Shabby Divine

 (1)

 Drinking river rot until it tastes like ink,

watching cobalt sparks strike against twilight.

rags in weeds, behind the cataract-clouded eye,

he is molting—

shedding the skin of poet, son, failure,

to become a blue-throated god; ruling kingdoms of mud and stars.

The river an open vein across land’s gray wrist,

clotted with plastic prayers of the city upstream.

 

where the earth is most wounded, knees pressed into the fertile loam

he is rooted—a gnarled extension of the bank.

a heavy glass sun in his palm, pulsing with a cheap, amber mercy

thins the blood until it can flow uphill,

back to the headwaters of youth.

 

Then, the first rupture. A kingfisher arrives—a blue stitch

sewing the sky to the scum-slicked water.

Then another. A water family gathering, in the hushed reeds.

 

They see a stone that breathes, a silent sentinel in the theater

 

a ride on a sudden down-stroke

a hitchhiker on a sapphire wing.

 

The wasteland dissolves; The smell of burning rubber and stagnant silt

replaced by the scent of parchment.

 

the blue throat of the bird—the only temple left to pray in

 

the sea of red—the sunset, the wine, the blood—

spills into the ecstasy of flight.

Rispana no longer a ditch—it is a silver script,

and he, an ex-poet; drunk in the weeds.

 

(2)

 

The light now bruised purple, blooming over River’s spine.

He names them as they land—feathered saints,

blue-throated keepers

shiver of a wing—gestures of kin

 

There is the Elder—on a rusted rebar spike

as if it were a throne of ivory.

a poem he never finished in the spring of ’94,

a heavy, dactylic creature, smells of cedar and regret.

watches him with eyes—like black beads of oil,

demanding the rhyme he still owes it, the resolution that never came.

 

the small one, a kinetic spark of turquoise,

darts in the periphery—of the sea of red.

the daughter’s laughter he traded for the burn of the grain, a fleeting, high-frequency joy

that refuses to land long enough to be mourned.

 

She skips across the surface of the silt,

writing circles in the scum that look, to a drunkard’s eye,

like the loops of a boy’s first cursive.

 

He raises the bottle—a translucent chalice—

to the matriarch who nests

in the shadow of the bridge—she of the silence that followed his best work,

the quiet that remains

after the applause turned to rust.

 

She does not sing; she only exists,

a blue-black anchor in the shifting current.

 

“My water families,” he whispers, his voice a dry rattle,

a sound of river-stones; grinding in the dark.

 

“Forgive the ghost who comes to your table

with nothing but a heart of vinegar and a pocket of dust.”

 

But the birds do not fly away—They of the honest dark

gathering in the hollows of his chest.

As he drinks, their blue throats pulse in time, with the slow, thrumming ache of his blood—

a bioluminescent rhythm that suggests even a wasteland can host a choir.

 

His mind begins to fray at the edges,

the "luminous prison" unravels thread by golden thread.

He is no longer watching the birds; he is feeling the wind

resist their hollow bones.

 

He is the rupture. He is the taste of the divine—hidden in the copper tang of the river’s breath.

 

(3)

 

The sea of red deepens to crimson.

The bottle a hollow shell, a glass lung—

has exhaled its spirit into his own.

 

Now comes the rupture—the point where wasteland

cannot hold the weight

of his dreaming.

 

He watches the fifth bird,

a jagged streak of cobalt, as it dives, his consciousness

unmoors from the mud.

There is a sound like parchment tearing in a silent room—

the sound of a man’s spirit splitting down the seam.

 

His mind breaches the surface of the Rispana,

as a kingfisher’s beak,

shattering the reflection of the moon into a thousand silver coins—

he will never have to spend.

The water is cold, an honest, stinging grace,

stripping the grime from his phantom skin.

He rises.

 

From forty feet above the reeds,

the wasteland is beautiful. The rusted car frames are oxidized jewels;

the plastic heaps are drifts of fallen blossoms;

the Rispana is a dark, winding vein of liquid onyx.

 

He sees his own body below—a small, crumpled shadow

propped against a willow tree—

and he feels a profound, distant pity

for that ghost.

 

“Stay there,” he thinks, his thoughts vibrate in the blue.

“Stay in the heavy world. I have found the rupture. I have found the taste of the divine in the honest dark.”

 

He dances in the updraft of his own imagination,

a poem written in the calligraphy of flight.

This is the ecstasy: the moment the poet realized he does not need a pen to write—

he only needs to be the bird.

 

The flight is a fever that eventually breaks.

returns to the luminous prison of his bones, the air in his lungs is different now—it tastes of sky.

His fingers, stained with nicotine and river-silt,

begin to trace the bank,

reading the mud like the first page of a holy text.

 

He finds a shard of blue eggshell—a tiny, hollow cup.

He holds it with the reverence of a priest handling a fragment of the true shrine.

This is the shabby divine:

a miracle discarded in the weeds, waiting for a drunk poet

to find its rhythm.

 

(4)

 

The mist rises from the Rispana—a gray breath of memory.

clings to the reeds like wet wool, blurring edges of trash heaps until wasteland looks,

much like the city of his youth.

 

Peers into the water, his eyes tracking submerged ribs—

of a rusted bicycle.

A chemical shimmer of the surface,

those spare arcs become the grand bridges of forgotten Dehradun—light and silver,

gone the poet's arrogance and a clean shirt.

 

the phantom of tea gardens—their green ghosts flickering

beneath the scum-slicked current.

 

"Every river is a graveyard of intentions,"

he mutters to the Sixth Bird,

a motionless kingfisher—a sapphire gargoyle on a jagged masonry.

 

He remembers the woman of the name that tastes like copper

a point on a map folded too many times.

He looks for her face in the eddying silt

and the Rispana offers his own reflection—the humble ghost,

the stumble of rags.

 

The bitterness a jagged stone—he washes it down, with a long pull from the glass sun.

The solvent, melting the grief

of a man the curator of a sunken kingdom.

The birds shift. The air grows colder; the blue-throated family

begins a low, rhythmic chattered prayer,

as he feels the first tremors—of the next rupture.