You might not produce any new lines

For over a decade, and then the thousands

That follow turn out to have roots and fungus

And sleepy, secretly swelling cicadas

Interwoven through that whole dreamless decade.

Are Enheduanna’s hymns halfway done yet?

Yet another new translation’s on the way.

They’re language after all, similarly braided,

With one end vanishing into wordlessness,

The other laddering up to, what? Heaven?

Your life is like a little room, inn for words,

Nice round skull, doors and windows, language rushing

In and out again, from the ends of the earth,

Some rare, mostly just common, local tourists.

A few you try to keep with you, hire them on,

While others you try to send back to the world,

Rearranged, on a mission for you. For you?

And just who you are without them—a bare room?

Empty bed? Windows peering out of quiet?

Poems don’t go on for years. They die in your arms

Or they go on for eras. The Logocene.

And you’ll never know. You are local. You’re pinned

To this intersection you think of as you

While they flicker over all the maps of sleep.