Issue 28: Rupsa Banerjee
A View of Watching the Breakers
Communicating the bare involves brush paints, holding
the possibility of making easel turn the path of star-tails
a sudden sparing creasing of oil, dried marine blue
the ocean cupped in unabated color only life-etched
brine-lipped spilling granulated-memory, the body a shell
submerged in the closing of edges, air-spawned wave lines
crests breaking moon-cliffs, Melville’s leviathan-bed in drift;
The trespass of the shores near the breaking of the dawns
the hang of clothes against parabolic spray, glazed surface
of crystallized vision holding stretch and curve, geal cold-blue
jauntily scraping surface, the salt arc turn-over of days
with the year’s curve reaching the lunar path frosted between—
sight-scarved a step against the circular travels what
maps leave behind with us the sphere of seen beliefs
the clank of coast-lines the places where stones temporarily
open shafts the mast-struck flights of birds the associated
conditions of logging up the misty grit with the opened palms.
Under certain lights the vast sky painted appears a colour apart from
the coastal menace blue, a refractory ambience that shields
chatter-scar fumbling tissue a glint viewed from above the inverted
canopy of frilled white on canvas appear looming directing gaze away
from the plaster a strife of odours, the colour of sun-tasted haunts
more thinning sticking with protein binds the bubbled water, the blown
threads the orbital nearness of glassy metal travelling back to record sight.
Circular listenings
Crept vines hold cloud hazard, free burn of shy glances
knowledge free indistinct airwaves and the gaps in monstrosa
a haven for small birds unaffected by the signals. Our
deference to the water, the shoring of the inflections,
a certain transfer of sounds, small marks above us
where speech originates moss-green in the clammed
shell flowing sea-water grain tasted with the breaking
of in-land salt float minerals sheltered record of the sweep
of time and twists in the utterance. Skin under the heaving
water shapes itself as language, for now an ’vasion holding
the places where the sand vanishes into the mouth of the sounding.
Rupsa Banerjee is Assistant Professor of English, St Xavier’s University, Kolkata, India. Her academic essays have been published in Sanglap and The Apollonian. She has translated modern Bengali poetry into English for a collected anthology on partition poetry and is currently working on translating the English poetry of J. H. Prynne into Bengali.
She has co-edited the collection Rethinking Place through Literary Form (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022). Her poems have been short-listed for the River Heron Poetry Prize (2019) and long-listed for the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize (2020) and have appeared in pamphlets published by Lady Chaos Press (New York), Chaour (Kolkata), Earthbound Press (London), and Veer Press (London).
Copyright © 2022 by Rupsa Banerjee, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
