Birds, and Other Baggage
I. Halcyon
I went in to the wild once
a fully-grown woman safely buckled
in her seat, but something about the way
the eager wind passed through the open jeep
and cradled my butt-cheeks against the lush leather
made me feel embryonic
fairly small, naïve.
The trees looked thirsty for shade,
their large stumps racing each other to the ground,
and my chest collapsed inwards to fit behind
a petty gathering of shrubbery, while
my feet itched to graze
the fleeting hallucinations of
burnt cinnamon grass
but they
locked me in four open walls
shut at the clasp of a cloudy day,
clogging my throat
like cotton balls stuck in teeth.
Unlike the giraffe beholding us drink
our gin without invitation, or
the leopard shying away from
its own beauty in a spotter’s light,
they told me
I would only interrupt
and for a few moments I was glad
the voices said to do nothing;
only if it were not for my own
weight, I would be running through
the wild, fearless,
tanning the bright blue sky
with streaks of brown.
**
II. Horizon
Another virginal foray, this time
inside my head, swelling up from
the cacophonous heat all the while
in which I watched again;
the blue-green ocean effervescing
into yellow, drowning in salt-semen
while the sun made the skin
crisp with beads of ginger sweat.
The ocean saluted at the sight
of skin, and retreated;
such thirsty skin that cut the crests
of waves and suffocated the sunlight, imagine
more shades of skin in one mustard rainbow
framed by a stinking ocean breeze
than on this piece of land on which I stood
and the sky dulled slowly,
to match the world below it.
Dipti Anand
* * *
Precocious and perfectionist, moody but self-modifying, severe yet silly; Dipti Anand is many things, but if you’ll ask her who she is, the most direct answer you’ll receive is “poet” and “writer.” Dipti’s authorpreneurial path has included studying Entrepreneurship at Babson College, Philosophy, Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at NYU, and creative writing at Oxford. When she’s not making long-distance phone calls, doing yoga or eating one truffle a day, Dipti likes to put in ink what she knows and doesn’t — love and relationships, time, her favorite colors, the sensation in her fingers, memory, the senses and more. She currently lives and writes in New Delhi, India. To connect with, and read more of Dipti’s work, please visit www.diptianand.com.
